10 - 18 July 2010: "Recollections", Moseley Arts Trail, Mosely Festival 2010,
Prince of Wales, 118 Alcester Road,, Birmingham, B13 8EE
Here is what I'll be showing. Picture to follow soon of it in the space....
Wednesday, 7 July 2010
Ambon Manise
My friend and 'colleague' Tim Stock is curating an exhibition based on Memories:
10 - 18 July 2010: "Recollections", Moseley Arts Trail, Mosely Festival 2010,
Prince of Wales, 118 Alcester Road,, Birmingham, B13 8EE
Here is what I'll be showing. Picture to follow soon of it in the space....
10 - 18 July 2010: "Recollections", Moseley Arts Trail, Mosely Festival 2010,
Prince of Wales, 118 Alcester Road,, Birmingham, B13 8EE
Here is what I'll be showing. Picture to follow soon of it in the space....
Friday, 2 July 2010
What's an girl meant to do...
One of the sixth formers wants to study art at uni, but also wants to have a job later on in life, so came to me for advise.
I'm getting pressure for a moving date. Technically I still have two months left in my flat and am paid until the end of August, but the pressure is deffinately on. It's a frustrating position to be in: well qualified, motivated, hard working and without a way of using my talent to make money.
Been trying to work out the compromises re getting jobs. Applications are out, so now my time is split between hunting for more 'jobs and opps' and waiting to see if I still have a magic touch filling in application forms.
So, with good qualifications and work experience in decent measure but with no home and no job in two months time and my precious creations making their way into cardboard boxes for storage (or will it have to all end up in the bin?) and a sweet but timid sixth former asking for career advise re being an artist... I felt a bit lost for words. What'a a girl meant to do?
I'm getting pressure for a moving date. Technically I still have two months left in my flat and am paid until the end of August, but the pressure is deffinately on. It's a frustrating position to be in: well qualified, motivated, hard working and without a way of using my talent to make money.
Been trying to work out the compromises re getting jobs. Applications are out, so now my time is split between hunting for more 'jobs and opps' and waiting to see if I still have a magic touch filling in application forms.
So, with good qualifications and work experience in decent measure but with no home and no job in two months time and my precious creations making their way into cardboard boxes for storage (or will it have to all end up in the bin?) and a sweet but timid sixth former asking for career advise re being an artist... I felt a bit lost for words. What'a a girl meant to do?
Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Art's own currency
The process of creating an artwork is in part agonizing, the exhibiting of artwork thrilling and the dismantling of artwork from an exhibition painfully hard to bear.
A while back my sister Rachel and I were talking about the ‘currency’ of art. Artists invest time, money, energy and thought into creating works in a totally disproportionate amount to the time, money, energy and thought the work seems to generate. My artworks, at this early stage in my career, spend more time in boxes and scattered across the floor and walls of my studio that on view to be seen passing members of public. I’m not disappointed, by any stretch of the imagination, with my progress as an artist over the last two years. Nevertheless, even if I were to secure exhibitions every month, most of my work would still be tucked away in unseen corners of unoccupied spaces.
Yesterday I spent nearly 7 hours on trains and tubes journeying to Worcester and back to collect my artwork from the Worcester City Museum and Gallery. Just days ago the work was hung at eye level, carefully accounted for with a purpose built frame to create depth between the work and the wall and non-heat strip lights wired up to present the work in it’s best light (literally!). In contrast, yesterday the work say rather disappointingly on the floor, propped up against the wall with a dismantled frame next to it, looking out of place as the next show begun to take form around it. This two month show has been my longest exhibition yet but still it inevitably comes to an end and the work gets stowed away again.
To make matters worse, barely having recovered from carrying an old steel window (heavy!) on the train from Worcester to London (Mike met me off the train and got the window the rest of the way to South Ealing, legend)today I had to dismantle my exhibition Of no fixed abode’ from Watford Museum. Timings were never going to be easy. The timetabling at the gallery isn't set up for the large scale installations that I produce (and I'm so glad they didn't let that act as a deterrent to me exhibiting - all in all I found Sophie Ronson and the Museum staff totally and wonderfully accommodating!). My exhibition had to come down at the earliest today and the next show opens on Thursday evening. I assumed that I'd have today to dismantle the exhibition and the new exhibitors would be in on Wed and Thurs setting up...
But I was wrong. By the time I arrived at 1:30 (having finished work for the morning), the next exhibitors (from a local education institution) were already in installing student’s work around my artwork, even having moved some of my work out of the way. I said hello, but barely got a grunt in return. Perhaps they were unhappy with the inconvenience of working around an artist. Whatever it was, I wasn’t hugely comfortable with the situation.
I feel like I’m usually a fairly gracious person but the new exhibitors didn’t acknowledge my work as anything more than an inconvenience – to my mind, the ultimate disrespect. When one of them asked to start taking my wax bricks off the walls at one point I essentially said no, that it was too fragile and I would do it myself. Kelly (the events officer for Watford Council) and Lindsay (museum staff) were fabulous, however. Kelly I hadn’t met before but I felt instantly like she had an understanding of my objects as artworks and so was comfortable with her helping to dismantle the work which she did with due care and attention to detail. It would have been much sadder for me pulling apart the installation if I hadn’t been so guarded and therefore distracted by the new exhibitors.
In the end I was quite happy to get out of there as fast as possible – as my work came down and theirs went up, the space I’d grown so familiar with over the last month was quickly transformed into an unrecognizable space… and at that point I couldn’t get my work out of there fast enough.
Huge huge thanks go to Sophie Ronson and the Museum staff, however, for all their help, patience, understanding and respect for my work. The process of installing the exhibition, all the exhausting, was positive thanks to their willingness to 'take risks' and accomodate my ideas. I would happily work with them again.
All that was left:
A while back my sister Rachel and I were talking about the ‘currency’ of art. Artists invest time, money, energy and thought into creating works in a totally disproportionate amount to the time, money, energy and thought the work seems to generate. My artworks, at this early stage in my career, spend more time in boxes and scattered across the floor and walls of my studio that on view to be seen passing members of public. I’m not disappointed, by any stretch of the imagination, with my progress as an artist over the last two years. Nevertheless, even if I were to secure exhibitions every month, most of my work would still be tucked away in unseen corners of unoccupied spaces.
Yesterday I spent nearly 7 hours on trains and tubes journeying to Worcester and back to collect my artwork from the Worcester City Museum and Gallery. Just days ago the work was hung at eye level, carefully accounted for with a purpose built frame to create depth between the work and the wall and non-heat strip lights wired up to present the work in it’s best light (literally!). In contrast, yesterday the work say rather disappointingly on the floor, propped up against the wall with a dismantled frame next to it, looking out of place as the next show begun to take form around it. This two month show has been my longest exhibition yet but still it inevitably comes to an end and the work gets stowed away again.
To make matters worse, barely having recovered from carrying an old steel window (heavy!) on the train from Worcester to London (Mike met me off the train and got the window the rest of the way to South Ealing, legend)today I had to dismantle my exhibition Of no fixed abode’ from Watford Museum. Timings were never going to be easy. The timetabling at the gallery isn't set up for the large scale installations that I produce (and I'm so glad they didn't let that act as a deterrent to me exhibiting - all in all I found Sophie Ronson and the Museum staff totally and wonderfully accommodating!). My exhibition had to come down at the earliest today and the next show opens on Thursday evening. I assumed that I'd have today to dismantle the exhibition and the new exhibitors would be in on Wed and Thurs setting up...
But I was wrong. By the time I arrived at 1:30 (having finished work for the morning), the next exhibitors (from a local education institution) were already in installing student’s work around my artwork, even having moved some of my work out of the way. I said hello, but barely got a grunt in return. Perhaps they were unhappy with the inconvenience of working around an artist. Whatever it was, I wasn’t hugely comfortable with the situation.
I feel like I’m usually a fairly gracious person but the new exhibitors didn’t acknowledge my work as anything more than an inconvenience – to my mind, the ultimate disrespect. When one of them asked to start taking my wax bricks off the walls at one point I essentially said no, that it was too fragile and I would do it myself. Kelly (the events officer for Watford Council) and Lindsay (museum staff) were fabulous, however. Kelly I hadn’t met before but I felt instantly like she had an understanding of my objects as artworks and so was comfortable with her helping to dismantle the work which she did with due care and attention to detail. It would have been much sadder for me pulling apart the installation if I hadn’t been so guarded and therefore distracted by the new exhibitors.
In the end I was quite happy to get out of there as fast as possible – as my work came down and theirs went up, the space I’d grown so familiar with over the last month was quickly transformed into an unrecognizable space… and at that point I couldn’t get my work out of there fast enough.
Huge huge thanks go to Sophie Ronson and the Museum staff, however, for all their help, patience, understanding and respect for my work. The process of installing the exhibition, all the exhausting, was positive thanks to their willingness to 'take risks' and accomodate my ideas. I would happily work with them again.
All that was left:
Watford Observer
http://www.watfordobserver.co.uk/leisure/localexhibitions/8238331.Homelessness_exhibition_at_Watford_Museum/
The local paper ran an article on my exhibition. I was going to scan it to put up on here. When it came out, a few hours before I was heading to catch a flight to Belfast for a friend's wedding, I scurried into town and bought up 5 copies. I knew I wanted a couple for my portfolio and thought that Tim Stock (curator for the exhibition) might want a copy for his. Then I was going to send one to mum and Dad and one to my grandparents - it's the sort of thing grandparents love, or so we all think.
Recently I've been struggling with how open and honest to be on a public blog. I'm not sure how to open up reasonable insight into the genuine peaks and troughs of being an artist without being transparent...so I suppose here goes.
I was disappointed with the article.
The article makes me feel a little misrepresented. For example, is it really fair to actually say I grew up in a war zone?
As I break the article down, it’s actually the bits about the evacuation that I really cringe to read. Maybe that’s no one’s fault – just the reality of a journalist trying to represent an intensely personal experience, based on one conversation, that is so far from the experience of most British citizens that it is impossible to represent if from the same perspective this third culture, missionary kid, teenager lived it.
It’s not true that I don’t remember feeling any trauma at the time of the evacuation – my response was in answer to a leading question! I only meant to say that you have to shift your perspective to that of a 13 year old who has spent her entire childhood in less than ‘stable’ political environment. Things that seem dramatic and shocking to the average British teenager were somewhat more commonplace to me and my three siblings and to our friends. But of course, we were all deeply upset driving through burnt out villages, where school staff live, in an armed escort en route to the airport and, waiting for the emergency flights to take us away, seeing smoke rising in pillars from the city centre.
It is probably true, however, that at least at first I didn’t feel that ‘displaced’ by our trip to Australia; perhaps that is what I meant by things ‘seeming dramatic’ to kids who grew up in the UK. We had little understanding or expectation at that point of the severity and longevity of the situation.
So, living as refugees in Australia didn’t “feel traumatic” in the sense that one might assume. We weren’t living without shelter or food and we weren’t injured or without medical attention when we needed it. I suppose the ‘trauma’ was subtle (our living conditions may have even improved, as refugees) that it feels like an untruth to call it so.
Watching CNN news each day to see if they featured the situation in Ambon, desperately hoping they didn’t, was difficult. We were told if no incidents occurred for a certain number of weeks then it would be deemed okay to go home. So we children watched the news each day, counting the days where Ambon wasn’t featured in the headlines. Each time Ambon was featured, we had to start counting from day 1 again. That was a ‘trauma’ I recall as it slowly dawned upon me that going home was being more and more unlikely.
The overwhelming mass of ‘orang barat’ (westerns) walking around probably threw us all (adults and children alike) into culture shock…but to a kid who lives between cultures and moves frequently, culture shock isn’t usually deemed ‘traumatic’ (though with retrospect, it probably is a kind of trauma).
*The hardest thing was leaving friends behind. You’ve somewhere to escape to and they don’t.”* - That feels like the truest thing in the article. Leaving neighbours and friends behind devastated me. I understood, even age 13, how ‘unfair’ that situation was. Furthermore, when you know your purpose (as a family) in a country is to serve the community in Jesus’ name, escaping the break out of war when others can’t is painful. To this day it makes me cry.
The rest of the article is fair actually – apart from the reference to Lancaster. I suppose yes I did ‘identify’ with a couple of the people in the homeless community, but I wouldn’t want that to be misrepresented as me having developed friendships and earned trust with them – it’s my dear friends Jess and JC who have done that.
For now, 5 copies of the article sit rather lamely on my dining room table. A copy hasn't been posted to either my parents or my grandparents. But perhaps the article is more fair than I first gave it credit for. In one sentence I’m quoted as calling the evacuation ‘not traumatic’ and the next living in Australia as a refugee as ‘traumatic’. Both comments left me feeling misrepresented. Maybe the whole thing was more unsettling that I like to admit and I’m confused by how to represent my experiences to people who, by no fault of their own, can’t relate. Perhaps the whole situation was deeply traumatic, but I feel a sense of guilt in admitting so, since we, the ‘orang barat’, were the fortunate escapees with other homes to flee to. What then of our friends left behind - who gives voice to their, much deeper, trauma? Perhaps I should.
The local paper ran an article on my exhibition. I was going to scan it to put up on here. When it came out, a few hours before I was heading to catch a flight to Belfast for a friend's wedding, I scurried into town and bought up 5 copies. I knew I wanted a couple for my portfolio and thought that Tim Stock (curator for the exhibition) might want a copy for his. Then I was going to send one to mum and Dad and one to my grandparents - it's the sort of thing grandparents love, or so we all think.
Recently I've been struggling with how open and honest to be on a public blog. I'm not sure how to open up reasonable insight into the genuine peaks and troughs of being an artist without being transparent...so I suppose here goes.
I was disappointed with the article.
The article makes me feel a little misrepresented. For example, is it really fair to actually say I grew up in a war zone?
As I break the article down, it’s actually the bits about the evacuation that I really cringe to read. Maybe that’s no one’s fault – just the reality of a journalist trying to represent an intensely personal experience, based on one conversation, that is so far from the experience of most British citizens that it is impossible to represent if from the same perspective this third culture, missionary kid, teenager lived it.
It’s not true that I don’t remember feeling any trauma at the time of the evacuation – my response was in answer to a leading question! I only meant to say that you have to shift your perspective to that of a 13 year old who has spent her entire childhood in less than ‘stable’ political environment. Things that seem dramatic and shocking to the average British teenager were somewhat more commonplace to me and my three siblings and to our friends. But of course, we were all deeply upset driving through burnt out villages, where school staff live, in an armed escort en route to the airport and, waiting for the emergency flights to take us away, seeing smoke rising in pillars from the city centre.
It is probably true, however, that at least at first I didn’t feel that ‘displaced’ by our trip to Australia; perhaps that is what I meant by things ‘seeming dramatic’ to kids who grew up in the UK. We had little understanding or expectation at that point of the severity and longevity of the situation.
So, living as refugees in Australia didn’t “feel traumatic” in the sense that one might assume. We weren’t living without shelter or food and we weren’t injured or without medical attention when we needed it. I suppose the ‘trauma’ was subtle (our living conditions may have even improved, as refugees) that it feels like an untruth to call it so.
Watching CNN news each day to see if they featured the situation in Ambon, desperately hoping they didn’t, was difficult. We were told if no incidents occurred for a certain number of weeks then it would be deemed okay to go home. So we children watched the news each day, counting the days where Ambon wasn’t featured in the headlines. Each time Ambon was featured, we had to start counting from day 1 again. That was a ‘trauma’ I recall as it slowly dawned upon me that going home was being more and more unlikely.
The overwhelming mass of ‘orang barat’ (westerns) walking around probably threw us all (adults and children alike) into culture shock…but to a kid who lives between cultures and moves frequently, culture shock isn’t usually deemed ‘traumatic’ (though with retrospect, it probably is a kind of trauma).
*The hardest thing was leaving friends behind. You’ve somewhere to escape to and they don’t.”* - That feels like the truest thing in the article. Leaving neighbours and friends behind devastated me. I understood, even age 13, how ‘unfair’ that situation was. Furthermore, when you know your purpose (as a family) in a country is to serve the community in Jesus’ name, escaping the break out of war when others can’t is painful. To this day it makes me cry.
The rest of the article is fair actually – apart from the reference to Lancaster. I suppose yes I did ‘identify’ with a couple of the people in the homeless community, but I wouldn’t want that to be misrepresented as me having developed friendships and earned trust with them – it’s my dear friends Jess and JC who have done that.
For now, 5 copies of the article sit rather lamely on my dining room table. A copy hasn't been posted to either my parents or my grandparents. But perhaps the article is more fair than I first gave it credit for. In one sentence I’m quoted as calling the evacuation ‘not traumatic’ and the next living in Australia as a refugee as ‘traumatic’. Both comments left me feeling misrepresented. Maybe the whole thing was more unsettling that I like to admit and I’m confused by how to represent my experiences to people who, by no fault of their own, can’t relate. Perhaps the whole situation was deeply traumatic, but I feel a sense of guilt in admitting so, since we, the ‘orang barat’, were the fortunate escapees with other homes to flee to. What then of our friends left behind - who gives voice to their, much deeper, trauma? Perhaps I should.
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