ARTISTS TALKING

# 37 [18 July 2007]

The artist in India...

So far I seem to have spent most of my time getting over the jet lag, then the airconditioning induced cold, then getting over getting over and then relaxing after all that...

But it is not like I really didn't do anything at all.I have taken several trips around the city centre back alley ways, around the inside and outside of the fresh produce market, around the pultry section (which nearly made me faint) and have drawn a man I believe may have been dead.. It's hard to say with the alcohol induced stupor with which people just lay by the side of the road, and look quite dead, unmoving, eyes wide open... And India being as it is, death and life always to be expected in immediate proximity to each other, well it wouldn't surprise me if the man was actually dead... So anyway: as I made one of the worst drawings I attracted an audience of about 20.. It is not exactly what they expect of me, the very white woman, top sit on a curb stone and draw in amidst the madness that is India.

I have started to scout around for possible materials to work with and collect the first quotes on prices. Drove around some parts of the nearby countryside to look for some locations for some of my work and this evening finally had a meeting with Tina and her husband, who run a local business and who are going to help me locate some people to work with. (i.e. carpenters, tradesmen, ..etc)

So I don't even know what timescale I am operating on, it would be great to get most of this work realized within the next 3 weeks. As I have a mad urge to take photographs in Varanassi or around Ladakh.. (Two absolutely opposite kind of places, from the descriptions I hear..)

First:tomorrow I will meet the carpenters and see what comes of the encounter. Hopefully it will be stupidly easy and everything will fall into place. But after the show in the Anglican Cathedral I will never again be so naive as to be unprepared for a hard uphill, swimming against the stream struggle...

Salmon-esque....

# 36 [4 July 2007]

And now I am 2 days away from the journey to India, where I will make art work... in the monsoon rain....

Next monday I will already go out and commission my mobile gallery and start working on a series of installations.

Internet connections in Mysore / India are reasonably good, so I will post images as I go along.

There isn't a project title, as I am working on 4 projects simultaneously.

I will give everything descriptions and titles throughout the following 4-5 weeks..

# 35 [30 June 2007]

...does anybody else wonder if they are risking too much of their youth on striving for an ellusive carreer..?
I have a lot of unanswered questions. Is this really important enough or just a complete indulgence.
I remember 8 years ago I was wondering if I was too old to change directios completely. If I should try and go and study medicine.. Maybe I should have done something more useful like that..

# 34 [29 June 2007]

..and sometimes..

I just by chance find other artists who make me feel brave again, who completely unexpectedly remind me of the magic and the soul that sometimes we can find in art, in words, in sounds.. however these are arranged..

Sometimes, I find one artist like this, in what I once thought would be the very least likely place... but here it is, I found one on myspace. As good as the epiphanic experience that I had weeks back when I nearly cried tears of joy in the Chinese Show in the Tate Gallery.. So my heart jumps. I am inspired. She inspired me. Brilliant! And why..? Because I think not only is her work beautiful, but it is brave. There is courage in revealing something that seems so fragile, but I see enormous strength in there.

But I am still feeling apprehensive about the upcoming journey. (I did get a flight, by the way...although the prices have gone throught the roof..)

It seems strange in a way to travel half around the planet to India, in order to make art work, when I wouldn't mind making it here. But financially and strategically it is so unbelievably prohibitive to work here.. Still, I have spent my dental money on the flight... (yes, my dental money... I have a tooth that needs sorting and will cost exactly what that plane ticket cost... Oh dear...) Making art like this just requires so much of one person, for which I suppose I always imagined there would be a whole team.. Instead the artist permanently does a :'And Again..." on picking up the crazy confidence required to risk an entire existence... For art. It seems laughable sometimes.. art... And still it is exactly the single most important, essential, existing factor, ingredient in my life.

I have projects to write up and haven't even started yet !

So just as well I am negotiating with a conspirator ... Tomorrow morning will be filled with trying to get things into writing and with burning images for an impromptu exhibition onto discs.. Just I can barely afford to have them printed out. And disappointingly the printing is almost the same cost out there in India.. And not quite as relieably professional as 'Moorfields Photo Lab' in Liverpool are.

I am clearly crazy. But then we all knew that.

Postcards anyone...????? (Remember I need any that you have sitting around in boxes. Old, new, vintage, with art on them or places... So far the response has been phenomenal: NONE... Help please, SOS... Needed by sunday..)

# 33 [22 June 2007]

..sudden change of plan.

I will go to India as soon as I can get the Visa.It occured to me that I seem to be somewhat slow at making drawing based works right now and I could use the time far more efficently out there.

So I shall be off within the next two weeks.Now I just need to find a lodger.

Phew. This is much better, why didn't I think of it sooner?

# 32 [22 June 2007]

..still folding boats and drawing them..
But the main focus now is on finding at least a little bit of funding for the installations / projects that I will do in India in August.
There will be 3 installation pieces and one temporary gallery, in which I will show previous work of mine. Brilliant. So much to do.

I had planned to be there for 4-5 weeks. I may stay 6 to get everything done. Upon arrival the first job will be to secure my premises, but I already have connections and I should be able to move in within a week.

Then the setting up and manning of the exhibition space as well as preparing my 3 installations.. I love that in India i can work like here only a very well established Artist can. And I love the response of the audience there.

Complete absence of cynicism. Instead an open mind to the work and questions people here rarely ask.
Looking forward to the process and experience!
It would help to find at least £2000, the actual cost could be £3000 or actually if I brought this to conclusion and imported my work to the UK then of course we are looking at more like £9000/£10.000

Would you not like to contribute?I would post you a paying in-slip for my bank account...

# 31 [16 June 2007]

At the moment I am tearing up books and making paperboats and setting some alight... I am enjoying the thoughts that come and the disturbing parallels with book burnings and making a game of knowledge... So I am making disposable toys out of encyclopedias that once cost a lot of money, reflecting their once respected importance, necessity and status..

But they are old books now. Old, but not old enough to be valued again.. Never again valued for their content. Who cares about the Baltic Sea and the strange Australian mouse-animals whose names start with a B... and I am only at the section B.. who knows what kind of knowledge I will come accross and make us of...
...Perhaps I will make a tower of Babel after all.. I have been so stuck on this image for so long... But for now I am making boats for journeys that will never take place..Journeys with no purpose and no destination.



.. a journey still remains a thing that may throw up surprises and kinks in it's design...

..where are the philosophers when we need them?

# 30 [16 June 2007]

I took a whole day off. Completely off...
And my god, I am a workaholic it seems.. Because by the end of yesterday I was almost twitching with the need to do something...
Today I am back to being relaxed, the rain stopped. And I am quite excited and refreshed after my 24 hour break with complete rest (except the wheelclamping experience which rendered me broke..),
I want to make a few short films this week and 'up' my speed and output ability.. It's not about finished projects and quality but just about seeing how many film sketches I could make..
So I will start with the 'limited-journey' project.. Another one of the claustrophobic resolutions to a movement intended but not quite allowed, restricted by externeal factors... weight, space, logistics.
I am quite drawn to these kind of visual metaphor non-journeys, it relates to some personal matters. And some matters I see around myself in social/political/economic sphere.
So off I go.. there is work to do..
Plato is sitting next to my bed, reading out loud "Theaetetus".. A quest for knowledge and thruth..
And my neighbours are sanding their floor..which is my ceiling.. It's time to move...

# 29 [13 June 2007]

It seems that I will be crazy busy until the end of next year. 2-3 installations in India in August. One project that I want to try and bring back for the Liverpool Biennale. Another project that seems to crystallize with these exquisite musicians. Then I also need to return to my drawing practice because it is becoming exceptionally rusty. And I don't know. Ah, yes. A show in a ruin, a bombed out church in Liverpool. This should happen in september. (3 small wooden huts with work inside... it's an open air venue, secured by the church walls, but there is no roof..)
And and and and and and and...
I am calculating wether I need to try and get a place at the Royal College of Art or possibly Goldsmiths (postgraduate courses)in order to save myself a few years worth of struggle.. And also to safeguard myself for my future. An RCA / RA next to one's name appears to be a good insurance against carreer lows... well..
But it's all just thinking, thinking and planning... In the meantime I am so busy and enjoy it a lot.
The 52nd Venice Biennale panicked me slightly. So many artists.. So much competition. So many whose work is just more polished. But then also a fair few whose work is pretty flat and obvious.. But still the rat race part of it all made me a bit uncomfortable.. And the concern over what the value of my work can possibly be... I saw too many pieces that were akin to my own, by content or choice of symbolism. But then perhaps it is ok to be part of a Zeitgeist... hmmmm... Still it makes me squirm. Until I saw all these related pieces, I thought that I was deeply unfashionable.. Which I am obviously not.

For the most part I just want to remain in a position in which I can simply make my work, have an audience and find myself in some publications.

art art bloddy art.


I best get back to some work and look into the Tower of Babel... It interests me as an image.. The gathering and distribution of knowledge throughout the ages.. The loss of a common language as alleged by this story about the destruction of the Babylonian tower and the fragmentation of the people by taking their common language from them..

What a strange god that would be.. Complete absence of benevolence, and if this story were true then it would be the root cause of all conflict and war... What a horrible god this would be..I think.
Although give me enough time and I will find ways to also completely agree with such a god. But that another time.

# 28 [13 June 2007]

I want to do more research on the origin of knowledge and the clustering of it in different locations and along different routes at certain times throughout history. I feel that it is an investigation that relates to contemporary culture which appears to have become a culture of surface, one of having rather than being (yes, that's a quote from Guy Deborge.. clearly miss-spellt)..

It feels like a relative revival of the Dark Ages ruled by crusades and propaganda. Fear and ignorance which people appear to willingly subscibe to and a condition they seem to embrace... However at every age there were glimmers of hope, beacons of humanity and moral....
I would like to use some time investigating the historical movements of knowledge gathering and distribution across the maps of the world...

My initial visual output I will probably concentrate on and around the fable of Babylon, the associated loss of the unifying human language and with that the fable-beginning of misunderstanding and fractioning being perhaps a root cause of war..

At the moment I envisage a sculptural and film expression/ outcome.. I just require some space to think in and work in. The exact route that the project will take will depend somewhat on the available space and resources, but essentially I can provide myself everything in order to make something. But of course the more additional resources are available the more this concept and manifestation can grow.

Access to information resources, with that the internet and well stocked libraries, are vital to me. Some opportunities for quality conversations, too.
Most I really would love to have enough time to really immerse myself in the research and experimenting with possibilities for a resulting exhibition..

I have such a strong back ground in drawing practice, which I haven't connected with for a fairly long time, I would like to pick up on that again; in fact I feel a neccessity and deep urge to...