ARTISTS TALKING

# 49 [2 January 2008]

I'm starting to have thoughts about the next festival - just as well, really! Christmas, Julian Calendar style, falls on Monday 7 January and after the New Style festive lull this date is coming up all too fast.

I've been wanting to experiment with the webcam equipment in the church since the project started, and Trevor's suggestion that we go there at night for a sort of Christmas Eve vigil next Sunday evening seemed like just the right idea at the right time. So, hopefully the webcam will have an airing at last, although I won't have the technology to beam the images live from Wood Dalling church.

It's been important to me to avoid any Christmas cliches in preparing for the festival - after all, everyone knows that quite a few of our current traditions were being practised in medieval times and that many of those are actually pagan in origin, being a celebration of the return of the sun at the midwinter solstice.

While I'm very interested in all of this, I need to step sideways and find a slightly different 'take' on the festival. I'm thinking of focussing on the weird heads in the church, that always make me think of woodland spirits, satyrs and fauns, rather than on the human portraits/inscriptions I've been so involved with during previous festivals. Not sure yet how they'll be interpreted, though.

It sometimes feels a ridiculous scheme: a residency with a self-imposed structure that leaves me feeling pressurised to come up with well-resolved concepts and a reasonable amount of work that seems worth publishing - as well as a heap of ideas for future development - twelve times during the course of a single year!!

But on the plus side - after taking far longer to ferment out than the instructions promised - the Festial Ale is ready to drink, and it's very good indeed!

# 48 [17 December 2007]

Still working on the Kalender production line! This All Souls issue has coincided with so many other things that need to be done, and consequently seems to have taken an age to prepare for distribution. But now all the little 'poor souls' are in their cellophane bags, the rubberstamping is finished and compliment slips printed and sliced up, and all I have to do is to buy a new stapler (now where did I put the old one?!!) and attach 180 little 'souls' to the covers.

Christmas? Ah, well, Christmas is the next festival I need to plan for ... and what a good thing it doesn't fall until January 7th according to the Julian Calendar!

The photographs here were taken by Trevor from the scaffolding tower currently occupying part of the nave of the church. He took the opportunity to grab an unusual perspective on the familiar Wood Dalling characters.

# 47 [6 December 2007]

Not much to report on the 'audience development' front. I have to admit to feeling a bit jaded about the whole thing. However, the new Kalender is with the printer now, and I'm hoping to pick up the completed job tomorrow afternoon. In the end, I decided to focus on 'All Souls' rather than trying to accommodate ideas around 'All Saints' as well - and all in 16 pages! There was plenty of material to fill it as it was, and I'm pleased that there was room to include some full-page images.

I read Jane Ponsford's last blog entry, and know just what she means about working surrounded by dead people - the 'All Souls' of the festival seem very close by when you wander round the 'empty' church. But I've never felt uncomfortable there. St Andrew's is extremely forlorn-looking at the moment with all the dust, rubble, scaffolding and moved-around furniture, but certainly all seems benign.

Putting a named cake on each of the floor brasses and photographing it was an intense experience and I hope the visual result captures something of that.

This new Kalender is about to be posted on the website:

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

Oh yes, and feedback would be very gratefully received at:

imogenashwin[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk

# 46 [27 November 2007]

Whew! It’s been hectic on the Kalender front. Having collected the reprinted Michaelmas edition, now with pale pink cover (the printer had run out of the light purple I’d chosen) and the right size but not quite such nice quality printing – sigh – Trevor and I set to and spent a whole evening rubber-stamping, filling cellophane bags with wheat grains and stapling them onto 180 covers. Yes, well …

The mentors suggested being a little less mysterious and including some information about the project in each issue. I’ve sort of compromised by writing a short introduction to Festial and printing it on a compliment slip to be inserted into each Kalender (another small task x 180!).

So now I’ve posted out the 30-odd press/gallery copies and just need to sort out the other 150 comp. slips so I can shift the rest from the sitting room floor.

At the same time, I’ve started compiling the next Kalender – All Saints and All Souls – and this time, for a change, it’s going to be practically all images with minimal text, which will coincidentally (of course!) be less demanding research-wise.

# 45 [19 November 2007]

I heard from the Wood Dalling Christmas Market organiser and the news was not good. Apparently they can’t fit me in! No compromise options were offered, like paring down the presentation and giving me a small table out in the hallway, for example. It does make me wonder how much local interest in the project it’s possible to drum up. I mean, they even turned down the free beer! Ho hum … a great excuse for an Advent party, anyway.

And, I’ve heard from one of the three local Societies I contacted about the possibility of going along to one of their meetings to chat informally about the project. It’s the one that’s based in my home village – and they’ve turned me down too! It’s true that they seemed to think I was offering a formal talk and their programme is full for 2008, but it’s always a bit disheartening to be told that your records will nonetheless be kept ‘on file’ and to be ‘thanked for your interest’! This community-inclusion thing is really not going the way Jo and Katie (my mentors) seemed to envisage.

Anyway, there are positive things to report – for one thing, Kalender has gone together well and is finished and is with the printer. Unfortunately, when I went to collect the 180 copies on Friday afternoon I discovered they’d printed it as a postcard-sized image in the centre of each A5 page. It was pretty hard having to turn it down having struggled across the rush-hour traffic - and actually seeing the box of condemned Kalenders - but there was nothing else I could do but go home empty-handed. The printers are going to re-do them, but I probably won’t be able to get over there again until Friday. Meanwhile, this new edition – Michaelmas, issue 6 – is now downloadable from the website:

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

Last Tuesday and Wednesday were All Saints and All Souls’ Days – Julian calendar style – and I spent some time at the church on Wednesday afternoon. There was no sign of the builders, and I had a great time taking photographs as the afternoon sunlight shifted around the old building. Plastic sheeting has been hung to separate the south aisle where the builders are working from the nave, and I found the reflections and shadows really evocative. A real piece of luck.

Afterwards, I was lucky again as I was able to warm up with a cup of coffee beside the woodburning stove of Kay, my Wood Dalling friend who I’ve met through the project (another good thing about Festial!)

And later an idea emerged for some work connected with All Souls’ Day, so on Thursday I baked a dozen fairy cakes …. but, in the tradition of fairy stories and soap operas alike, I’ll leave the rest until my next blog entry … !

# 44 [13 November 2007]

Twelve days after my last blog entry, I’ve sent out a lot of press releases and made enquiries about the possibility of holding a mini Open Day within Wood Dalling’s own Christmas Market in the Village Hall on December 1. No feedback on any of this so far!

No feedback either from any of the local historical societies I contacted – but it’s possible they have to wait until their next meetings to discuss the issue.

Another thing that's taken time is sorting out some radical enhancement of the Festial website. Trevor has, as usual, done some lovely work on this (well, that's what I think!).

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

On a lighter note, I’m in the process of brewing 40 pints of Festial ale – cheating, admittedly, by using a kit – as a (clearly essential) part of my Michaelmas research/work. If I get the go-ahead from the Wood Dalling Christmas Market organisers, I plan to give mugfuls of this away to interested punters at my Open Day. Now, who says this is stooping low???! When I say mugfuls, I won’t actually fill the (medieval-replica) mugs right to the brim, obviously, and I’ll be inviting donations for the Village Hall Fund ....

I’ve also proposed taking along my laptop with a slideshow of project images and a small portable DVD player for the two video pieces. The Committee were meeting last night, so I expect I’ll hear one way or the other fairly imminently.

For the last few days I've been gathering material for the Michaelmas edition of Kalender. I was worried (as I often am) that there wouldn't be enough and it wouldn't hang together, especially this time as the festival itself was somewhat overshadowed by the wedding. I needn't have worried, though - when we sat down to do the layout it was actually difficult to fit it all into the 16 pages! I'm hoping to email it all to the printer tomorrow so it should be ready to pick up before the weekend.

That's not quite on schedule, as the next festival - All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day - theoretically takes place today and tomorrow! We went past the church today and there were vehicles parked in the driveway and builders swarming (well, that's an exaggeration but I certainly spotted one) so it's not ideal. I'm not all that keen on the present cold wet conditions either, if I'm quite honest, but I'll get up there tomorrow anyway and see how it goes. Whose idea was this project, anyway?!

Last Wednesday I went to UEA to meet the MA student, Amandine, who had contacted me about the project in relation to her MA coursework researching the idea of a ‘200 Years of Art and Religion in Norfolk’ exhibition. I met Amandine and also Anna, a third-year Museology undergraduate who is also working on this research.

We had an interesting discussion. The students had already met several contemporary artists and had become slightly confused as to what was at the heart of the theme of ‘Art and Religion’. Amandine had seen the Festial website so she knew that my work wasn’t using art as an expression of religion, but Anna thought that perhaps that was what their brief implied. I said that if they were looking for artists/craftspeople of today who are making sculptures, textile pieces and so on to locate in places of worship (including site-specific pieces) I was certain they would have no difficulty finding them. But that is absolutely not what I’m doing in my own work. Amandine felt that it would be more interesting to take a step back from this ‘expression of religion’ thing and incorporate work that looks at or comments on religion, but I did have the impression that the students hadn’t really formulated clear thoughts about this yet. Apparently, an artist they had seen that morning had assumed they were looking for Christian artists, although the word Christian doesn’t come into the literature they sent me and I’m certain that any exhibition funding body would run a mile from anything labelled ‘religion’ that didn’t allow for different faiths to be represented.

Another thing I talked about (I hope I didn’t talk too much!) was the difficulty in classifying medieval religious art as an expression of faith, as there were so many motives underlying the creation of the work. Not least, the wish of the donor to gain brownie points with God and earn a shorter time for him/herself and his/her family in Purgatory!

# 43 [1 November 2007]

This week I’m getting my head down trying to attend to some of the ‘audience development’ issues that Jo and Katie were keen that I should address. Of course, it’s taking much longer than I imagined and the new Kalender, which is also crying out for attention, is so far no more than a (faint) glimmer in the background.

Anyway, I’ve written to three local history societies (emphasising that this is contemporary art with a historical slant rather than history per se: I’m sure they’d have something to say about my accuracy if I presented my work as ‘fact’!). Also, I’ve written a ‘half-way through the residency’ press release which seems a bit thin on substance to me, but you never know I suppose if real news is thin on the ground right now. I seem to remember that, for this reason, the Arts Council guidance booklet advises artists to issue frequent press releases and resist the feeling that their story is not newsworthy just because there’s little take-up the first time round – or perhaps I’m just imagining this!

Putting Kalender together feels much more creative than what I’m doing right now, but I recognise the necessity of reaching out to a grass-roots audience if my ambition is to be taken on by publicly-funded galleries.

Yesterday I received an email from OUTPOST - the Norwich-based artist-run organisation I belong to - advertising a performance this evening: my friend Anna and her husband Laurence (Townley & Bradby) will be scooping up stray strands of tobacco from a computer keyboard, making them into a roll-up and smoking it. I’m always interested to hear what Anna and Laurence are up to and I know I’d enjoy the performance, but I find myself wondering how far out of step with cool contemporary practice my own concerns/issues/passions/obsessions may be, and whether this matters or not. In the end, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether it matters – it’s just what I do and I’m going to keep doing it.

On the other side of things, I’ve also received an email from an MA student in the Department of World Art Studies and Museology at the University of East Anglia. Amandine is researching ‘Art and Religion in Norfolk’ and is looking to interview contemporary practitioners working within this area with a view to an exhibition next year as the outcome of a partnership between her Department and Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service. This could be interesting and I’m hoping to meet her sometime next week.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

imogenashwin[at]yahoo[dot]co[dot]uk

# 42 [25 October 2007]

This is the longest gap in my blog since I started it in April. It’s not that nothing has been happening. Far from it. But the run up to the wedding and then a few glorious days in Venice (with nightmarish journeys, but we’ll gloss over that!) and then 101 other things-that-needed-attending-to got in the way (including that inconvenient thing: paid work!).

Anyway, I’ve been given a window of opportunity to write about Festial while Trevor valiantly tackles a pile of pages from the encyclopaedia of economics that I’m supposed to be proof-reading, so ....

It’s hard to judge the success of the Dragon Hall installation, although I think it was probably the best I could make it, given the resources at my disposal. Ideally I’d have projected the DVD, but in practice I would probably have needed a white surface or screen, as I don’t think it would have been visible enough on the rough brick walls of the Undercroft. So, the television monitor was a reasonable compromise. Two small prints on plinths stood in another alcove, and elsewhere was a lectern with the A4 comb-bound book containing all five issues (so far) of Kalender, and a whole heap of copies of the current Kalender, of which I reckon at least 90 have been taken away by visitors.

Going back last week to dismantle it all, I’d been looking forward to seeing comments in the book, good or bad, as I had no idea how the installation had been received. It was therefore disappointing to discover that the only ‘real’ comment was that of my lovely friend Hilde, who came up to Norwich for the wedding and had been along to the exhibition during the morning beforehand. It was a really nice comment, but I have to admit a certain possibility of bias!

Observant readers may remember the last entry where I was looking forward to the first performance evening slash ’sponsor’s party’ at Dragon Hall which, I assumed, would serve as a private view for the four exhibitors at the venue. Well, I was wrong! It was a perfectly pleasant event and I enjoyed the talk by Susie Hanna on her current animation about Sylvia Plath, but the speech by the Fringe Festival organiser made no mention of the art to be seen there at all. As some of the work was quite subtly located and mine was in the Undercroft with no signage exhorting people to go take a look, I’m not at all sure that everyone present was aware that Dragon Hall was more than just an atmospheric venue for the party and performances! It’s true that in quiet moments during the speeches, strange sounds could be heard emanating from the Undercroft (thanks again for the soundtrack, Trevor!) but I’ve certainly learned a few lessons from the experience. Firstly, don’t take anything for granted but actually speak to the speech-maker(s) beforehand and check that the work is going to be promoted. And provide clear signage to lead people to the work: don’t assume they’ll find it by themselves! As this was a Fringe Festival run by volunteers, it was really nobody’s job but my own.

On, then, to Michaelmas in the Festial year. I’ll post a bit more about this festival as I do more work on Kalender – just need to finish that proof-reading first! – but I have had to compromise on the date that I visited the church this time, as Michaelmas using the Julian calendar actually fell while I was away in Venice. So, I went up there on the first possible day afterwards, to find that a few changes had taken place in my absence. The most instantly noticeable of these was that scaffolding has now been erected outside and inside the north side of the church. I did know that quite major work was going to take place during the course of the year to replace the north aisle roof and windows, but it was still quite a shock. There were no builders anywhere to be seen on that occasion (well, they are notorious for starting a job and then trying to keep lots of people happy at once!) but I think that, for this shy and retiring artist, the presence of the builders is likely to be an inhibiting factor while the work goes on. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it, though.

Then, on Monday, I went to Ely for a meeting with my mentors Katie from BCA and Jo from the Babylon Gallery. It was quite a tough, but stimulating, meeting. Half-way through the project seemed a good time to take stock and maybe tweak things a little if necessary. Most importantly, Jo and Katie gave me advice which will help me find the motivation to push forward on that thing called ‘audience development’ through the barrier of feeling that I’ve received little or no audience feedback during the time the project has been in progress. So, now I have a checklist of ‘things to do’ (as if there weren’t enough already!) and I’m actually really excited about it.

Among these, I’m planning to hold an Open Day in Wood Dalling to talk about the stage that Festial has reached and to show some of the work. Maybe there’ll be some hands-on activities, too – but I’d better not get carried away with all this until I’ve done some thinking about it. My first thought is that, as the church is named for St Andrew, St Andrew’s Day (13 December, Julian calendar style) would be a good choice. Another thing I’ll be doing is contacting some local heritage societies to see if they would be interested in hearing about the project. This all sounds far removed from the bright lights and cool galleries, but I’m starting to understand the need to ‘grow’ an audience from a tiny seed of goodwill. Maybe I’ve been a bit too ambitious, too soon.

# 41 [1 October 2007]

Well, the installation is duly installed and I think it's OK. I'll get a better idea tomorrow evening which will in effect be the private view for the Dragon Hall exhibiting artists. It's a 'sponsor's party' and performance evening in the Great Hall, so I'm hoping that quite a few of the partygoers and audience will find their way to the undercroft!

In the end I gave up the idea of projecting an image into one of the alcoves. It just didn't look the way I had envisaged and with all the loose dust in the undercroft I feared for my overhead projector over the three weeks it would have had to remain in position. The image was to have been a photograph of the lower part of a poppyhead. Projected onto the crumbling wall below the vaulting, I hoped it would have a very ambiguous effect (see accompanying pic).

But I realise now that it was an unnecessary addition to the installation anyway, and that it works better kept very simple with just the TV on a plinth and two 'portraits' on twin plinths in the adjoining alcove. The bound A4 Kalender omnibus sits on a lectern near the stairway into the undercroft, and all the copies of the current Kalender are piled up on top of one of the enormous barrels that have a permanent home down there.

The one improvement that we're intending to make is to sneak in tomorrow evening before the party begins to connect an extra pair of speakers to the DVD player. At present the sound comes only from the TV monitor itself, so if we position the speakers in different parts of the undercroft the soundtrack will hopefully form more of a soundscape.

# 40 [25 September 2007]

It's my birthday today, but no let-up in the Fringe Festival preparations. I think we'll treat ourselves to a meal at the local pub this evening, though!

Quite a few items in the catalogue of woe of my last blog entry have now been addressed, thanks in no small measure to Trevor, who has worked tirelessly helping to retrieve large unwanted TVs from lofts, giving technical assistance, making and painting plinths, offering calm reassurance and so on. I know I'm biased (well, we are getting married in a fortnight's time!) but his soundtrack, now I've actually had the chance to start working with it, is sounding FANTASTIC!

Many more hours than I care to count have been spent in cutting, dipping, rolling and varnishing little elderberry beads for the covers of the new Kalender, but now every single one is stapled on and waiting to be taken to the undercroft of Dragon Hall in Norwich, where I'll be installing on Thursday. All five of the past issues of Kalender have been printed out at A4 and comb-bound, so that's another thing sorted. I've decided to project a single image into one of the dark alcoves within the vaulting as I have an overhead projector and the space just seems made for it. So there’ll be the projection in one alcove, the video in another (also naturally dark), and in the third, two tall plinths each supporting a photograph. That’s the plan, anyway, and at the moment it does seem achievable.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

www.norwichfringefestival.co.uk