This month I have been creating work to show at Hold the Space, Brown Street Project Space, 62 Brown Street, Sheffield, S1 2BS. The private view is Friday 7th June 6 - 8.30pm and the show is open Sat and Sun 12 – 6pm until the final day Saturday 22nd June.
Knowing that the work will be seen in an exhibition gives a frisson of dynamism in the studio. I’m not sure I’d go as far as to say audiences complete an artwork, but there is something about publicly sharing art that gives an artist clarity. It’s not the feedback per se, but I think the process of hanging, curation, and then feeling the work activated by viewers looking. All of that somehow passes works-in-progress to finished pieces.
I’ve been preparing three different series of works, all traced watercolours on paper, each featuring gold. Each series though, is defined by a single colour. The oldest series is Crown/Halo is red, which started in 2021. Here I use stills from video works made during my PhD in which I danced in my studio. I screengrabbed a range of images in which I presented myself to the camera. I have hand drawn crowns I’ve seen in Hollywood movies. Earlier sold Crown/Halos also featured halos I copied from Renaissance paintings. I currently have five of these images and in my studio I’ve paired these with two gold-coloured statue drawings, making a row of seven.
In Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, A Tarot Journey to Self-Awareness, Rachel Pollack divides the tarot up into sevens. When I heard this, I realised I wanted the works in this show to be divisible by seven. I’ve been working on Spirit of A Muse, my blue-coloured works which I discussed in April’s Studio Stories. I have managed to complete fourteen of these. This series are made from tracing photos in which I pose to camera, copying found in pin-up images, and adding yoga postures and my own relaxed moments. This series looks clear and polished as they come from photos of my body holding still.
In my own journalling, I wrote the blue images are ‘the intellectual to grapple with’, the red ‘the fire to transmute’ and then I wrote of a new series I’ve just started, the green ‘the woo of the body’. And about the gold I use to embellish all the images ‘the reward, the embodied knowledge’.
This week I’ve been experimenting with the green series. Without consciously deciding, I gathered together lowlight screengrabs I couldn’t use for my vintage dress series, and I selected the images in which my arms are raised in the air. The source images aren’t very clear, meaning the drawings feel a bit blurred and watery. I didn’t notice the arms aloft until I saw three in a row on my studio wall. These I’ve paired with gold circles, halos and mandalora. Mandalora are the almond shape seen between two circles overlapping and these can be found in Christian paintings and other religious iconography. This new series looks like the figure is in a portal or threshold. Between things. I guess, like me. These works capture something real I’m feeling, I think. I’m not quite sure how to title these, but the pressure of the exhibition will necessarily force a decision! As it is, I’m still making these to get to seven, to install on Sunday.
Dear reader, thanks for reading along with me, I appreciate it. I haven’t shared Joy Development thoughts over May. I journaled but couldn’t clarify my thoughts or how I wanted to write. I wasn’t broadcast-ready. My intention for June is to find my clarity and voice and pick up this much-cherished writing practice. Thanks for sticking with me.
Studio Stories, May 2024