Time Past

I’m posting this on the day our old kitchen (dark, decrepit and dingy) becomes a thing of the past. Unfortunately this means using my studio for the next few weeks (months?) as a temporary kitchen so I’m shifting different bits of my activity to different parts of the house.

This recent little piece in a box is about the (distant) past. Long, long ago…. Bar a bit of paint, it uses timeless materials: earth pigments, plaster, stone, shell, wood. The kitchen was old in a different way – clapped out, dispirited, dilapidated. The adjectives keep coming!

As to the future, it looks like being very busy: events are lining up and I need to keep working hard while the builders get on with bringing light and warmth to the heart of the house. Details on here soon about the coming season.

This little piece-in-a-box was made last spring with recycled and found objects. Some were actually picked up on the walk, others are there to represent the sensations and sights of the occasion. It was cold and crisp and there was a thin coat of snow lying on the ground. A very special day with a special flavour.

For me a successful piece always has to have a distinctive flavour, the more intense (usually) the better. Another form of synaesthesia I guess.

Hove is already looking a lot more snowy than that this morning.

It’s been an impossibly interrupted and complicated run-up to Christmas. Building works stopping and starting, visits to family up north and out west, Christmas presents to buy and distribute, deadlines to meet (an article, a submission, a proposal). I moved out of my studio (due to become a temporary kitchen) and back again; now I’m half in, half out.

None of that is serious stuff. But I do find it hard to deal with the stop-start rhythm. It’s easy to lose momentum and confidence and the thread of what you’re doing. So a few uninterrupted half-days recently have been a godsend and I look forward to some more proper time soon. I don’t mind if there’s chaos all round so long as it’s not my chaos: I can ignore the sledgehammers and skips and banging so long as I don’t have to break off what I’m doing every few minutes.

Here is some of the new work that’s under way. Far from finished – I’d hoped to have it ready to submit for the Towner Gallery Open Exhibition – but still, it is under way and trying to find (in each case) its direction.

A happy 2013 to all.