Sunday 23 December 2007

“On the bottom shelf of the library were twenty volumes of THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, each one clothed in a navy blue cover and bearing a torch of gold. Inside on the frontispiece was a drawing of the globe resting on a bed of clouds and showing the lines of longitude and latitude… the first page of my favourite section, THE BOOK OF WONDER , showed children gazing up at the heavens…
She also wrote down poetry she had memorised and painted an illustration. Tom referred to these random accumulations as the Book of Wander.”
Joan Clark – LATITUDES OF MELT


It was a Pavlovian response, when being offered a show mid-January, I said yes. It is hard wired into us, even those of the conceptually based WGAS, we need them for the CV, for validation.

As soon as I had agreed I wondered why. I never like the outcome, it seems a waste of money. No one actually sees them and the busiest time in a gallery is when booze is being served and then people come to see who else shows up as the work is impossible to see.

Mind you they can be useful, in Pouch Cove I wanted to see if it was possible to make a large space intimate and what size prints would be needed so that one could still feel the personal relationship to the work as one would in a book - wouldn’t have to worry about the crowds. Also there I wanted to sell.

But, as I stated, outside of the creative community, except for a brave bayman’s family, no one from the village dare enter the space. As I have also stated that while I ‘m sure that Carol would prefer that I took up gambling as less money would be wasted and there would be a slight chance of some funds coming from the effort, the money spent putting up a show would keep me in mailings for a good six months.

I am continuing to use the space afforded me at the University of the South as an experiment. - the opposite of what I did in Pouch Cove which looked like I was a rational human being quite in control of what I do - which most people know couldn’t be further than the truth.

This time it is opposite of this summer, the images will be small, different sizes and placed all over as if I were some brown version of Yamamoto - definitely not Tillmans - I won’t distress the images the way that Yamamoto does but will mix format and styles. Based around the books of wander, but exploded, vomited over the walls in a form of loose exquisite corpses. This means, gelatine silver prints, and archival pigmented prints, black and white and colour. I am going against my evil twin’s suggestion of less is more.

Liking Allen’s hanging at the MCA where she used magnets, and not wanting to use neither frames nor have the hanging devices show, am going to try to do the same as I want the images to float out from the wall somewhat flat but not as if they were on fome core. Everything is a balance here as I don’t want them to overly curl as some fibre based paper does but don’t know how dry the room will be.

Not knowing the space but reckoning that it would have four walls, thought of using the major points on the compass as a basis for the hanging. Also panicked as I have to not only figure out what images I want to use but what will determine the size. Think of being contrary here by making what would seem to be important small and those images with little to see larger.

I had planned to start all of this - 18 December - yeah right - so that I could plan the days and not have a race at the end. There was a moment of maturity with the show last summer when I did start working on it in February and stuck more or less to the plan. I hold no hope for this sot of working method this time - holidays. I also thought/hope that this will keep my mind off the fact that I am not in Pouch Cove this winter. That I shall be so busy that January will pass without thinking of where I could have been. The snow and seeing how people handle it here doesn’t help at all.

Having seen the floor plans, I have been calmed a bit, a manageable amount of running space. Only two walls three spaces. Ok I can breathe.

That is until I wrote the Tanzanian of the South only to find out that I have both galleries.

Breathe. Breathe.

Ok so plans change as the space becomes grander, I’ll become more schizophrenic. The first room will still show my manic confusion but the second, going against what I had said this summer, will be six to eight large archival pigmented prints showing some control.

Now all I have to do is start.

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