Despite not being outwardly productive in recent times, I’ve been quietly plotting some new work. In addition to this, I’ve also been fortunate that the work I started during my MA has continued to generate discussion and act as an opening to new opportunities.
One of these opportunities came as the result of some images from ROITD being selected to be shown in the first exhibition of Shutter Hub’s ambitious new project. Postcards From Great Britain aims to share visions of British culture through photographic images and promote connection and debate. The images include social, political, observational, historical and traditional responses and when the project finally closes, at the end of this year, the submitted work in its entirety will be archived and housed in various significant collections worldwide.
Images are presented in postcard format, depicting visions of British life
The project will be punctuated with exhibitions throughout Europe, the first of which opened this week and a happy coincidence of my work schedule allowed me to nip over to Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, to attend the exhibition opening. It was good to be there and I was happy to be able to meet a number of the other exhibiting artists and discuss how they work. These connections stimulated a couple of promising avenues for future exploration and possible collaboration and I’ll expand on this in future updates.
Attendees at the exhibition opening in Haarlem
Apart from enjoying the short break for the opportunity to see the exhibition, I was also able to get out for a quick photo walk and the mental space of being away also allowed me to continue planning for the main focus of this year, which will be an exhibition of my own work in collaboration with selected artists, later this year.
My own research for this is ongoing: I recently finished reading Catch by Simon Robson. The book centres around Catharine (referred to as Catch by her husband), a wife alone at home on a winter’s day while her husband works away in Birmingham. She is bored, self-critical, over analytical, aloof, over-serious, frustrated by a lack of musical talent, envious of other more frivolous/artistic/bohemian people, embodied in this case by her friend Masha.
She is also, evidently, dissatisfied by her inability to have a child with her husband Tom.
Cover of Catch by Simon Robson
The writing is often overly elaborate, to the detriment of the narrative and the revelation of character. However the author still manages to depict an unraveling, a sense of quite rapidly losing touch with oneself and the certainty of circumstances that previously anchored you in place. Catharine quickly loses touch with her sense of self, caught up in an accelerating cycle of thoughts, careering towards the dissolution of her marriage, the destruction of her longstanding friendship with Masha and to the relinquishing of her sanity, triggered by innocuous events such as a conversation with a disaffected teenager in the village and some low level flirting with a retiree.
This feeling of being captive to self-destructive thoughts, apparently founded on ‘fact’ that one is mistakenly convinced of, felt very familiar. This negative feedback spiral can be a very lonely place, where you feel increasingly hopeless, convinced of the futility and finality of everything, and almost unable to listen to reason. This is something I will be exploring in the work that I plan to show later this year.