Well the first month has been completed and I still have lots of things to sort out for the project from this website to sponsorship and printing to events. This week the From Page To Screen festival has eaten up a fair bit of time – 7 films in 5 days – and I have some basic stuff to put in place for Dorset Art Weeks and my son and daughter-in-law are visiting for a few days and there’s the garden to sort when/if it stops raining and then the bees will be swarming and…and…and…it’s good to be busy!
But whatever else may be happening, the work I am doing for this project is happening well – it’s mostly flowing easily and also teasing me into unfamiliar areas and causing me to experiment in my other work. So all is well.
What with it being the From Page To Screen film festival here in Bridport I am at the Arts Centre twice today so it made a hand delivery the obvious choice. I was there for a screening of Derek Jarman’s The Tempest and will be heading off there again soon to see The Railway Man. It was also an obvious choice to have the smiling face of Amelie, the new intern at the Arts Centre, rather than the straight-lipped, stern face of the post box.
Nothing much to say about the process today except that some accidental by-products of its making have sent me off experimenting with some other techniques. Oh and the print is getting ever fainter on the envelope.
I am not feeling very well again today but am trying to ignore it, except that I did my #Letter365 for today as one of my first jobs just in case I wasn’t up to it later. And I have to say I am very pleased with the piece I made. Not that I am not happy with all the pieces I am putting forward in #Letter365 – they all have to pass the “would I have it on my wall” test as a very minimum! But some days I think that maybe I should reconsider my intention to destroy, unseen, any pieces that haven’t sold at the end of the exhibition.
Anyway, having got the piece ready I decided I would post it rather than deliver it by hand. When I got to the Post Office there were two shiny red post vans and there had been a collection (they don’t tell you the times any more in case they can’t be bothered some days I suppose). The postie who had emptied the box readily offered to take my #Letter365 and, slightly more reluctantly, agreed to have her picture taken. I think you will all agree it’s a pleasant change when I can feature smiling people rather than just a post box!
Thing is I now find myself in a quandary. I have previously been refering to “postmen” and have today used “postie” as a non gender-specific term as the person who took my letter is clearly female. Should I refer to her as “postwoman” or change all future references to postal operatives to “postie”. I am not a great lover of shortened names and terms, though “postie” does have a friendly nature to it. What do you think?
I thought about calling this post “Letter The Right One In” as a play on words with the film I saw this morning. I am glad i didn’t. I’m actually not feeling very well so I have nothing else to say apart from the fact that I have posted No27.
I had hoped to finish my #Letter365 piece for today early enough to deliver it to the Arts Centre before the first film of From Page To Screen, Bridport’s film festival. Alas, while I have finished the piece I haven’t the time to do the envelope and photography in a stress-free way before I have to go.
I don’t mean the evidence that shadow rabbits can hold credit cards between their ear and nose (see picture) but the evidence that the post box day plate for Tuesday has been “mislaid”. It hasn’t been there the last few weeks and MON is displayed on Tuesday. That’s why all the people in Bradpole look confused! Well, one of the reasons.
I got very frustrated creating the envelope for this one. For some reason the printer would not recognise the settings set up for this particular document – the ones it has used for the previous 25 days – and chose to use the settings for the other documents that were open!
It’s odd that there is a pressure in me to produce a completely new and unique work each day. While I intend each work that will be unique that doesn’t mean that I have to summon up a totally new idea each day. I have only just realised that I could work on developing a single idea over a period of time – I had already thought of doing special series, say at Christmas – and I had sort of forgotten that part of this process is the final installation, so perhaps I will do series of similar work for stretches at a time. It will perhaps be like the wave-carved ripples on the wide sand beaches, the same but totally different every day. And some days there will be a rock or a crab. But mostly it will just be the same but totally different. There again I may not do that!
Drizzle and drivel – No25 goes in the box
I thought it would be sunny today but it turned out dull and drizzly. So today’s #Letter365 offering got everso vaguely damp in the 30 paces to the post box.
Having spent a busy day making the most of the sunshine, painting the new solar wax extractor and digging and raking one of the vegetable beds, then spending some useful time in the studio I am exhausted! Losing an hour last night probably didn’t help either. So no energy for deep thought.
I will just mention that I watched Powaqqatsi this evening. Interesting to see it again after 30 years I guess. Still stunning even though not as powerful as it was in my memory, but now we have such a deluge of visual images available to us that it is hard to remember how remarkable this was when it came out. The Philip Glass score is of course a masterpiece in its own right and certainly not just a film soundtrack. Two sections might get plundered by me for some ideas!
An unfolding artwork created a piece each day for a year
