Exhibition Outcomes

Now the small exhibition has been and gone, I've had time to reflect on how it went and what new paths it may have opened up.

The process of getting ready for this exhibition was a continual balancing act of staying true to process led work, working through ideas organically and arriving at final pieces that feel genuine - with also wanting to produce work that ultimately sells. Overall, I feel that balance was successful. That's not to say there wasn't challenges along the way or that I was totally happy with every piece I exhibited.

Something I certainly learnt was how it was important my ideas/concepts/themes were personal to my practice - but also accessible to an audience. I don’t really want to hold my ideas high up above people’s heads or make them feel that’s what I am doing. I want people to be able to connect and relate to the work – not feel confronted or confused by it. The themes surrounding the female experience are shared by 50% (or thereabouts) of the population so are I hope some of the thoughts raised in the work speak the language of others. Going forward, I will need to keep awareness up of this. I want to make my work accessible, but I also don’t want to go too far the other way and start making work solely and just for ‘the consumer’.

An artistic outcome: Having set out to capture moving figures (akin to the witches in Macbeth or healing women moving around one another in a circle of connection) I in fact produced works all exhibiting stillness and contemplation. Although I’m happy with the outcome of these pieces, I’m aware that they exist partly because I wasn’t successful in capturing the more dynamic composition of figures I wanted to.

I'm pleased the process of creating work for this exhibition felt genuine and process led. All of it was documented in my sketchbook which became a reflection of just how much I change lanes – but keep coming back to push further at an idea and become ‘better’ at it. Towards the end of the process, almost right up to the week before, I ‘landed’ on the idea of the form of circles (as in the actual shape) and their ancient significance. I suppose in many ways it was an alternative landscape to the one I had been doing in that it involved allowing paint to find its place on the paper and using water to move it around.

Below are some examples from my sketchbook showing this type of landscape:

As I reached a point (at least for the exhibition) of resolution for the landscapes above, the circles were intriguing me. I worked on about 7 of them at the same time (as I nearly always must have lots of pieces ‘on the go so I feel open to experimentation. It feels too pressurising to embark on one piece alone!) - and what I produced was essentially a series of process drawings. At the time I documented them in a blog post in answer to Jonathan’s challenge to do something that might go wrong. If I’d had a couple of extra weeks before the exhibition, I may have resolved some of them enough to put them up as final pieces. As it was, I didn’t have time, but I put them up anyway, unframed, and not for sale. Surprisingly, I had more comments on them than the other pieces, and one of them sold.

The exhibition has really turned out to be an example of how making work can create the idea for the next piece (something we discussed in my tutorial) and although I feel daunted by this and feel a slight weight of pressure to making lots of work - I'm reassured that the process led approach works for me and I can continue to push this to see where it takes me.