MA Week 74 – Submissions, submissions

Reflection on the past week, 26^th June 2017

 Last week started on a social note as I met Mel on Monday at Left Bank Leeds. She had some of her analogue photos of Leeds in the showreel for the “Humans of Leeds” exhibition which opened that evening. It was great to see her work and also to have a look at Left Bank with thoughts of exhibiting there. Working on exhibitions took up a large part of the week. College was closed so I couldn’t get into the print room, more’s the pity.

Submission for “Movement” Summer Group Show

I spent quite a lot of time choosing the prints to submit. I’d decided to submit four, mainly quite arbitrarily as I’d had four prints in the MMU conference. I tried to choose some that related to each other but didn’t effectively repeat each other, which ruled quite a lot of them out. There was a deep red one which my partner, Nick, really liked but I hated. That kept going in and out of the selection but in the end Nick argued it in. 

The prints are A4 and I bought some 40x30 cm white Ikea frames to house them. I had thought of spraying them, two yellow and two red, but having looked at spray paint I quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a tortuous undertaking and would probably detract from, rather than add to, the prints.

 

A rubbish image of the controversial deep red print!

I spent a lot of time trying to get decent images of the prints in the frames. Mel had given me some advice (two light sources at opposite sides) but I only have one small desk lamp and my little compact camera, and it’s not enough to negate my reflection in the glass of the frame. This effort is ongoing and I am becoming very aware that I don’t have the kit or the expertise for this. I’ve got decent images of the prints unframed, so I may well have to run with these. Most of the rest of the submission is drafted so just the images need sorting out tonight. The submission needs to be in on Wednesday.

 

“Curation as Disruption” call out

About ten days ago I received an email from Sharon inviting submissions for the last show she’ll put on at College, called “Curation as Disruption”. I’d read it and rather dismissed it in the drive to get everything else done, but it’s kept coming back to me. It seems stupid to turn down an opportunity to exhibit, and more to the point, it is very important to me that I support Sharon after all the help she has given me. A poem has started to form in my mind, about Sharon’s invitation disrupting my concentration, so this could form (part of) the submission. I will allow the call out to disrupt my plans, and I am thinking of going back to develop further the “squares” or “tiles” idea from April, which seemed to generate some interest but which I never took further as I wanted to concentrate on printing. The pieces will need to be small in order for me to be able to manage the work, so I bought a couple more frames when I was in Ikea with a view to doing this.  

I am continuing on with the deep reflection on the Troubling Time conference, too. Reflection on practice and pestilent reflection on the glass of picture frames.