Curiouser & Curiouser

The Artist's Talk that I gave on Saturday was called "Curiouser & Curiouser". It was a chance for me to pick out some of the emerging themes from my work so far. It was useful to put my thoughts in some sort of order and to communicate them to people who have no idea what I'm up to. It was also good to share my ideas in a semi-formal way with some of the council staff who have been enabling the work. It's easy to take it for granted that they understand my inspiration and direction. Maybe now it's slightly clearer. I hope so.

I have become more and more intrigued by the objects in the Museum Services collection and have recently been focusing on objects related to natural history. Everything is beautifully wrapped and conserved, carefully handled and stored. Sometimes this is in direct opposition to the circumstances that brought the object into the collection. I've also been thinking about what is natural and what is unnatural within the reserve, about the contradictions entailed in management of the site.

I feel that I have gone through a saturation phase and now I'm letting everything settle, waiting to see what emerges as the main ideas that I will pursue. It's inevitable that I won't be able to pursue every avenue that suggests itself -I need to concentrate on goals that I can achieve within the time I have here and see where that leads. So I'm printing out images and assembling them on the Artspace walls to create a visual reminder of ideas, making notes. The wall is in flux -I will move images to fit beside each other, reposition others to make them more obvious. Colour is creeping in as well. I thought that the work might be dominated by the blue and white of cyanotype but at this point it is beginning to balance itself out. That seems right and natural.