I had an art exhibition back in February!! And I was really happy with how it all turned out. The work was kind of inspired by Chris Krauss' book 'I love Dick' and I am feeling too lazy to go into depth about it, but it was kind of about revealing and owning the personal aspects of our lives and the things we normally keep hidden. I embroidered secrets, or gossipy type facts about people with glow in the dark thread and then displayed them all on this big frame in a black room, with lights strung up behind the embroideries that flashed on and off. I really enjoyed the aspect of being in a small black room as part of an art exhibition as sometimes it can be weird going to an exhibition especially if you are by yourself and have no one to talk to, or you can feel 'on show' how you are viewing the art etc. Anyway I like the fact that being in a dark room took away this aspect of being watched and made the experience more relaxing (definitely for me as the artist being there). The fact that the sculpture was kind of maze like meant that when the lights flashed off you would be kind of trapped in there so as not to trip over the art work in the dark, this meant that you were forced to spend longer with the work than usual. Because the light flashing on made the room quite bright, it would take a while for the embroidered glow in the dark words to be visible to your enlarged retinas when the light flashed off and the sentences would slowly grow on you after several sequences of the light flashing on and off. Everything came together at the last second exactly how I wanted it to. But because of the nature of the work the images don't really convey the sense of it very accurately.
I worked sewing the embroidered sentences onto the frame til about 5am then had to be at work at 9am. Lovely Dan learned to sew so that he could help me for a few hours in the middle of the night, and a few of my other super lovely friends came in to help too. Adele wrote an amazing catalogue essay for me and did the floor sheet. The switch to make the lights switch on and off at an interval of 10 seconds had to be custom made and was only finished on the day of the opening as the previous arrangement I had stopped working a few days earlier. It was all fairly hectic and a pretty big relief when it was over, still I was glad to make something which for once I did not cringe over (apart from the personal secrets revealed).
My friend Ben took the photos above and some pretty good photos from the night too, but there are a bunch up already here.
