Foreword

After several years of mothering, working, experimenting, thinking, positioning, surviving, tolerating, imagining, comparing, grooming, conceptualising, sighing, building, caring, bruising, bristling, drawing and driving forward, the artist is now ready to show a visually arresting build-up of a body of work, still gathering pace and substance, and sure of what it is. For years the artist has been working away like this - not so much in the background as away from the instant gratification of constant public feedback - and now it seems she is more than ready for the next step. A greater confidence in the work is apparent. Not just in terms of its execution but also in terms of the idea behind the execution. The work is as finely tuned now as anything done by the artist ever before, and it is more than refreshing to see an artist spend time developing a body of work, and not just intoxicated by the world of one-liner ideas executed by others which is so prevalent in the art world today. As mentioned, the artist is preparing for the visit of a gallery. She is feeling calm and unfussy. The concept is as sound as the need for a show is profound. Forward she goes.

Travel as an art in itself

I received a reply today from a friend who lives across the ocean. He had been on his travels and was on his way back home. There was something of the quietude of the desert in his words, however briefly were they put. There is something about travel, I was also thinking, after closing down his message, that opens the mind in a way nothing else can. Well, maybe nothing other than art, good art, that is, religion, for all I know, and enlightened bereavement. The spirit of adventure after all is rather like the spirit of the artist. At least in my book. One thing however that I do not have much in common with this artist, the artist of the blog, is that she did not as a young woman maybe do quite as much travelling at that age as I did, and instead journeyed into and through and with her work. While I was spitting sand from my mouth, she was cracking pastel sticks and inching back towards the paper again with a pencil in her mouth. While I was experiencing the runs in stupefyingly hot third world outhouses, she was working on her craft. While I was wasting time, but never the moment, she was getting better and better at what she now does so exquisitely. One time when she made up for this relative reticence on the travel front was when she flew alone to see her sister on the other side of the world. I was working on an eccentric and only very marginally ground-breaking project involving cyber-scanned heads and facial motion capture, and I was at the time, to be frank, knackered. It was like our roles had been reversed. I would collapse at night, exhausted, thinking of this person I knew getting up and starting their day at exactly the same time. While she gorged on spontaneous travel, I was chipping away in my own way at the craggy face of capitalism. No, there is a kind of epic space lurking in everyone's psyche I believe, one which maybe only through travel can be recognised in terms of scale for the epic space it is. I hate to sound pious but we live increasingly in a culture of unexpanding horizons. We delude ourselves that through globalisation we are experiencing a kind of worldliness, togetherness, but we are not. We are growing smaller and smaller as individuals and not just as a people. Even our networks and newspapers are too frightened now to have a point of view, presumably for fear of alienating half their viewers or readers. No, I imagine my friend returning home from the rumours of sand feels a bigger man than when he left. It's how I imagine the artist wants people to feel after looking at her new body of work. Mind-opened and not just open-minded.