OK humour me, yes this is a child's painting not in fact a Jackson Pollock. (Depsite the clearly way above average use of mass, movement, balance and confidence of colour)
However what I love most about this is the genius who is my toddler's key worker at nursery, who spent a long time on toddlerboy with this until she finally got the story out of him that what he has painted here is...... "daddy cooking beans in the sunshine"
And that is why I love good nursery staff!
The image, by the way, was one I found whilst trawling for something suitable. It reminds me of all the mixed emotions I had when pregnant, setting up my little one's room. The excitement and fear in equal amounts that has never gone away. (Although the cot has recently made way for a big boy's bed).
I've been very excited for quite a while about this year's Manchester International Festival. We're lucky to have such an incredibly ambitious and creative set of events just on our doorstep.
I bought tickets for It Felt Like a Kiss the day they came out, and am really looking forward to Jeremy Deller's Procession on July 5th.
And as if that weren't enough, this amazing woven badge of an invite dropped through my letterbox. I get a lot exhibition preview invites and don't make very many but there's no way on Earth I'm missing this one. Jeremey Deller (Turner Prize Winner whose work is actually interesting...), as part of Manchester International Festival, at my second home of Cornerhouse, with a textiles based invite? You betcha I'll be there! I'm quite intrigued too as to how you turn a live procession event into an exhibition. By the way you can be part of the Procession if you're quick - more *here*
Oh and whilst on full Festival excitement mode, I was caught out hook line and sinker by the marketing gimmicks and bought one of their bags made from the publicity banners, recycled into all sorts of designs.
My little one is two. A proper person. And a food allergy so only home made cakes for this one, which is no bad thing, especially given how much I love baking. Happy Birthday my little man.
I was in Orkney at the tippy top of Scotland last week. It was a wonderful relaxing break. Whilst there I visited the much hyped Pier Arts Centre to see if all the fuss was justified.
It was an absolutely stunning building, once the office and store for the Hudson Bay Company, recently extended and reopened with sympathetic but iconic architecture. Inside hung temporary exhibitions on the ground floor, and on the first floor, the permanent collection of modern British art (think Barbara Hepworth and the St Ives school of art). I came away wowed and utterly in love.
And then as I mulled it over some more I realised I hadn't seen any evidence anywhere of people actually engaging with the work. In many galleries now (and in many I've worked in myself) there are family activities, family corners, 'interactives' (i.e. hands-on stuff to do that are permanent parts of a particular exhibition), signs of projects with young people or community groups that took place and have been incorporated into the exhibition design...
But there was none of this on show. A flaw I thought, so went back to see if I'd missed something. And looking round again it seemed I had. I noticed, upstairs in the permanent collection, something I'd seen so many galleries say they do but really don't. Hang art for children. What this usually turns out to be is art picked because the curator thinks it will appeal to children, sometimes assisted by the Education Officer (in more forward thinking places anyway). It might have bright colours or patterns, or some kind of humour. But invariably it's hung at standard gallery level - eye level of a 5'6"ish adult, or just above.
Pier Arts Centre has turned some potentially problematic architecture to its advantage - small low level walls with big chunky windows have been used because of, rather than in spite of, their scale, to show valuable, historic, original pieces of work at all levels. Some only a few inches off the ground. Several times I sat down cross legged on the floor to look more closely at favourite pieces like the one below.
Stooping, crouching, kneeling and crawling seemed by far the best way to explore the work in all its finery. A much more integrated and authentic approach to making galleries more accessible to children than simply selecting the jolly stuff and hoping for the best.
(And for anyone wondering, yes it was accessible to people with mobility related disabilities too, I checked that out having had the same thought whilst I was there).
It was a great way to revisit and rethink the way I work with galleries in the future.
It's a tough call which I love more, words or pictures. They both do such wonderful and different things and really my life revolves around both, when I'm at work and when I'm at play.
So it seems appropriate to give a little shout out here to my friend MyTarPit and his new project. For the past year he's been sneaking mini street art drops here there and everywhere across the world. And now you can get one, he'll just send it to you without you even having to leave the house. For the small price of just... 200 words! Yes that's right 200 of your finest handcrafted words. Genius. Now that's what I call affordable art.
Find out more on his 200 words blog
I'm running some workshops this summer for the first time in a long time. Mainly because I just haven't had any free time. But now I've freed some up I can do a bit more of this sort of thing occassionally. So I've been playing around with some ideas with paper. I'm liking how it's going. More on the workshops in a few weeks in case you happen to be around Manchester(ish) and fancy coming along...
This year things are changing for me workwise. It's a lot to adapt to but I'm liking it and changes were needed.
Two-ish years ago I pondered an office space instead of working from home all the time. Then a certain little tot came along and there was no work at all for a while.
Now I'm back up to full steam and that homeless cat still pops round to be fed, there's more washing than ever to be done, the garden is so tempting... so a little bolthole to work in seemed like a good thing to help me focus on work in work time, and make more time for home the rest of the time.
That's my spot with the laptop and cereal bowl!
Luckily a good friend stepped in and offered me the very thing, a desk in her shared office with four other freelancers. It's perfect and I love it. A great desk, high ceilings, tons of daylight streaming in (when it's not raining anyway). It's great being with other people who work for themselves - no-one watches your clock, we love stopping for the little chats we'd never have working alone at home, someone brings in cakes from time to time and even better, we sometimes bring in new contracts because we can work on them together so the productivity goes up too.
Of course there is another bonus... I have a whole new excuse for buying more stationery, furniture and desk accessories. Here's my favourite spot with a few of my prize finds...
A stunning intage lamp which makes me feel like I'm a 1930s detective - from HisforHome (who luckily works down the road from me and delivery included a cuppa and some soup); calendar free to download from mibo; owl pencil pot from fruityflypie. The collection will grow in time, it's early days.
Next task in re-organising my work is to update my work website. I've made a start, I'll let you know when it's done. Given that it took two years to find an office, don't hold your breath! Oh and there's the small matter of a newish part time job but that can wait for another day...
Now that I've freed up a bit more 'me time' I've been catching up with my etsy shop. Taking new photos, renewing expired items, listing new things. As I was glancing through the shop to see which of the newly listed items people were looking at I remembered the marvellous Heartomatic tool which churns some glorious stats out for etsy sellers.
In my freelance work one of the things I do a lot of is evaluation so I do place quite a lot of faith in stats. I know they're only part of the picture but they can be a useful starting place to decide where to look in more detail.
So I started looking through the heartomatic list to try and work out which items are most popular. And here's where stats get tricky - you can pretty much use them to demonstrate any theory you like, which is not so helpful when you need a clear result.
For example - are my most popular items the ones with the most views? or the ones which most people have marked as a favourite? Or the ones which take the least number of views to mark as a favourite? I'm sure there must be other ways to cut this up too so you can see my confusion.
I don't know what the answer is so for now I'm pitching in the middle and looking at which take the least number of views to end up as the highest number of favourites. Still with me? So that's what you're looking at in these pictures.
All that having been said, it still doesn't tell me why these are more popular. Is it that the images are good? the pricing's right? they hit a trend at the right time? No idea. Yet still I feel the heartomatic is incredibly useful, perhaps one day I'll figure out why!
Stats:
