I haven't had time to update since the event; every spare chance I had got taken up by every other part of life so, I do apologise, but this will hopefully make up for it!
The day it's self was incredible, there was so much going on and so much to take part in (although, typical me, I watched from afar) and it was great to see so many people trying out things in celebration of the day.
The day was split over 3 sites, Post Modern Gallery (Artsite), The Number Nine Gallery and the Central Library. Each venue hosted different events and workshops - for example, Indian Dance, Outset business guidance talks, vocal workshops, dance performances, origami workshops, creative journal-ing talks (which I missed and was really gutted about!) and so much more. The most humbling part was, of course, taking part in the exhibition that was held throughout the day.
The exhibition was called "We See You" and featured 8 local female artists from across Swindon.
You can find the bio's and examples of the work exhibited, along with the work and bio of the mastermind herself, Karen - here.
The work produced for the exhibition ranged from concrete sculptures to monoprints, woven textiles to pages from a sketchbook and each piece was like a window into the lives of each woman who produced it.
When I met with Karen before the exhibition, she asked me a question - "Why don't you see many full time female artists?"
As I was looking at the work for the exhibition, and reading the biographies of my fellow exhibitors, this question kept popping into my head.
Many of the women had families, be it young children, children who are now grown adults, mothers/fathers to care for, brothers/sisters who play a big part in their lives, or extended family whom they are close with.
They also had jobs, full time or part time, but still; they had jobs that took up the bulk of their time.
They also had homes to take care of, mouths to feed, bodies to clothe and perhaps little heads to put to rest each night.
All these women still managed to find time to create art, to find inspiration in life and create something amazing. It seemed, though, that art could never be something more than a hobby in the lives of these women, because they simply had too much going on in life to put aside for art. As I was walking around, I was trying to think of ways in which these women could be full-time artists, but simply, there wasn't enough time. In life, there wasn't enough time. I guess, society says that a woman can have a career, but they need to schedule time in for starting a family, and getting married, and once that's done everything else gets put on the back burner. You always hear people say to expectant mothers "You'll have to enjoy that now, you won't have time for it when the little one comes along!"
This exhibition was a fantastic example that women can still have time for art, whether it be a career or a hobby, and we can still produce amazing work, and we can still do everything else that life asks us to do too. A little middle finger to societies expectations of women. It made me very proud; I can work full time (doing shift work too, even more awkward for time management!), I can still have a social life, I can still sit in my underwear and spend the day watching Netflix AND I can still create amazing art and show it to the world.
I took some pictures of the artwork displayed for you all to see:
Find the images on my Flickr, just click here!
Please, go look at the small biographies Karen wrote up about these amazing women so gain some more insight into their pieces of art, some of the stories are incredibly heartwarming and some a little heartbreaking. Again, you can find them - here.
Taking part in the exhibition was a freeing experience for me - I'd willingly put my work out there for anyone and everyone to view, and I couldn't choose who to show or who to hide it from. It felt very liberating not having that option, I couldn't hide away in the corner like I would usually. It was there, out in the open, in all it's sketchy glory. I spent quite a lot of the day people watching - but people watching in the sense that I was watching people's reactions to my art. The artwork was put up in an anonymous sense, we had the small biographies pinned up by the door with descriptions of our work and a personal image, but if you didn't stop to look at that, the artwork could have been anyone's.
I banked on the fact that people hadn't clocked the bio's and just listened in on the general thoughts of people whilst they looked at it. Overall, the feedback was great. People seemed to relate to the images and the little comments I'd annotated on the sheet, and quite a bit of laughter as well. Although, as my Grandfather pointed out - the use of language is questionable.
(Sorry Gramps, but swearing is part of my vocabulary I'm afraid...)
I took some close up images of my artwork to show, trying to capture the detail and comments AND get the whole A1 sheet in a picture was impossible to do.
Most of the images on the sheet are show below, in this lovely little slideshow I spend HOURS messing around with so my blog looked all spangly and technological.
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