Exhibitions and some war news.

After painfully taking down the installation at the Bankley Gallery last weekend (photos here) I borrowed the Gallery's comments book and scanned in all the pages - the response was entirely positive but then people are often polite and generous on the surface (either that or I am actually totally amazing). 

Here they are:

It was very hard work putting it up and even harder to take down but the overall effect and impact of the work both on people and was certainly worth it.  The photos will definitely look good in my portfolio and I'll be able to submit ideas for similarly large scale projects to other galleries.  It's funny but I didn't really realise how well I'd achieved what I'd set out to do until about half an hour before I had to take it all down... then I got all teary eyed and nostalgic and wished I'd wandered about it a little more... this didn't last though because as soon as I started taking it down I realised how annoying it was going to be - so then I was thrown back into yet another evening of frustration. 

At the same time as this exhibition I have had some work in another exhibition running (which is still on now - until the 5th August) on 50 Beech Road in Chorlton at The Everyman Gallery which has two of my framed pieces for sale.  Feel free to drop by and have a look at everyone's work.

It's been good to have these two exhibitions because one was conceptual experiment widening my scope and creative ability and the other is more of a commercial venture where I can leave the business side of things in the hands of my lovely art dealer.  I wonder if in a few years this will all develop in some brilliant direction where I'll have enough reputation and money to actually not have to work in my day job anymore.  That's always been the dream, to make existence that little bit nicer and to be able to do what I like to do and put myself in a position where I don't have to do anything else.  I have some interesting ideas in my mind for future projects - smaller and larger scale, for a while I think I'm going to work on smaller scale ideas and explore narrative and bring something of myself into the abstraction because so far I've not really been saying anything except that there's nothing at all to be said and that under the surface the world is some kind of big, swirling, non-stop, chaotic and inescapable pool of everything.

When I focus on myself I know that I'm finite and that if I dig deep into the centre of myself to the very beginning there's actually nothing in there any more- like the foundations have all rotted away and they need replacing with steel supports so that I can put something beautiful inside - or maybe unearth something beautiful that's been buried under so many years of thick and constantly developing defence barriers.  Everything has been pooling outward trying to attain some sort of gainful permanent growth and building strategies to fight against the howling enemy.  My efforts for most of my adult life have been directed towards some kind of war against a faceless and bodiless enemy - who is still out there, and I'm not surrendering just yet - it's just that I have hidden resources and places to explore, nobody understands them yet, I need to understand them myself first.