Grimsby Minster

A piece of my work, Contraption, is being shown next Friday 18th March at GrimsbyLightworks mulitmedia festival. I'm really pleased this piece is being shown again - I have shown it before as an installation, and this time it is the video, Sadly I won't be able to go for the evening, so will hope for any documentation, etc, to be sent on to me. Grimsby Minster sounds like a perfect place to show such work - a lovely big old church full of atmosphere and history.

lightworks

It's so important to see work in exhibition settings - to see it play live in front of an audience - you get to experience it yourself in a whole new way, and when people enjoy it or get something from it - there's absolutely nothing like that. An artist friend of mine says it's like a drug, you just want more, and he's right. It is especially gratifying and amazing to anonymously witness a viewer experience a piece of work - to see people moved or taken by something you have created, with no reference to yourself, without your intervention or explaining, is the ultimate. Sometimes if that viewer then finds out you are the artist, they will tell you something about your own work you maybe had never thought before.

I've had all sorts of experiences like this - some people are convinced of their own view of the work, insisting that the piece is very political, or industrial, or feminist or something else. Those aspects may well be there, and probably are in shades, but I always try to graciously accept a different interpretation. After all, everyone walks in off the street with their own thoughts and their own issues, and although I do alot of thinking through and subtle directing in my work, my intention is not to impose my thought. I am offering my view, my take. It can be wonderful to look at the world through different eyes, to read it in a novel, to hear it through a symphony, to relive it in a film. A piece of art can be like a lens you borrow, making aspects visible, understandable, that you bring back to your own outlook.


13th March 2011