Kirsty Hall  |  Artist & purveyor of mad obsessive projects

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find out all that much about Dutch artist, Anita Groener but I like the way her work alternates between spareness and complexity.

Anita Groener: Labyrinth IX

Anita Groener – Freeway

These two works form part of the Crossing series. Over the space of three years Groener drove about 12,000 kilometers between The Netherlands (her homeland) and Ireland (her adopted country) and these regular road trips became a huge influence on her studio practice. She describes this series in the following way:

The verb Crossing signifies movement, a movement which is not uniform but which is drawn back and forth. In my drawings I try to capture the delineation of movements of thought processes occurring in space and time, between here and there, between the point of departure and arrival. The journey of the line marks the surface turning it into visual patterns. What you see is a physical manifestation of the layers of routes and directions taken in this process, revealing its manifold meanings.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find out all that much about Dutch artist, Anita Groener but I like the way her work alternates between spareness and complexity. Anita Groener: Labyrinth IX Anita Groener - Freeway These two works form part of the Crossing series. Over the space of three years Groener drove about 12,000 kilometers between ...

I’ve found so many stories and links that I’d slung into the folders on my desktop, that the only way to get through them is to do a bit of a round-up. Maybe I’ll make this a weekly feature since I always seem to find far more than will comfortably fit into my regular blogging schedule.

Links

Nick from The Boat Lullabies blog found a fascinating photographic history in a thrift store.

Bob collects pencils – lots and lots of brand name pencils. Now, I like pencils as much as the next artist but this strikes even me as a tad odd. It is a well done site though – I like the regularity of the design and you know what, Bob’s right, these pencils are kind of beautiful when you see them all en masse.

Photographer Helga Steppan, organised all her belongings by colour – the results are stunning.

The Mega Penny Project is a handy way to visualise large numbers.

Such a clever idea – people who’ve matched their screensavers to the background behind their computer so that it looks as though their computer screen is transparent.

I adored this short animation called Hiccups 101 by Jessica Sances.

Craig Robinson has done a series of what he calls ‘lollipops’ – abstracted computer drawings of musicians and pop stars. I was fascinated by how little I needed to identify some of them. I listen to a lot of music on my computer but I don’t watch MTV particularly, so I was surprised at how often the names of musicians instantly popped into my head – even ones I’d never heard sing. Even when I couldn’t remember the name, I’d often still know who it was meant to be – I guess most of us are steeped in celebrity culture whether we want to be or not.

It’s not art related but this YouTube video of a small child trying to communicate something important to his increasingly giggly father makes me laugh hysterically every time I see it.

People

Regular commenter, Tina Mammoser from The Cycling Artist has a good post about avoiding scams which was inspired by this post by Alyson Stanfield.

Ulf Nawrot who did the post-it drawings that I linked to back in August, kindly sent the following clarification on his process:

All my post its were drawn while doing something else in an ad agency: phone calls, meetings, brainstormings-if you are looking close you will find lots of valuable information hidden on these notes like phone numbers, comments etc.-but you will also find my different states of mind, anger, distraction, making fun of people…the whole thing started subconscious like the swirls and ornaments a lot of people draw on desks and everything else in reach when they are doing phone calls.I have been collecting my post its since 1993 and at this point there must be around 25.000 of them.

25,000 of them – wow, way to go, Ulf!

I've found so many stories and links that I'd slung into the folders on my desktop, that the only way to get through them is to do a bit of a round-up. Maybe I'll make this a weekly feature since I always seem to find far more than will comfortably fit into my regular ...

I’ve been in a creative slump lately because I’ve been unwell. I just haven’t had the energy to do much of anything, let alone making art – although of course, I’m still doing my daily envelopes for The Diary Project. But overall, I’ve just been feeling totally blah about my work – it happens and I know it’ll pass but it’s still not a fun place to be in.

One of the few things that has been creatively exciting me lately is Camilla Engman’s Organized Collection group on Flickr.

So my art practice for the last few weeks has mostly involved collecting little object on the days when I’ve been able to get out and about and just taking simple photos of them on walls or paving stones. It’s small and it’s simple but at least it makes me feel as if I’m still doing something.

Kirsty Hall, found rubber bands, October 2007

Kirsty Hall, found rubber bands, October 2007

One of the things I noticed when I first started joining Flickr groups was how it made me see the world in different ways and how I stretched my photography a little bit because of it. I’d take different photos than usual because I’d think “hey, that would be a good shot for such-and-such a group”. If you’re feeling the need for a bit of a creative stretch, particularly in relation to your photography, then I’d recommend it.

And having said all that, I’m now going to take myself and my camera outside to the garden to see what I can find, before I need to go for yet another rest.

I've been in a creative slump lately because I've been unwell. I just haven't had the energy to do much of anything, let alone making art - although of course, I'm still doing my daily envelopes for The Diary Project. But overall, I've just been feeling totally blah about my work - it ...

1: Keep Something Back

You don’t have to share your whole process and every piece of art you make. It can be nourishing to keep a private sketchbook or make little test pieces that you don’t intend to share. I have a couple of sketchbooks that I don’t usually show to anyone. Apart from anything else, we all need a place where we feel emotionally free to make bad art without worrying about an audience!

2: Let Yourself Play

Remember what got you into art in the first place and take some time to reconnect with that joy. This can easily get forgotten when you’re a professional artist and bogged down in promotional activities and exhibition schedules, so make sure you also schedule some playing time. Taking classes in a different technique or trying out an exciting new art material can be a good way to access what Buddhists calls ‘beginner’s mind’, that wonderful state where everything is exciting and fresh.

3: Find A Balance

Balance your practice by finding forms that complement each other. For example, if your work takes a long time and involves long and complicated projects, then regularly doing little pieces that can be finished quickly is a good counterbalance. It helps you feel as though you really are getting stuff done. Artists have traditionally done this by using drawing as a complement to painting or sculpture but it’s not the only option, performance, photography, writing, music or another form can also fill that need for immediacy.

Conversely, if you tend to complete works quickly, taking on a longer, more involved project can be an interesting challenge. Working in series is often a way of doing this but maybe you can think of other more unusual ways.

4: Love Your Process

I’ve seen far too many people, particularly at art school, endlessly struggling with a medium or form that they just don’t enjoy. Why? Art is hard enough without handicapping yourself with a process that doesn’t excite you. You need a certain amount of joy to get through all the bits that you don’t like, so don’t lumber yourself with a form that just doesn’t do it for you – it’s not noble, it’s just masochistic!

5: Accept The Lows

Anyone who tells you that art is a wonderful, creative thing that always makes you happy is an idiot!

Annoyance, small bursts of depression and large doses of frustration are a normal part of the artistic process. It doesn’t mean that you’re no good, that you’re not cut out to be an artist or that you’re doing the wrong thing, it just means that you’re engaged with your work. Just make sure that you do have a deep core of love for your process – if you’re annoyed all the time then you probably need to reconsider your medium (see number 4).

In my experience, anger and frustration usually happen right before a breakthrough and it’s a sign that I need to stick with a piece – although if I’m throwing things around the studio and yelling, I tend to take a day off! Feeling low usually happens when I’ve just completed something big – I call it The Exhibition Blues – and it’s always a sign that I need to step away from art for a while to recharge my batteries, assess what I’ve just finished and get ready for the next piece.

6: Fill Up The Well

Art doesn’t form in a vacuum and it’s important to replenish your inspiration on a regular basis. Julia Cameron suggests regular Artist’s Dates, where you schedule inspirational treats for yourself and I’d totally agree. This could involve reading art books; going to the theatre or cinema; visiting art galleries or museums; taking photograph’s at a farmer’s market; going for a walk; taking a day trip or indulging in some new materials at the art shop – the key is that it should be something that nourishes and inspires you. If you’re starting to feel a bit stale or low, then try this.

7: Write It Down

Give your brain a helping hand and write down all your ideas, not just the ones that seem immediately good and relevant. You can always edit them later and you never know when a seemingly unimportant thought will develop into a larger project. I often think that I’ve come up with a brand new idea but invariably I’ll find a single sentence in an old notebook that was clearly the original spark. New art takes time to grow, at least several years in my experience. Writing things down is a way of planting your ideas and then letting them develop while you’re busy getting on with something else – I call this process ‘composting’.

The notebook that I keep by my bed is the most important of the 5 or 6 journals and sketchbooks that I use. I wouldn’t want to be without the other notebooks because they all serve different purposes but the majority of my ideas start out in that little bedside book.

Bed is apparently where I think best but it varies from person to person. I know someone who keeps a waterproof board and pencil in her bathroom because she gets her best ideas in the bath. Someone else I know writes ideas on the steamy doors of her shower cubicle and then dashes out to grab some paper before they evaporate! Work out where you think best and make absolutely sure that you keep a way of recording ideas there.

8: Make Art A Priority

You need to make a space for art in your life. If art isn’t a priority then it simply won’t get done and you’ll get to the end of another year wondering why you haven’t made any work.

I do know that it’s difficult: if you’re working another job to pay your bills or raising children, then finding time and energy to make art can be especially tough but you need to keep hold of the idea that you’re an artist, that it’s central to who you are and that you’re going to keep making work somehow.

You may need to work in the margins of the day – on your lunch break, on public transport, as you’re waiting for a meeting to start, while the kids are napping or when the rest of the household is asleep. When I worked in a hospital, I used to sketch the visitors to the canteen on my lunchbreak. I didn’t do it every day but I did it enough that it noticeably improved my drawing at a time when I had no access to life drawing classes. I know several writers who’ve written zines and even novels in spare minutes at work. Other artists find ways to incorporate their paid work into their art, perhaps by using it as the subject of their work.

It’s easy to think that you need vast swathes of time in order to be an artist but that’s not always the case: what you need is a steady and regular commitment. Yes, having lots of time can be great but it can also make you freeze. When I was at college I used to spend most of the day talking to people, pottering around the studio and drinking endless cups of tea and then in the last hour I’d finally get myself in gear and do some work. I’ve learnt that I tend to do much better with a limited amount of time and a deadline.

If you’ve got serious limitations to contend with, then another option is to temporarily alter your practice. If you can’t make sculpture because you don’t have the space, then maybe you can draw, if you can’t get access to printmaking equipment, then maybe you can do monoprints instead, if your oil paints are toxic to your toddler then switch to gouache. Don’t be afraid to explore the options – you’re an artist, you can surely come up with a creative solution.

When my son was small, I couldn’t even draw because if he woke up and threw me out of that creative zone, then I wanted to throw him out of the window! I decided this wasn’t an ideal frame of mind for parenting, so I switched to photography and writing – both forms I was able to pick up and put down much more easily – until he was older and I had more mental space. And let me tell you, I came out of that restricted period like a bat out of hell, I had so much stored up creative energy that it powered me for years.

9: Create A Supportive Space

It’s vital for artists to have support, particularly from the people that they live with. The importance of having people in your life who understand your need to make art can’t be overstated. They don’t need to like or understand your work, although it helps, but they do need to understand what it means to you.

Again, I know it isn’t always possible to have this support – you may be in an existing relationship with a partner who doesn’t quite get it or have a birth family who are firmly opposed to you being an artist. You can still make art in these circumstances but you’ll have to be prepared to fight your corner and that’s draining and takes energy away from your work. Sadly, I have noticed that people who end up quitting art often have families who undermine their choice to be an artist, either directly or more subtly.

I’m incredibly lucky, my family of choice are totally supportive – bemused sometimes, but always supportive. Of course, I say luck but really it was a choice – I put art at the centre of my life and deliberately picked people who support me. When I was single, the two fundamental things that anyone getting involved with me had to accept were:
1) I was a parent and my kid came first
2) I was an artist and I had no intention of giving that up for anyone.

It was always an absolute deal-breaker for me – I can be quite hard-nosed and selfish about my art when I have to be and I just wasn’t prepared to trade art for ‘love’.

10: Don’t Quit!

Ah, the most important tip of all!

David Bayles and Ted Orland talk extensively in Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking about the importance of not quitting and give a host of reasons why people do, plus ways to avoid it. It’s an excellent book and one that I reread most years – every artist should own a copy.

If you want to be an artist then quite simply you have to find ways to keep making art and not stop, no matter what life throws at you. Good luck! And don’t forgot to have a bit of fun along the way…

1: Keep Something Back You don't have to share your whole process and every piece of art you make. It can be nourishing to keep a private sketchbook or make little test pieces that you don't intend to share. I have a couple of sketchbooks that I don't usually show to anyone. Apart from anything ...

Last night, my son had his 15th birthday ‘sleepover’ (why do they call them sleepovers when no sleep ever happens?), so I was in nominal charge of 8 teenage boys. This morning, as my son and I cleared up the quite considerable mess, I found myself musing over the similarities between parenting and art.

Art is an everyday thing. Like parenting, it is made up of lots of little moments, a thousand little decisions and a hundred thousand moments of just showing up – what Alison Lee of Craftcast calls “getting your butt in the chair”.

Art is usually not the heroic struggle of Romanticism or the epic machismo of the 1950′s Action Painters, although those big dramatic moments do sometimes occur, most often in the run up to an exhibition. Instead art – for me at least – is rooted in the everyday; in the daily ritual of the Diary Project envelopes, in the way I sit in my computer chair listening to podcasts while I do another couple of rows on a Thread Drawing canvas, in the slowly changing pile of art books that are permanently in residence under my bed.

Although it is not usually about domesticity, my art is firmly rooted in the home. I am fortunate enough to have a studio at home and like Virginia Woolf, I recognise the importance of having a room of my own. However, my art also takes place in other rooms in the house: in the living room while I’m watching TV with my family, in my bed where I often draw, in our library/dining room where I sit at the big table and stick photos into my sketchbook, in my study as I make work in front of the computer, in the shower where I think up ideas, in the kitchen when I get distracted from cooking by the sudden overwhelming need to photograph the ingredients.

Art permeates my whole life – it isn’t confined to a set time or a set place.

In the myths about art, this everyday quality is often omitted. For some reason, it suits people to imagine dramatic moments of crazed genius, a life lived on the bohemian edge and a slow descent into madness, drugs and suicide. We seem to want our artists to be very different from everyone else. Perhaps the reality of getting your butt in the chair, like the daily grind and pleasure of parenting, seems too mundane to most people? Was this great art really made in front of the TV or with radio 4 playing in the background while the artist drank cups of tea and pottered around the studio – how dull! We wanted death threats and overdoses, tortured homosexual love affairs, rats and cockroaches in the studio, drunken pissing in the fireplace, body parts cut off and maybe a couple of tragic stabbings!

But art – like parenting – is not something you do once in one grand and shocking gesture and then never again. Instead, it’s a constant trickle, a constant reiteration that this tiny thing, this moment of awareness, this quiet, everyday dedication is the really important thing.

Last night, my son had his 15th birthday 'sleepover' (why do they call them sleepovers when no sleep ever happens?), so I was in nominal charge of 8 teenage boys. This morning, as my son and I cleared up the quite considerable mess, I found myself musing over the similarities between parenting and art. Art ...

Sheree Rensel commented on this post:

I totally agree with comments presented. I too realize that blogging is very beneficial for aspects related to motivation and building an audience. However, I want to know how blogging has helped your INCOME. How has blogging increased your sales or increased the money you get to support your art?
That is the topic for which I am REALLY interested.

Sheree Rensel: Blue

Ah Sheree, the answer to that would be ‘not at all’ since I’m not currently set up to make money off my art. I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that maybe I should try to make some money from my work but it’s something that I’m still internally struggling with. For a long time I believed that my work was completely unsaleable because of the fragile and often temporary nature of the things that I made. That’s no longer as true as it once was but I’m still trying to reprogramme my brain on this issue. I plan to write more about the issue of money and artists in the future.

That’s a long-winded way of saying that I’m probably not the best person to answer your question!

Fortunately, Katherine from Making A Mark left a long and detailed comment, some of which addressed this issue. I’m reprinting the relevant bits here:

Kirsty – I absolutely agree a blog should be for yourself. I personally am less on reading ‘commercial’ blogs where people are blogging for a business which is not their own or because they think it’s ‘what you have to do’ to sell art. These blogs often seem to run out of steam after a bit.

Blogs which just present work for sale (as one e-bay) are fine by me – but IMO they work so much better with a few details about why the artist chose to paint the picture…

…Re. last comment, here’s my observation. The people who appear to sell consistently using their blogs as part of their marketing are those who do good quality work. (By which I mean good quality work will find a buyer if you market effectively). What a blog maybe does for them is speed up the process of increasing awareness – and then once you’ve attracted people who like watching what you produce then you have a ready market of people who are more likely to buy.

I would agree with this, personally I prefer blogs where the artist is not solely focused on selling, although I have no objections to being gently reminded that they’ve updated their Etsy shop or that a particular piece is available in a commercial gallery. In fact, I definitely think that artists should do that, where applicable.

However, the artists who seem to have the most success online usually seem to take the long view. For example, Camilla Engman is an artist who’s had a lot of success online and she seems to have built up her sales in a gentle and organic way. She cultivates an audience for her work by having relationships with the readers of her chatty and informal blog and maintaining an active Flickr presence including starting a new group called Organised Collection recently. And of course, she makes excellent and consistent work that she offers at a range of prices from affordable calendars and prints to the more expensive original paintings.

Camilla Engman: Collection 2

Engman is a lovely example of how to operate as an artist in the offline world too. We had a show of her work at the Here Gallery and she included a couple of packs of her little prints as a thank-you gift for those of us who’d helped with the show. She’s the only artist I can recall who did something like this and it was certainly appreciated by those of us who unpacked and hung her show, since we were all volunteers and none of us were getting paid. Getting curators and gallery people on your side never hurts!

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I am also available for online consulting if you need one-on-one help.

Sheree Rensel commented on this post: I totally agree with comments presented. I too realize that blogging is very beneficial for aspects related to motivation and building an audience. However, I want to know how blogging has helped your INCOME. How has blogging increased your sales or increased the money you get to support your ...

Paul Catanese, Assistant Professor of New Media at San Francisco State University kindly sent me info about a panel on art blogging that he’s chairing at the College Art Association Conference in Dallas in February 2008.

He brings up some interesting questions in the panel blurb:

An explosion of new blogs from artists, collectors, galleries, residency programs and museums are reshaping notions of professional practice within the arts. Though promotion is certainly a major driver in this arena, sites such as Art.Blogging.LA, Walker Blogs, Art Fever and PORT are especially good at projecting a local arts scene into a broader context. Other models investigate blog as sketchbook, establishing a new format for the open atelier. Does art blogging indicate the emergence of a dislocated, yet thoroughly local arts scene? Can blogs shift the space of studio practice while retaining its capability to be unstructured? Is the quest for site traffic inherently at odds with healthy periods of gestation and dormancy? What models exist for balancing these forces? What are the implications for establishing or maintaining an art practice for those who remain virtually present, yet physically distant?

This jumped out at me: Is the quest for site traffic inherently at odds with healthy periods of gestation and dormancy? This is a particularly interesting question to me right now since I’m currently not at my best health-wise and I’m trying to balance regular updating here with a need for large amounts of sleep and cold medicine (could make for some funky blogging this week!) It’s great to see someone recognising that art practice does require these dormant periods where you’re cooking up new work and aren’t ready to talk about it yet and I can certainly see how that could make keeping a sketchbook type blog difficult. Indeed, I’ve noticed that it’s not uncommon for artists who’re doing a blog that’s focused on their own work to go a bit quiet on occasion.

Anyway, if you’re interested, Paul’s currently looking for panel members and the deadline for abstracts is the November 9, 2007.

Paul Catanese, Assistant Professor of New Media at San Francisco State University kindly sent me info about a panel on art blogging that he's chairing at the College Art Association Conference in Dallas in February 2008. He brings up some interesting questions in the panel blurb: An explosion of new blogs from artists, collectors, galleries, ...

Sorry about the lack of posts over the weekend, we had visitors and I just didn’t get a spare minute to update.

I’m a big fan of Tara Donovan’s art. I love the way she uses vast accumulations of objects like polystyrene cups, pins, sheets of glass and drinking straws to make dense, layered sculptures. She stacks the objects but then lets them find their own pattern and form.

Tara Donovan: Haze, 2003

I find the way her work refracts colour very interesting, she often uses translucent materials that become subtly coloured when layered in such large quantities. It seems to me that there’s something about the importance of revealing the hidden in her work.

Tara Donovan: Haze, detail, 2003

I must admit that I was envious when I saw her huge block of pins – although I just don’t work on that sort of scale, I love that she does. The pins aren’t held together with anything other than gravity and their own interlocking chaotic mass.

Tara Donovan: Untitled, 2001

If you want to read more about her work, there’s a good review here by Paul Brewer and an artnet interview with Donovan here.

Sorry about the odd formatting on a couple of the images in this post, I can’t work out why it’s doing that or how to fix it.

Sorry about the lack of posts over the weekend, we had visitors and I just didn't get a spare minute to update. I'm a big fan of Tara Donovan's art. I love the way she uses vast accumulations of objects like polystyrene cups, pins, sheets of glass and drinking straws to make dense, layered sculptures. ...

The Diary Project suffered its first real casualty recently when this envelope came back so mauled that the Royal Mail put it in a special ‘oh dear, we’re incredibly sorry’ plastic bag. Amazingly, the contents are still inside.

Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from the 10th September 2007

Kirsty Hall: plastic bag from the Royal Mail

I was totally thrilled, it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened so far!

The project blog is currently up to date until the 16th September and should be updated again over the weekend, although we have house guests this weekend so it might not happen until Monday. I’ve been a bit behind with it lately but I’m attempting to get back onto a regular schedule with updates. If I leave it too long it gets completely overwhelming.

I got an interesting email from someone a couple of weeks ago asking me why I post the letters to myself and not to another person. I won’t post their original letter because they haven’t responded to my request to do so but here’s an extract from my reply:

Why do I post the letters? Well, I like the sense of risk involved – the envelopes might get lost in the post or damaged. I’m a bit of a control freak so posting the letters is an interesting way for me to let go a bit. My work has always involved a certain amount of ‘letting nature take its course’ – in the past I’ve often made sculptures that rot, decay or slowly change. I like to open myself up to chaos a little because it challenges me and the posting does that. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the idea of journeys and I love the fact that the envelopes take these little journeys without me.

I wanted to send the envelopes to myself rather than someone else because I wanted to have them all to exhibit at the end of the year. Also, there’s just something very absurd about sending letters to yourself for a year and that aspect of the project makes me laugh. And on a completely mundane level, I absolutely love getting post and because of this project, I get a year’s worth of letters, which just delights me. I get a little bit excited every time a letter comes home safely.

Oh, and I think that posting the letters also stops me cheating. It’s a firm deadline – I absolutely have to get the letter in the postbox by midnight or I’ve failed for that day. It’s good to have that sense of ‘I must get this done’. I know that no one but me would know if I did the letter after midnight but somehow having to go out and post them keeps me honest about the project. I don’t know why, but somehow it works as an external control.

The Diary Project suffered its first real casualty recently when this envelope came back so mauled that the Royal Mail put it in a special 'oh dear, we're incredibly sorry' plastic bag. Amazingly, the contents are still inside. Kirsty Hall: Diary Project envelope from the 10th September 2007 Kirsty Hall: plastic bag from the ...

Artist Annie Vought meticulously cuts paper to make her beautiful and witty wall pieces. Her recent work has concentrated on writing, while previous work explored the human body through cut up anatomy drawings.

Annie Vought: To Do, 2006

As a compulsive list-maker, I just adore the absurdity of this piece – just think of the hours it must have taken to cut away the paper from something as transitory and throwaway as a to-do list. She’s clearly a woman after my own heart!

The use of shadows in these works interests me and I see obvious parallels with my own thread drawings where the shadows also work to complete the image. Unsurprisingly, it also delights me that she uses pins to attach the delicate cut paper to the wall.

Annie Vought: Slightly, 2006

Kirsty Hall: Thread drawing – work in progress

—-

Vought is also involved in a radical form of curating in public spaces through her involvement with the Budget Gallery.

The Budget Gallery is not in a specific place. We don’t have a building, so we’re beyond low-rent. We don’t even pay rent. We set up our gallery in co-opted public spaces like vacant walls and fences. The shows are carefully co-ordinated, prepared, and publicized. The pieces are displayed much like a traditional gallery. We paint walls white, install art works and labels. We announce openings that are attended by hundreds. Refreshments are served and one can often hear jazz playing in the background. Of course, this is no traditional gallery – it’s all taking place on the sidewalk. In the end it’s a blend of all the greatest things about attending an art show, a garage sale, and a block party rolled into one.

Check out their project rules:

1. We use underutilized public spaces for our exhibitions.
2. If work doesn’t sell at the opening, it stays, in public, unguarded, for at least 1 week.
3. After the opening the unguarded work is sold on the honor system.
4. All art work in our shows will be sold, stolen*, or vandalized** and we can not pre-determine the outcome.
5. Our commission is arbitrary, optional, and determined by the artist.

*Having a work stolen is the highest honor of the Budget Gallery because it means someone wanted the work so badly they were willing to abandon personal and societal mores to acquire your piece of art. In our eyes, this may be considered a more valuable compliment to you than a simple monetary transaction.

**We suggest you consider vandalism a form a collaboration.

I find that a fascinating concept but also very challenging: it certainly brings up a lot of issues around letting go of control.

How would you feel about your work being shown in these circumstances? Could you deal with it? Would it upset you to have your work stolen from an unguarded public wall? Would it upset you more to have it vandalised?

I think I would have to make work especially for that space, with those aims in mind because if my regular art was stolen or vandalised I’d be upset. I actually had my degree show vandalised and even though I’d known beforehand that it was a possibility because of the extreme delicacy of the piece, I still had to go and cry in the toilets for a while!

Artist Annie Vought meticulously cuts paper to make her beautiful and witty wall pieces. Her recent work has concentrated on writing, while previous work explored the human body through cut up anatomy drawings. Annie Vought: To Do, 2006 As a compulsive list-maker, I just adore the absurdity of this piece - just think of the hours ...