Tag Archives: My Art

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Kirsty Hall - The Diary Project, envelope drawing

DP 211, originally uploaded by kmhlamia.

I've just finished a mammoth Diary Project update and it's all up to date again. This is my favourite envelope out of the 9 I've just scanned.

For those of you who haven't checked out the rest of my site and seen the 'work in progress' section, The Diary Project is a year long art project where I'm drawing on the back of an envelope every single day for 2007. The envelope is then filled with something secret and posted back to myself before my daily midnight deadline. Hopefully next year, I'll get an exhibition where all the envelopes can be shown altogether and people will be able to open them and investigate the contents. It's like a very, very slow form of blogging! If you happen to know a gallery who might be interested in showing the work, please let me know: I need to start organising that part soon and any useful suggestions or contacts would be very welcome.

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I first came across Solveigh Gott's excellent textile work when I showed one of her knitted pieces in the Knit1, Build 1 exhibition at the Here Gallery two years ago.

I'm a big fan of her project, The Textile Files. It's a simple but very evocative project: she collects bits of fabric, attaches them to a file card and then blogs the picture with a piece of related text. I was just checking her blog and saw this picture of pins, which immediately got me excited.

Solveigh Gott - The Textile Files
Solveigh Gott: Pins from The Textile Files

I started reading the text and thought "hey great, someone else is working with pins!" - and then promptly realised that the reason the text sounded so familiar was because it was written by me! Yep, she was quoting text from this very website - thanks, for the mention, Solveigh, I'm very flattered to have been included in The Textile Files.

But really, fancy not recognising my own writing - I am such a doofus sometimes! Still, it's not quite as bad as the time I started reading a list of livejournal interests and thought "wow, this sounds like someone I would get on with, I should friend them" before realising that I'd accidentally backpaged and was reading my own interest list. Still, I suppose it's positive that I instantly liked myself...

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I like to listen to podcasts while I work. I can't read, write or do anything too complicated whilst I listen but I do often scan and edit photos, knit or work on pieces of art that require fingers and time but not too much thinking. Quite a lot of Pelt - the latest pin piece - has been done to the accompaniment of podcasts.

Kirsty Hall - art, Pelt, Pin Sculpture
Kirsty Hall: Pelt, April 2007

Pelt in progress - photographed in April, back when the weather was nice enough that I could make art out in the garden, sigh.

One of my favourite creativity podcasts is Craftcast by Alison Lee. I just listened to the episode with arts business coach, Bruce Baker. I laughed out loud in several places when he touched on issues that have been repeatedly coming up for me recently. I love when the Universe gives you really obvious messages like this. OK Universe, I get it, I'm meant to be thinking about money, selling and learning to give up control of the bits that I'm not so good at!

As I say, I'd already been thinking about these things and I feel that I'm making some pretty big internal leaps in relation to how I feel about my art practice. For example, getting the website up has been a big thing: after years of failed attempts and dithering, I finally recognised that I needed to employ someone to design it or it just wasn't going to happen.

In a similar vein, I recently joined the Spike Island Associates Programme as a way of networking with other artists and overcoming the invariable isolation that comes with having a studio at home. I went to a private view there on Friday and then to an interesting talk yesterday by Lucy Skaer & Rosalind Nashashibi, who'd collaborated on a film together. The bit where they were talking about getting permission to film in the Metropolitan Museum in New York particularly resonated with me and it forcibly struck me last night that I'm now in the position where I should also be applying for funding and working with institutions who can give me more support than I've had previously. I suddenly feel that I'm ready for that and I know that my work is too. Inevitably perhaps, my own perception of my success as an artist is as much about these sudden internal jumps in confidence, as it is about external markers of success.