Photograph by Stu Allsopp
Understanding that there is a delay, is helping me somewhat. My recent diagnosis of autism means I am beginning to realise that there is sometimes a disconnect. It takes time to know what I’m feeling when activity steps up in intensity.
The past few weeks have been madly busy by anyone’s standards. I’ve brought my Spanish Civil War project, about British artist Felicia Browne, to a successful conclusion and it’s time to slow down a little. I can’t stop though as work comes in on the back of our events, mainly in the form of requests for talks which have to be written. I have to draw all the elements of the project together in a report and send in an evaluation to my funders. Tomorrow I will run a workshop which needed careful thought and a lot of equipment, including rather fine teas and coffee to keep us going. I have new projects on the horizon. But mainly my family need me back and my focus is returning.
I’ve had my moments of relaxation and brief snatches of joy. Taking my family to see the work last weekend was a high point among others.
Yet a sense of satisfaction is elusive – and I know that this is partly because some of the people I really wanted to see the work couldn’t make it. I think I have a right to feel sad about that. These particular people matter and the work matters. I have to wait and plot more showings, while knowing that this symbolic showing was special and can’t be repeated. Site specific work of this nature is temporal reminding us that everything is.
I’m sad mainly at how hard it is to make the work accessible to all the people I wish could see it – including those no longer with us. I seem to be glancing against a shard of grief like a broken bottle in the shallows. My work usually mitigates sadness – in honouring my father and my grandparents I actually feel more connected. But this time it’s different. The poignancy of the two project mama’s meeting one another at the exhibition when their now dead Spanish exile husbands were the connector was sometimes hard to bear, and I have a new work in the studio which features family photographs – it’s proving emotional.
I also want more people to know about Felicia – and I’m sad about that too. She deserves to be more remembered and for this I have to play the longer game and trust that this is just a beginning. We’ve had such a brilliant response to the work – now we need to find it a bigger stage.
I have to hold on to my original vision of bringing the history home as a symbolic act – and this being achieved in the most beautiful setting imaginable. In this and in all the wonderful responses to the work we have succeeded.
You can read all about the project here.
The other side 