After many false starts, explorations. experimentations and near breakdowns… we got there. It was another wild ride on the runaway bus that is the Handshake Project, and this one- Handshake7, was almost the one that broke the camels back. Overlapping with the tail end of Handshake6 was not ideal, but hey; never one to turn down an opportunity I applied and leapt on in. over the year we were pushed along through a great range of exercises by the indefatigable Estela Saez. She wasn’t too impressed by the workmanship on my first completed piece and that was a wake up call to get my shit together. Unfortunately it didn’t get any easier as I struggled to find my way once ‘cut loose’ as we began working independently towards our own final projects. So many explorations opened up new possibilities for my practice, but outside of the framework provided by the exercises I found myself a little lost as to how to proceed. Hence I turned up to our first presentations to Katharina Dettar with a whole lot of possible routes but zero to show in terms of development since the end of Estela’s workshops. I was in desperate need of advice and guidance….
Katharina’s mode of engagement was (thankfully) very reassuring. Estela’s energy drives you on to break through and try new things, but at this stage Katharina’s quiet encouragement and suggestions were the perfect antidote to my very real anxieties and considerations of dropping out.
Henceforth it was all go again and a new body of work quickly took shape.in many ways it was a further departure from all that I had done over the year, but at the same time, could not have come without that sequence of previous work.
Perhaps most importantly, HS7 galvanised belief in my own practice- my own ways of working, thinking, making. While workshops will always provide opportunities to think and make in new ways, rather than feeling pressured to then develop these on their own terms, I now realise it’s possible to instead absorb those experiences, which will inform you in ongoing ways without have to force them. Just do what feels right and comes naturally in the moment- that is always where the best work comes from.
My final series of work, ‘Berlin Imagined’ comprised 3 aluminium brooches, a couple of postcards and a fold out poster. My artist statement on this work follows below-
A tribute to my time mentored by Berlin based artist Gabi Schillig, Berlin Imagined reflects upon our many online conversations between early 2020 and mid 2022. Conversations framed by the borders around our screens, our cameras offered glimpses into each other’s worlds, lives and spaces. Divided by distance, and yet to meet ‘irl’ each of us is yet to set foot in the other’s city.
The works in this series continue my explorations for how we understand urban space. Zoom links meld time and space, virtual portals into faraway places the imagination attempts to visualise. Berlin, the city, becomes like one of those described in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities- a myth, a dream, a fable.
I borrow from vintage Berlin maps, colour coded neighbourhoods informing the size and shape of aluminium brooches, as well as their palette. Cutouts reference parks and public spaces, (and the cut map works of Sol LeWitt)- some real, some imagined, but all spaces displaced and reconfigured. Upon these shapes the features of the Berlin maps are recreated, yet again, local residents may be unnerved- the topology of the shapes at odds with the layout of the streets that overlay them. In some instances streets are simply skewed, rotated off their ‘physical’ moorings. In others neighbourhoods and their forms are at complete odds
These works return to previously considerations of maps as deficient representations of physical space, here transformed into objects that conform with the notion of space (and place) as essentially unknowable beyond embodied experience. Yet additionally, these pieces also stand for the fictions of my imagination, a city of immense history- a history known, misknown, unknown…. A city often imagined, but yet to be visited.