Looking back. Catching up. Just a few months behind.
October 2020, my partner and I drove down to Wellington, with jewellery, rolls of paper and other paraphernalia for our Handshake 6 ‘process’ show. It was magic to be on the open road, going somewhere.
We stopped off in New Plymouth, and Wanganui. Drank coffee, ate nice food, looked at whatever art or jewellery was open, caught up with friends and family.
It was busy in Wellington. I couldn’t believe there were so many people out and about. It felt very strange – as if there just wasn’t a pandemic. I felt like a traitor from Auckland, scanning my app carefully.
Aptly named ‘Signing In’ it felt like a whole year of confusion had been squeezed into this show. I had a lot of experiments in my studio, but not a lot of finished work…
Attai had encouraged me to give respect to each piece, aim for a certain level of finish and try and finish two necklaces well, write down my thoughts and all it’s issues, which I haven’t done. Yet. He discouraged me from using the footprints but our meeting came a little late because we had to set off the next day for the drive down country.
I made a necklace from my instagram collection of faces….and painted my shoe bottoms orange to show my process. Walk, collect, document, file, and eventually, make. My work looked flat on the kraft paper and I wished I had painted it black or white or something that worked with the hard fluoro of the plastic. So….next time, more prep! In and out of lockdown was challenging and because I work spontaneously, it’s difficult to know what I want until I actually know what I want and when you can’t buy what you want you have to make do.
It was lovely seeing nearly all of us HS6’ers. We set up as we had discussed in our Zoom meetings throughout the year. I was hugely intimidated by the level of process that I was showing with and recognised how difficult it had been for me to envisage this show at all.
