The hard part is starting. I’ve committed to creating another gallery project, but this time a more personal and intimate affair. I will be committing myself and my family to living with art for the duration of this project and I aim to respond to it in some way. I will certainly be interacting with it on a daily basis as I have installed the work throughout the house.

So where to start? Some would say at the beginning, but I was drawn to Katrina Palmer’s magnum opus, End Matter as it starts at the end, which is kind of where I am beginning. Katrina’s work aimed to create a text entirely made up of end matter beginning with an outro rather than an intro, with the body filled with epilogues, appendices and postscripts. I don’t intend to write about art in the boring and stilted way that we are used to in the gallery press release, I commissioned enough of that nonsense for my own gallery. What I want to get back to is that core of writing that I made myself when I was the only one writing press releases at MOT. Being an artist I wasn’t interested in art historical or critical text, I just free-formed and created narratives around what I experienced, at their best they were something and anyone who came to those early exhibitions in the 2000’s might remember them. I missed that interaction with the work and so this project aims to be purely idiosyncratic in its approach.

The idea is to just keep adding text, which I guess is like a blog, sometimes it may have nothing to do with the work, but through my immersion in the work it will somehow be infused with it. I wake up to it and I write in front of it, I pass it on the way to take a shit. I cook and eat with it sitting behind me. Dark and slightly depressing black and white photographs of quarries and portland stone populate the fringes of my vision on a daily basis. An inventory of remnants of an installation is etched upon my living room wall and occasionally Katrina’s voice imparts it’s fragile tones telling of loss adjusters and a grave digger who is condemned to push his barrow full of stone around the island of Portland. Throughout, the writer in her self imposed exile haunts me across time and space and I become implicit in her tales of the quarryman’s daughters. I lose all sense of realities as fiction and history meld together in this incredible work. This is her large glass and I can’t help parallel thinking, Her loss adjusters become the bachelors and the daughters her bride.

I will come clean, I intended to write daily, but this project has already started, I have been living with it for 3 months already. This is a slow gallery and I am a slow writer or at least slow to start and I wanted to start before the structure of the gallery and website was built. I have been writing in a journal, returning to the analogue and I had intended to transcribe from that, but as I write this I have changed my mind. I have to get this to a web designer today or this site will never go live and I will be forever procrastinating about how to launch this new project. Today is the deadline and so you get today, with maybe a slight delay. In some way this seems in tune with Katrina’s work. It infects you rather than confronts you, there is no escaping it, you can’t just get it in a few minutes it demands your time and is better for it.

Well I think that will do for now, you can find out more on the Art Angel website here if you want to listen to the sound elements of the work and get the official art-speak version. If you are interested in discovering my journey through the work tune in here every so often…