inProgress

So, the QR code thing worked and brought you here? Good… I think.

I’m in this show because I do support work at the art school and my job this year has been working with a number of the students in this show. I can’t name them, but it’s an honour to be able to show my work beside them.

Some of the work on the wall (the three on each side of the centre) has been previously shown at an exhibition called Sgôr, which was part of the Wal Goch Festival. They’re some of the early photographs from my project about Wrexham AFC called “I Can’t Help Falling in Love With You” which has been going on for around a decade now. It’s probably what I’m most well known for since I become a Disney Princess last year after appearing on Welcome to Wrexham.

The piece in the middle was produced using a photocopier, some scissors, a bit of tape, and a red Posca pen. It’s rough. It’s messy. It’s the beginning of something… or perhaps a return to it?

The work about the club, whilst a big passion of mine, has started to feel like a weight round my neck and a limit to my creativity. I’ve felt trapped at times, and like the project has become something bigger than I wanted it to be. I’m not ungrateful for where it’s taken me, but each step I take forwards felt like a step further away from who I was when I was studying Fine Art. I allowed the work to continue on without giving myself time to stop and think, and not questioning if the output is really what I want to be the focus of my making.

Returning to using a photocopier, to using cheap materials, and to just being as simple and DIY as possible woke something up in me again. In doing so I realised I wasn’t stepping further away from who I was, that person is always inside me, I’d just not opened that door in myself for a while.

Pushing these pieces together, displaying them publicly, writing this… it’s the best way for me to take the project that is already in progress, and to slam it back together with the way I used to make as a teenager all those years ago. It’s a way of opening that door again.

Also, I think it’s a really important thing for students, and everybody else to know that those of us who are ‘artists’, who deal in ‘finished’ pieces and ‘professional’ work… we don’t always know what we’re doing, we are full of the same doubts as you… we just hide it better, and we shouldn’t.