So every time I get selected for a London exhibition I am elated. The Discerning Eye at the Mall Galleries was one of the highlights of 2019. I went down to the exhibition with Patrick early on the Thursday of the Artists' PV. Parker Harris had already contacted me to tell me that I had sold my opened book, We Know that Light. I hadn't know there was PV before the PV...Because of GDPR, I will probably never know who bought the piece so I won't be able to imagine it in the future, but of course I was delighted.
What was equally exciting was finding that Kwame Kwei-Armah had chosen my piece for his wall. You can find out more about Kwame here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Kwei-Armah
I loved the way he curated his part of the space and felt he told a story with his choices.
I barely spoke to anyone at the PV, which is not my usual way, but earlier in the day I met a few people who stopped and looked intently at my drawing. I saw lots of engagement with it, which was fun. Part of the reason I didn't speak to much of anyone except a fellow artist, Cathy Cooper, (who I'd met at the drop off and whose work was in Gill Button's selection), was because there was a fire alarm and not a practice… so we all had to file out and wait until they discovered that it had been triggered by someone vaping in the toilet.
On the train going back I read Kwame's comments in the exhibition booklet:
This Thursday I went back to see the show another time. I wanted to look at Kwame's wall in particular and to think about what in my work made Kwame choose it. There were still plenty of people visiting, but I did manage to find a lull to take photos of Kwame's wall.
I noticed the breadth of Kwame's choices. There was the black and white wall which was beautiful in its quiet. It ranged from isolation to race and was strong and graphic.
To the left of the B & W grouping, and what felt like the middle of the wall, Helen Stone's One of Many, an evocative tactile sculpture, a child's jacket with tags spoke to me of how we won't share our world with everyone. Below the jacket, three beautiful paintings of people from the asylum.
To the left, Kwame has chosen lots of people, juxtaposed to spaces. Skin, faces, expressive, Brexit, the people we share the world with, a beautiful world, a barren world, a built up world, a broken down world.
A pair of shoes, abstracted colour , an internal landscape...
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| my work 4th from left |
Perhaps Kwame chose my piece because of the colour, the view and the title which seems to admit that we all share the experience of living with all the inhabitants of the earth. And man, isn't that light amazing!
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