The Show

It's crazy how time disappears- I feel like I don't even remember doing anything other than things for this MA show for the past 2 months. I don't remember eating, sleeping, or having time off. On the surface, it'd be easy to think, "Yeah, I just need make sure all my pieces are ready. Then I just have to show up, put my stuff in the gallery, and I'm ready". In reality, there was a ton to do to get the show ready: making the catalogue, advertising, organising the layout of the gallery, getting gifts for everyone who had helped us in the year.... then building our displays and setting up the gallery.

It's finally over now, though. Even though the show went up on 11th September, there still ended up being so many things that needed to be done while the show ran: watching the gallery, keeping the displays looking nice, showing people around the show, clearing out the studio, etc. We finally took the show down and cleared out the gallery on the 22nd and yesterday I enjoyed my first actual day off in ages. I celebrated by clearing out my email inbox and cleaning my room. I've always found that when I get really busy with projects my personal life ends up getting into a state of near chaos. I've never been one to have a super-tidy bedroom, but lately it's been an "absolute tip" [a wonderfully British way of describing a messy room!] lately. I've got no plans for this next week- I've had months to look forward to having a bit of time to get my life in order, and that's what I'll finally be doing! Answering a year's worth of emails (I've managed to get my inbox from 1500 emails to under 500), organising my kitchen, and cleaning my room are high on the list.

When a huge project has just finished, I think it can be extremely helpful to take a mental vacation from anything related to work for a bit. Sadly I've been unable to manage that yet. I'm relieved that the MA is over because there are so many ideas I want to try out that I wasn't able to while I was constrained to doing everything in a strict academic mindset. I've already got a new sketchbook filled with ideas and new things to try out.

So what happens next? The Birmingham City Council sponsors a programme called Design Space, which offers free studio space and business classes for artists who will commit to doing 30 hours a week of self-employed work in their chosen discipline. I applied for Design Space over the summer and got in- that starts on the 1st of October, so I'm really looking forward to that. Before I knew about Design Space I had already planned to devote at least 30 hours a week to my jewellery work anyway- I made so much progress during this past year and it would be a massive waste of my £10,000 tuition/fees to just walk away and not do anything else with it!

I've got a few shows coming up in the next year and have applied for a few more: I'll let you know about those as they come up. I've finally had a chance to post all the pieces from my MA collection on my crafthaus page, so please feel free to have a look and leave comments :)

I've also had a chance to give my website and crafthaus page a much-needed makeover: feel free to let me know what you think! I'm always happy to have comments and suggestions, especially for anything web-based, as I'm a self-taught amateur.

I'll leave you with a few pictures from the show: opening night was so much fun and it was great to see so many friends there! If you'd like to see the work that other people did for the show, you can check out the Making Treasure group here on crafthaus, or take a look at the group blog: http://makingtreasure.wordpress.com

A pre-show toast with our professor

My display

Display detail: I needed a way to show the back sides of the pieces as well as their fronts, so used a long sheet of mirror on the table top and suspended a sheet of clear perspex/acrylic over the mirror for the pieces to rest on