The one with Bobby Sands…
It’s a nice feeling to wake up and see in the distance a barge slowly meandering its way along the Thames. As in the foreground on a balcony, 13 floors in the air, a potted plant struggles to maintain its composure in a wind that blows unseen against a golden early morning sky.
The surround sound of sirens of saviour or impending incarceration come and go in this corner of the city and then are overlapped by tube trains that run free from the shackles of their darkened tunnels in the cold East End air of a Friday morning after the night before.
On Thursday night I had the private view of my show at the Unit 2 Gallery. It’s a strange feeling watching people look at your work. Watching them pause and look intently at what you had paused intently to see sometime ago in a different life. Hoping that they see what you saw or at the very least feel something from this engagement. Some people stand there and look in search for meaning…or at least a meaning that gets them out of the cold…and others march around glancing momentarily at each image in the blink of an eye before leaving your images far behind.
Private views are experiences that begin with fears of failure – will anyone actually turn up? And more often or not end in the warm fuzziness that comes with the soma of free booze and the company of friends who you know would support you even if your work resembled an IRA dirty protest.
Well, the morning after feeling comes and then goes and you realise that your brief moment in the sun has gone. Strangers will still come and look at your photographs on the wall whilst you are elsewhere but soon they will be taken down again. Wrapped carefully and then put once more into packing crates for storage whilst you search earnestly for another opportunity to give them the light of day and another chance for them to be made real again.
