16 November 2007

The Exhibition Opening

Saturday 10th November

A warm balmy evening at an art gallery in the centre of the city. People with glasses of wine spilling out onto the street, most conversations brief, shallow and awkwardly saccharine, an occasional moment of depth following a comment or a wink of an eye, an insecurity shared, a common feeling acknowledged.

It was Renate and Louise’s opening night, the one and only exhibition opening I’ll attend socially this year. Working in a tertiary art School for 10 years, I’ve gained a network of arty friends and acquaintances by a natural process of osmosis, some of them emerging artists, some unknowns, some despised, some highly regarded and some legendary in the counter-culture circles.

As a confirmed anti-social recluse, networking and socialising for me is like sipping on arsenic.

Yet how easily I can slip into real conversations with sculptors. They seem to think about things and express their creativity more organically – they think AROUND things, they explore the space which contains things, they’re experimenting outside the square. Their minds have that pliable quality that I’ve been finding in my practice lately. I tend to think of sculptors and 3D artists as the truly creative and misunderstood elite practitioners of the art world – not unlike Ashtangis in the yoga world.

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