Reading · Art, Design, Photography

March started off with participation in two shows. We held an exhibition at Worcester Arts Collective to coincide with International Women’s Day which was a really good show (even if I say so myself) with nine artists taking part and a variety of art forms.

‘Accelerate Equality’ was an engaging, multi-faceted art exhibition with a variety of art forms, including visual art (static and projected), sculpture, zines, and poetry.

I included three pieces, the context for the main piece read:

“Joe Jackson’s 1979 song ‘It's Different for Girls’ was reportedly written about love and relationships but the title of the song could so easily be applied to many aspects of gender inequality.

“This series of works consists snippets of song lyrics; coded, printed and pasted onto board in a manner akin to billboard adverts.

“Some songs pass us by like the transient nature of billboard ads, but when we connect with a particular song, whether through an attached memory or through the lyrics, it can have significance time and again throughout our lives.”

The second exhibition was an installation piece put together with fellow WAC resident artist Steph Green for the TUC event ‘Remembering struggles – Celebrating achievement – Fighting for change’ for International Women’s Day at The Guildhall, Worcester.

(Note to self and general advice: don’t agree to take part in two exhibitions where dates overlap and installation/set up/take down are required…)

We created an installation of work which weaves together historical photography from street protests spanning over a century, from the 1912 Suffragette movement to contemporary demonstrations. This historical perspective is juxtaposed with an examination of recent updates to the Right to Protest and the Public Order Act 2023, which significantly limits protest. At its core, the piece interrogates the impact of these restrictions, posing the question: ‘How can we ever achieve equality if our voices are silenced?’ More photos of the installation and info is now on my website.

‘How can we ever achieve equality if our voices are silenced?’

I haven’t done any coding of note this month but I did discover that my printer will print on custom sized paper, a maximum of A3+ wide and around 70cm long. So I had a play around with one of my test 1984 text pieces based on the circles that I started back in December.

The circles didn’t really work when printed – too much whitespace and not definite enough, so a quick modification to switch to some thicker lined rectangles for an improvement I feel.

The first 30 sentences of Orwell’s 1984 with circle diameter/rectangle width determined by the distance between adjacent letters when plotted across each line (or something like that, it’s been a while since I worked on the code…)

More candidates for the 12-month Revolve project:

Studio Diary

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