Appledore Visual Arts Festival 2009

I exhibited my first professional commission at Appledore Visuals Arts Festival last weekend.  A highly emotional experience as I seemed to be the only exhibitor there tackling real-world issues as opposed to producing pretty Devon craft for the tourist trade.  Convinced that I would become the anti-Christ of North Devon, imposing my dark social documentary work on the beautiful coastal town of Appledore I was in a pretty lonely and low place by the second night.  Until that was, I began to link up several observations about the place, and it all began to make sense.

First fact, there is tension between a large group of locals and the arts group who organise the festival.  Second fact, these locals object to anything and everything just for the sake of rejecting.  They even complained that the brightly coloured flags on the quay were too noisy.  Thirdly my work is cited as being very relevant to the community and compliments were slowly trickling in by the third day.  Fourthly the arts organisers chose me for a reason.  They knew I can be controversial, they knew I don't always pretty-up the truth, but they wanted my presence at the festival.

So to summerise, Appledore is not a pretty picture town.  It's got a rough past as an old boat building town and dock.  In it's current day position it is home to a lot of strange folk that get absorbed in the quirky backstreet. If you imagine it as more like the Barbican or Multey area of Plymouth (where I previously lived) you get a much more accurate sense of mood.  Don't think it's an idilic Devon fudge box utopia.

By the end of the festival I had regained confidence and recieved a lot of compliments for my artwork.  It was clear the work was not as visually stunning as my previous projects but I knew that.  This project was not about visual trickery and pleasing images, this was my first step into literal social documentary free of abstraction or distraction.  I made no attempt to disguise my observations behind symbols with multiple connotations so I had to be right in what I said.  It's amazing how disciplined I felt in doing that.  There was absolutely no chance that I could claim someone had misunderstood what I was saying because I was saying it so plainly.  It made me check and double check my facts before exhibiting.

Naturally there were some people who disagreed and thought I had completely missed the point.  Interestingly I did not get told this to my face, I heard this second hand through a trusted informant.  But to put it quite simply, the two women who thought that, had not paid attention to the piece.  Some people just cannot concentrate on a video installation and still see technology as an undeveloped artwork, suitable only for lighthearted "playing around", worthy of a short glance only.  They think paintings deserve studying, scultpures need to be poured over, but videos are a bit of a laugh like a device used to grab childrens attention in museums.  I've narrowed it down to 10 people in the second year of Fine Art at Somerset College and I'm sure, if I find them, I'll have a nice argument with them at the college exhibition on the 20th.

The piece was called Teenstrangers and was a series of observations made by me in my 6 months of research.  I did not state a single opinion in the piece, nor did I take sides.  Therefore it is impossible to disagree with me.  The compliments all came in the form of...  "Very interesting, well observed" and were always spoken by people who were clearly still engaged in thinking about it.  I couldn't ask for anything more.  The biggest compliment was someone saying I was similar to Louis Theroux.