things on the wall
Hello! I am in London!
We arrived last Saturday after the most nightmarish move I've ever had, part of a horrible few weeks in which we flaked out on some people quite badly (sorry, vodka_fairy and Jess; sorry, Dan's mum, who ended up having to pack a load of my life detritus for me while I went off in the moving van). I honestly have no idea how Dan is still sane, never mind out job-hunting and looking sharp in his suit; and I've had a good few moments when I just wanted to hide under the furniture hugging my knees and rocking back and forth until it all went away, somehow. But it doesn't go away, and we did all the things, and we got here.
Since then we've been staying at the staggeringly generous rainsinger and Z's place. Dan's been registering with every job agency in sight. We are still house-hunting - well, room-hunting, really. We've been swinging wildly between exhilaration and terror, though luckily enough we seem to be on opposite cycles, so the other can usually talk the terrified one down. We've mostly been staying in and trying not to spend much.
But: strangely enough, I seem to have got myself half a studio space to work in, near Deptford Creek. I'm not quite sure how this happened. Most affordable studio spaces have endless waiting lists, but somehow here I am.
Working from home all summer has been doing my head in. My brain is slow and sticky when it comes to context-switching and I need a commute, however short, to make the transition properly. I ended up with home mode and work mode bleeding into each other, meaning I was never doing either one wholeheartedly. I've always wanted a little workspace away from home and assumed I could never afford one. It turns out that when I researched it before, I was looking at office space, which is punch-in-the-guts expensive if you're a freelancer - but there are schemes where you can get art space for much less. This, however, means I have to present myself as a Proper Artist. I feel like a total impostor, but my stuff is all over the walls and I have to admit seeing a whole wall of it at once is quite encouraging. Look, here's a bit of it:
And as if I wasn't already on the verge of a hysterical giggling fit all the time, I've landed right in the middle of one of their biggest events of the year. They're having Open Studios this weekend - like Artweeks, for the Oxford people - a part of the Deptford X art festival where all the studios in the complex are open to the public. You can get all the details at the link, but there's a private view from 6pm this Friday, and the studios are open from 12 to 6 on Saturday and Sunday. (The flyer above is wrong about that - it sounds like they're open from 6pm every day, which is LIES.)
London folk: please come! There will be cheap drinks! What I've seen of the other tenants' stuff is very cool! You can see a small part of my Collective Consciousness installation from last year, which I've put back together and hung from the rafters! It's five minutes' walk from Greenwich station.
Oh, London. Underneath it all I'm really happy to be back.