Accessible online spaces for art making, curating and leadership

Listen:

It was really good  to see what everybody is doing for the exhibition and were discussing their ideas in what they are going to make as their final artwork  for the launch.  I thought that hearing everybody talk about it made me very proud of how well they have been doing  over the last seven weeks,  by watching them grow and develop as artists and gaining lots of confidence from developing their own leadership skills  along the way.

In the session, it was interesting to be asked by Abraham about what I have been painting recently, as he was curious about my piece on the wall behind me. I explained what the ideas behind it were about and how I make my paintings by using a good selection of colours for the background, before adding my subject on top. I show my paintings to help encourage the artists with developing their own work and talk about the difficulties I find myself when creating a new work or when exhibiting my work.

As we fast approach our launch on the 22nd October, we had a wonderful session today with Tanya in the space helping us reflect and sharing where we are all up to in developing our artworks for exhibition and the access too. We connected with each others lives, and journeys and the fight for independence and visibility. It was a really great session to have together.

Figures becoming submerged into the swirling background unaware, being distracted by their phones.

A group of figures submerged into the swirling background, unaware of each other and the swirling chaos around them as they are distracted by their phones.

These are a series of new drawings I have been working on thinking about people being constantly distracted with their phones.

I did these drawings to highlight how we seem to spend a lot of our time using the phones for everything, for scrolling the latest news to finding the next recipe to cook. Our lives seem to be dominated by our screens.

People are not really socially engaged with each other like in terms of conversations, they would rather look at their phone than talk to you, saying they are busy doing something.  People walk down the street looking at their phones rather than looking at where they are going, its either you have to move out of the way of they walk into you. This makes me feel a bit annoyed when that happens, it’s as if I’m not there.

In my drawings, the people are only half there because I wanted them to look like they are wading through the chaos of the background and being drawn into it. They don’t know what’s going on because they are too busy looking down at their screens.