….I went to a talk by Gayle Chong Kwan tonight. Gayle has been exhibiting at the South Square Centre in Bradford during the past month, and tonight gave a talk about her work. I had not been specially impressed by what I had seen. In fact, she said in the session that the attraction of working at South Square was that she was offered the opportunity to experiment, with no strings attached. A couple of aspects of he intended work had not quite come together as well as she had hoped, I think . Tonight, however, we were given the chance to see something of the range and power of her other projects, and her achievement really is noteworthy.
The thing I was particularly impressed by was the high standard at which she is able to operate across a wide range of disciplines …. drawing, photography, painting, sculpture. You name it, she has had a go at it, and the results have always been very professional. I don’t know whether it is a term she would apply to herself, but I would say that the label “conceptual art” is probably appropriate. In my book this is usually a clue to something very cerebral, even theoretical. The normal corollary of this is that it is possibly rather short on emotional content, and I would say that is true of Gayle’s work also. It makes up for any deficiency in that area by being aesthetically very exciting, however, especially in the photographed versions of her 3D work.
Seeing somebody work at such a high level of proficiency certainly drives home the need to hone my own skills. I’m still some way short of what, in my imagination, I would like to achieve. I am partly consoled, however, by the fact that I haven’t put in my 10,000 hours yet. I’ll keep plugging away.