To be clear, Past Tom is the arsehole. I'm not calling the RA an arsehole (yet) nor is "Arsehole" the title of my intended submission, although I wouldn't rule it out...
Sometimes Past Tom does stuff that he thinks will be good for me, knowing that Future Tom (from his perspective) is going to hate him for it, but Future Tom (from Future Tom's perspective) will forgive Past Tom later when it all works out in the end. It's a sort of deal Past Tom and Future Tom have with each other. In this case, I think Past Tom thought it was my last chance to enter the RA Summer Show (although who knows) so why not... It's £40, which is a lot of money to blow, but I'm a miserly bastard, so I should afford myself the occasional indulgence.
For those who haven't been foolish enough to blow £40, basically the way it works is that you buy a chance to submit (from a capped number of 'tickets'), pay your wonga, and then submit at your leisure before the deadline in Feb. If somehow you don't get rejected at that stage, you are then summoned to deliver your piece to the RA, for a second round, and if you somehow STILL don't rejected, you get the honour of having your piece crammed in with a bunch of other people's work, and maybe the chance to make a slightly cringe breathless video about what it all means to you... I've never got past the paying and being rejected stage and almost certainly never will...
So I am now in the first interbellum period between successfully purchasing the right to enter, and actually making the submission... The theme is 'dialogue' and the tone is one of art-for-social-good - starting dialogues between different social groups etc To be fair you are expected to interpret as freely as you like, but there is definitely a bit of an agenda. I'm in a rather grumpy mood about art-for-good at the moment, as I feel like the quality of the 'good' often outweighs the quality of the art, and secondly because I feel like it's all a bit of a desperate bid to make art seem 'worth something' that's not money for rich collectors... It smells a bit tokenistic and apologetic, but maybe I'm just a knob... So that's not a great place to start, which was partly why I thought I'd agreed with myself that I wouldn't enter... Hey ho.
After much walking and thinking and humming and haring, I think I know the direction I want to go in. I want to explore the 'dialogue' between Tom 2.0 and Tom 3.0 - that's to say Carolyn's Tom, and current Tom. What would I say to my pre-bereaved self? What would my pre-bereaved self say to me? More generally, for all of us that have undergone some life-changing trauma (and that might be most of us), what could that dialogue be? Could there even be a dialogue? Beyond "I'm so fucking sorry", at least? This interpretation fits with my practice, fits the theme, and broadly fits the expectation to have a social element to the work. Boom... Great... So now what? What could that actually look like?
Cue more walking and thinking... I don't want to submit anything digital if I can help it - AI has pissed in that pond now. I can't draw or paint, so that's out... So photography or sculpture? I thought about using my frosted faces (which I haven't written up, but basically I left my wax face cast outside to get covered in frost) together with my living face to make a montage... But I'd like to avoid photography since I think sculpture would be more 'RA-like', plus (and don't tell anyone this 'hack') sculpture seems to have a higher chance of being accepted to open calls since fewer people do it, and curators need something 3d to fill the middle of the exhibition space...
So now I am thinking about a sculpture involving my face cast... After yet more walking and thinking (ok, I might be exaggerating a bit at this point), I've come up with a few ideas, but the leading one at the moment is to use one face cast to represent the past or future viewpoint, and imply the viewer as the other viewpoint. This ticks some boxes technically and aesthetically too.
I'm thinking paper mache to save weight, and cover it in something that represents the 'message' to be shared with my pre-bereaved self (or from my pre-bereaved self, not sure yet). I'm now (assuming I don't decide I hate this idea and go back to the drawing board) trying to work out what form that 'message' might take. The obviously answer is a letter. I could even, perhaps, expand the work by inviting other to participate and have the cast covered in many letters from many people, overlapped, fragmented, crying into the void of time.
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