As one exhibition is about to end…

The past few weeks have been so busy it’s actually difficult to remember what’s been happening. After the opening of the exhibition in Glasgow I had one day off (where I basically felt ill all day) and then went headlong into more deadlines and festival activities. The talk that I did at the West Port Book Festival went really well and thankfully drew in a large audience. I really enjoyed it, and it was great to have to put so much thought into what I’ve spent the past 2 and a half years working on and actually talk about it. I even managed to include a taster of what an actual learned pig act might have been like with the aid of a toy pig, some number cards and a very silly magic trick. Not sure the audience were entirely convinced of the sagacity of the stuffed pig but they seemed to like it nonetheless.

On the exhibitions front the show in Glasgow is now in its final week and will finish on the 5th September, after which it will all go up to Inverness for the touring show Now You See It with Highland Council until February 2010. And I’m pleased to announce that I now have a space in London to exhibit the series in May 2010 at artsdepot, which looks like a great venue and I’m really looking forward to that.

In the meantime, three pieces from the series will go on show in Newcastle at a group show on a vintage theme called Past in Present at The Art Works Galleries during September and October. My friends Annabel De Vetten and Chantal Powell are also going to be in this exhibition. The opening for that is this Thursday but unfortunately I won’t be able to make it down.

Next week I’ll be in London where I’ll be meeting up with Roxana Halls once again to see her studio, which I’m very excited about. I’ll also be going to see The Bay, a play that my friend Rachel Stevenson is in, which was running at Te Pooka’s Big Red Door during the festival and has now transferred to Theatre 503 in London and runs until 11 September.

Incidently, it’s a bit late now, but I really meant to write a blog post earlier in the festival and mention some friend’s exhibitions and events such as Carmen Moran’s mini exhibition Kunst Im Klo (Art in the Loo) at the Glasite Meeting House, Madeleine Shepherd’s exhibition and collaboration with Writers Bloc Alba Ad Astra at Transreal Fiction and Gav Inglis series of spoken word nights Underword at Fingers Piano Bar. Oh well, better late than never? Hmmm.

In print

Last week I had one of those ‘you wait and wait for a bus and then three come along at once’ moments but instead of buses it was in terms of having my work acknowledged in print. First of all I got a mention in the Magic Circular (the magazine of The Magic Circle) in a review of the recent Collectors Day event where I showed the series A Sage of the Stage, not a Beast in a Cage for the first time. The review was favourable thankfully, calling the exhibition “imaginitive and rewarding” which was nice. The next one is a slightly more tenuous link because I don’t actually know if it’s in *print* anywhere yet, but the press release for the Cut-Click exhibition has a paragraph about me in it, and the reason I’m including it is that for once I didn’t write it! It does say I’m London-based which of course I’m not, but it’s not a big deal, and as a friend of mine pointed out, I do occasionally don headwear that makes me look like I’m from London. The final bus, or instance of me in print this week if you prefer, was in Printmaking Today. Yay. Where I am delighted to have had an image of one of the prints from the series reproduced in the ‘forthcoming exhibitions’ section. It’s the yellow one second from the right…

Image from Printmaking Today, Summer 2009

Finally for today, here are some more pics from the Cut-Click exhibition. Here’s my print of The Learned Cats on the right, next to work by Julian Kimmings…

Image from Cut-Click exhibition at Abbey Walk Gallery © Caroline Twidle 2009

And here’s one of people on the opening night with my print in the background.

Image from Cut-Click exhibition at Abbey Walk Gallery © Caroline Twidle 2009

It’s around us

Today I moved out of my large sunny 2nd floor studio overlooking Arthur’s Seat on one side and Portobello on the other, and moved into my new studio on the ground floor of the same building. The new studio, once all of my stuff was in, looked a bit like a store cupboard when I left it this afternoon, rather than a place I’m going to be spending a great deal of time in – but tomorrow it gets a makeover, and I’m feeling really positive about the move (which was for financial reasons) and looking on the bright side: having people around me since it’s a semi-shared space as opposed to the solitude of the old one, having doors direct to the outside world for sunny days,  and never again having to cause myself bodily harm hauling framed artworks up and down the stairs whenever I have an exhibition.

The past couple of weeks have been the usual hard work and relentless list ticking off, but a number of nice things have eased the pain. Afternoon tea at the Howard Hotel for my cousin’s 50th birthday, another trip to London and The Magic Circle for research, where I also met up with a magician friend Will Houston (who’s book has just come out) to talk magic history over lunch, the opening of a friend’s exhibition in Glasgow – FeltusFeltus, Domestic Zirkus at the Citizen’s Theatre – which is getting rave reviews and is also showing at the Whitecross Gallery in London, and my own little bit of good news: that I will be showing some pieces from the learned animals series of screenprints A Sage of the Stage, Not a Beast in a Cage at The Magic Circle Collector’s Day in May. I also got to see the invites for my show in August at the Tron Theatre which are looking good.

And something to look forward to this weekend, Hauntings: The Science of Ghosts at the Edinburgh International Science Festival, where amongst other things, stage illusionist Paul Kieve will be talking about staging ghost effects in the theatre – can’t wait!

And as if that weren’t enough, the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album comes out on Monday!