It’s been a mad one I can tell you!  Last time I posted, I had five days to go to exhibition.  I spent a LOT of time at the studio in those five days, cutting circles, engraving glass, projecting drawings, tearing my hair out, running around like a headless chicken.  You know, as you do, with just days to go and everything going wrong…

But it came together (as my friends and family reassured me it would, they knew something I didn’t).  I even got most of the installation done on Monday afternoon, with just a bit of a tidy up on Tuesday morning – I was actually set up and ready with a whole five hours to spare.  Almost unheard of!

I thoroughly enjoyed the preview event, all of the work is great, not just mine, 😉  I received a lot of positive feedback, moved a couple of people to tears and got a comment from a good friend that she “never knew I could draw”.

We had a little tour of the three venues with food, drink and a Ukulele band to finish the evening off.

Here’s a couple of photos from the event, I forgot to take any with all the craziness of the evening – hopefully we will get some official photos through soon.

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Only five more days to go to the launch of the Museum Residency Exhibition.

I won’t lie, the last few days in particular have been quite stressful, worrying about final outcomes, whether I would get any kind of finished pieces, how would it all turn out?

Well, I am still relying heavily on the kiln fairies being kind, so I’ve got nothing to show you as the glass is still in progress, but today I finalised the display, so all that remains is for me to finish the glass, make the repro death penny, finish my diary board (that’s a metre square!) and get some work in the sketchbook so its good enough to put on show.  Is that all, you ask?

The exhibition preview is next week, and the exhibition is on 25h March during the museum‘s normal opening hours.

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Most of the last few days research have been reading Frank Hasse’s war journals.  They sometimes make for very harrowing reading, and I am only part way through.

This week, I will be carrying on reading, but will be starting some actual artwork.  A collage piece is coming to mind right now.  I don’t often do drawing or painting these days, so I am doubting my skills to execute this, but I have to remind myself that this is just for development purposes really.  It’s a piece that will be changing and ongoing as I read further into the diary.  It’s a means to an end, and methods used to create the collage board will be translated into techniques for glass.

You might also catch me doing a little bit of clay work!

I’m visiting the Moravian settlement in Ockbrook on Tuesday morning, and then I will be at the Museum after that for the rest of the day, and back again on Thursday this week from opening until around 3pm.  A couple of the other artists are in this week too, so a good time for a visit.

So, the research has begun.  I met with Keith last week, who was indeed a mine of information.  His focus as been about the family history of the brother and sister that these two particular memorial plaques commemorate – Edwin & Margaret Hasse.  He’s been able to track down quite a lot of information and documents about not only the two casualties, but on the rest of the family.

I was intrigued to hear about the letters home that Edwin wrote to his mother, they sound ‘jolly cheerful’ – whether that was Edwin’s disposition, or an attempt to not worry his mother, we will probably never know.  But his older brother, Frank, who also served during the war kept a war journal and few years later, this was published.  It often tells a rather different side, and yet these two brothers were in the same regiment and so were often in the same place – so it can’t just be down to geography that one place wasn’t so bad as the other.

I am still reading through the diaries, there’s quite a lot to read!  But interesting little snippets are coming out, and for now, it feels as though my project is going that way.

I feel like the project could be huge; that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and actually I don’t think I can do the Death Pennies enough justice in the short space of time we have.

The next few days should see a flurry of activity as I attempt to translate the feelings of these diaries into something visual – it’s making me think and work in quite a new way – what a challenge!

Tommy at Seaham.  No, this isn’t connected to the Hasse pennies in any way (as far as I know), I just happened to visit this sculpture at Christmas when I was visiting friends ‘up north’.

It’s interesting though, that despite me knowing I wanted to apply for the residency, at that point I hadn’t even been interviewed, so I didn’t even know if I would get the position, never mind that WW1 would be the focus of my project.