Felicity Bristow - Visiting artist

Felicity originally trained to be an architect and later became a visual artist and designer who makes site specific installations.
Making and sculpting is very important to her and the recording and thinking of how things go together. She tends to find the journey more important than the end result.
She has more recently become interested in chromatography - which is the separation of manufactured or natural pigments and the above photograph is an example of this work.
She has worked on artist's books which she describes as containers (for housing a volume of work). She tries to tell a narrative with her book making and the making of the book is major in this - how she stitches it, how she binds it, what materials she uses, the ink not being permanent so it is constantly changing.

I did learn some important messages from her visit:
- it is important to try something to get to the next stage, so the things that don't work are important too.
- take a step back rather than just charging on.
- visit galleries and keep an eye on what other artists are doing.
- start conversations and keep them going with people you may collaborate with.
- art need not be permanent!
- you don't have to have control over the outcome, she firmly believes in the element of an accident!
- try things out and work out if it is for you.
- if you get stuck, leave it for a while.

I admire the way that her previous skills and interests feed into what she currently does - e.g. she likes making things with her hands, she likes getting involved with materials and she enjoys incorporating her digital skills. It seemed to me that she has tailored made her creativity to completely suit her, rather than commercial demands.
What I struggled with was the language she used to talk about what she does (which was similar to the language on her website). I found it limited my ability to understand what she did. Having worked in a profession for 25 years where you got nowhere if you didn't speak plain English, I have a strong preference for people not speaking social work or artist waffle. (oops, sorry!).
I visited the Pittenween Art Festival this summer and while lots of the artists' blurbs in the programme were perfectly understandable there were still a large amount which were clearly not written for the average person - I just find that excludes people and doesn't follow the "I'm ok, you're ok" principle!


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