"The One Show" and Craig-y-nos

"The One Show" Wednesday 17 April- ( from left to right):
Ann Shaw and Pamela Hamer with presenters Alex and Matt Baker

Well, it s over – all of 30 seconds on live television talking about  Craig-y-nos, the children’s TB sanatorium in Wales.

Some of my friends said I look nervous and uncomfortable. Well ,who wouldn’t on prime-time television with 5 million viewers and an audience including a clutch of celebrities and you are expected to talk about dark secrets from your four years spent locked up in a remote castle all in the name of a cure for a disease which folk were terrified of?

Pamela Hamer, the other ex-patient with me on the show was totally unfazed by television – and determined to have her say.

Pamela told her  rat story in – she woke up one night to find a rat in her bed and the night nurse comforted her when she screamed by telling her it was Joey the pet rat from the kitchen just come to say good night to her.

She was 8 years of age and encased in plaster only able to move her arms.

It was a blog that I started in 2006 in my search for the “lost children of Craig-y-nos” that eventually unearthed all these amazing stories and gave a collective voice to 40 years of missing Welsh history.

I just managed to get a plug in for the book The Children of Craig-y-nos .

Behind the scenes:

I am sitting in Make up getting the most amazing stuff put on my face when Angela Rippon comes in and sits in the chair next to me - in a similar pink jacket to what I’m wearing! OMG!

After the show Pamela Hamer and our partners go to a quiet, small Italian restaurant in Earls court.

The folk at the next table lean over.

“We saw you on telly tonight!”

I reckon it’s the pink jacket.

Dealing with Rejection

(Harlequin role- image created on iPhone)

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche

I was at a gallery opening on Saturday night and friends kept coming up to me: “Where is your work? Why isn’t it in? “

And I had to say. “I got rejected.”

Now if you are an artist or writer, you get used to it.  Or you give up making work.

But how do you deal with rejection?

Well you can toughen yourself up by trying the The Rejection Generator Project :http://stoneslidecorrective.com/?page_id=441

Here are some samples:

Dear Artist

“We can see all the work, care, and even love that you've put into this piece, which makes it harder to tell you that we won't be accepting it. This is hard for us, because we just can't stop laughing... All that work, all the devotions of your soul and your heart, and you produce this? That's hilarious. We can barely type because we're laughing so hard.”

Or how about this:

“Dear Writer,

I enjoyed reading the opening pages of your novel but you didn’t follow our submission guidelines. Prospective authors must be at least sixteen years of age. Based on the chapters you sent us, I doubt you are older than ten.

Yours truly,

The Editors

As Nietzsche said:

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

Links:

http://www.gsa.ac.uk/support-gsa/gsa-alumni/alumni-stories/s/shaw-anne

www.annshaw.co.uk

.

Hot Tappers - exhibition

Our group of older tap dancers have finally got a name for ourselves:
"The Hot Tappers".

This photograph was selected by Blipfoto (www.blipfoto.com) the online photographic community, for  their Creativity Scotland exhibition illustrating the diversity of creativity in the country.

We meet weekly in the Stirling Rugby club.

The miracle of apps!

Student Katie Joyce introduced me to photo synth a free app that stitches pix together.
Here she is in front of a magnificent wall mural she made for an exhibition in Delta Studios, Larbert along with two friends.

Keep Dancing

Diary of an artist writer online | Project blogs | Artists talking | a-n
Our Keep Dancing group at the macrobert arts centre, Stirling, challenging stereotyped images of older people.

Our dance group Keep Dancing, run by the macrobert, has grown legs. Literally. A group of us have formed a tap dancing class. See video of Anne Aiken who leads our group.
.http://www.youtube.com/user/annshaw

This month see the launch of Luminate -www.luminatescotland.org/-

 the first festival on ageing in Scotland.

Stirling contribution is a new theatre performance by dance artist Natasha Gilmore, Ultra Violet, an intergenerational event that will be premiered at the end of the month.

Unfortunately I had to pull out because of

other commitments  but it looks like a very exciting project.

Meanwhile I have just finished – oh what a relief! - another book on Wales.

So I am going to have a welcome break from writing and I have resumed my visual artwork again.

After all, I do have a solo exhibition coming up early next year…time to get back to the drawing –board, or in my case Ipad.

Storytelling in Tate Modern

Inside Tate Modern's Turbine Hall

I am sitting on the floor of the Tate Turbine Hall, as you do, when strangers came up and told me highly personal stories about their lives:  the young Chinese man now a reformed liar, a Caribbean woman with recurring dreams of carrying a heavy load on her back up a steep hill and a Sri Lankan woman who could decide at 38 years of age whether to have children or not.

These are storytellers, part of Tino Sehgal’s installation. He says the work is about what it means to belong to a group.

One thing they had not expected is that members of the public would join in, not with the storytelling though I am sure there must have been some frustrated actors there who decided to join in too but with all the walking, running and sitting.

At one stage I too joined in. It was a theatrical experience, which at times bordered on the quasi-religious: dozens of people standing absolutely still chanting and singing with lights on and off.

Did it work? Yes. I forgot about the other exhibitions I had come to see and spent most of my time in the Turbine Hall and the Tank Rooms paying only a cursory glance at some of the other galleries.

For we have reached a stage in the visual world where seeing a work, however important in the canon of art no longer does it for us in the 21^st century. We want more from it than the passive viewing of something hanging on the wall.

And this can only come about by the blurring of edges between all the arts, helped by the interface with technology: the artist and the viewer become inter-changeable, like the writer and the reader.

We want to engage with it, interact with it, to become part of it even if only for a few minutes and this you could do with Sehgal’s work.

This is the first time the Tate have used the Turbine Hall for live performance installation.

Hopefully we will see more in the future.

Although the event has some loose choreography, lights dim,singing and chanting at regular intervals, running, walking, it gives the impression of an organic whole: a mass of total strangers interacting and moving as one.

What the artist did not expect is that total strangers would join with the storytellers in walking around the floor of the Turbine hall.

This is interactive immersive collaborative art of the 21^st century, reflecting the zeitgeist of our time.

Yet the piece also had a strange sense of deja vu.  I witnessed a similar scene over ten years ago while a student The School of the Art Institute in Chicago where art, technology and performance came together in one student performance.



Oh dear! a video I made of the storytellers has been deleted from Youtube - breach of copyright!
yet we were sharing stories.....

Why do we open our studios to the public?

Ann Shaw | Image | Artists talking | a-n

What do people expect from Open Studios?

We have just had the results from our survey from our third Forth Valley Open Studios and they have thrown up some surprising results.

Visitor’s expectations and those of artists are wildly different.

Less than 10 per cent go expecting to buy work.

They go for the experience of meeting an artist in situ, many for the first time, and to seek information and education about art and the creative process of that particular artist.

"After the Storm" Digital painting from my online photographic diary:www.blipfoto.com/libra
www.blipfoto.com/entry/2252535

This is in stark contrast with the way it is viewed by many artists who regard Open Studios as a commercial     opportunity.