New Blood Art: The Story - Part 2
London, 1994
That glimpse ahead was real. But I was still nineteen - just back from Tanzania, not yet at university - when I came back to London and fell in love with a magnetic boy (who looked like he belonged somewhere else entirely), We’d known each other since sixth form - adjacent schools. He wasn’t like anyone else I knew.. Another free spirit, both of us somehow dropped into a suburban world we didn’t quite fit - and we fell into summer together like it was a spell.
My fine art degree started at Aberystwyth, (probably the best place I could get into without a foundation degree) and he was studying law at King’s College London.
He came to visit me during freshers week. And that was sort of that. He arrived, and somehow I didn’t... we were back and forth, between his place and mine. And then a few months into term when I was meant to be getting the train back to Aberystwyth, something in me couldn’t leave. I found myself going up and down in the lift at Hampstead Station - street level to basement, basement to street - again and again. Maybe it was restlessness. Maybe it was love (maybe it was undiagnosed ADHD). Maybe it was all three. I didn’t go. I stayed in London - and walked my art portfolio around the art colleges to try and get a place half way through the first term - knocking on art tutors’ doors. Ian Robertson opened his - at London Guildhall University, in Aldgate East. I had a whole pitch ready… He looked at the work and said, “Yep, that’s fine.”
The magnetic boy moved me into his tiny halls of residence room - with him, and his hamster. (Yes, he had a hamster in his halls room.) I wasn’t supposed to be there, and neither was the hamster. We used to half-heartedly rearrange the hamster cage into a coffee table in case a cleaner walked past and spotted it. We were always slightly braced for someone to say, “You can’t have that hamster in here”, completely sidestepping the larger issue that I wasn’t supposed to be there either.
We were freestyling love.. There was no plan. We were just in it’- alive, and following a thread. (Which, looking back, is more or less how I started and ran the gallery too.) It was a kind of quietly absurd, low-stakes high-stakes setup. Magical in its way.
After halls, we moved into a house near Clapton. The estate agent had driven us in through Stoke Newington, which looked easier to explain. We didn’t realise where we were until we’d moved in. It was Clapton - East London - culturally rich, a bit of everything. Not somewhere we’d imagined, but somehow, there we were. The others in the house were King’s students - not artists. Law, pharmacy, English, geography. I was the only one coming home with charcoal on my hands and life drawings under my arm. I gave some away. Sold a couple. It didn’t feel like anything unusual. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was just living - between two completely different worlds.
And so, the broad strokes of an idea started to take shape… I’d go back to the studio and see my friends at college making these incredible drawings and paintings and then packing up to go and work in a pub for minimum wage. Or, like me, folding jumpers at the Gap on the King’s Road. I started to notice the gap. I was literally working and living in it. There wasn’t, then, a way to sell work like ours.
Posters were everywhere, of course. Reproductions. But if you wanted something original, something real, there was nowhere to go - unless you had gallery money, or knew someone. There were young artists and there were people who wanted to buy their work. But no mechanism in between - that was the gap. And also, I suppose, the beginning - as I started to wonder - how do we do this? And this quiet, insistent, not fully formed idea - kept circling… though every way I looked at it, it seemed to fall down on the same thing: if you’re selling a life drawing from an art student, you can’t be paying high street rent (actually you can’t be paying any rent…). That was probably my first brush with anything resembling fiscal awareness.. I didn’t realise that’s what it was at the time. I just knew the numbers didn’t add up.
There weren’t really other models. The railings at Bayswater were there - paintings lined up outside Hyde Park - but it always felt more like spectacle than curation. The work didn’t feel held.
And then there was Hyper Hyper, on High Street Kensington. That wasn’t about art, but it stirred something. A kind of layered, independent energy. Small spaces. Individual visions. A collective made up of fragments. I think, if I could’ve done something like that for art, I would have. It probably wouldn’t have worked then - but it would now. Something like an open-plan gallery-meets-studio space. Somewhere permanent but light, where artists could be visible without being absorbed - that’s still in there somewhere I think, yet to manifest.
Back to the story.. I had followed my heart. And that chapter closed.
The love affair with the magnetic boy and the hamster ended in our final year - we were in India at the time. He went back to London, I stayed out and spent a couple of months during monsoon season, in one of those wildly long university holidays… living in a whitewashed room with a bed and a large balcony surrounded by tall palm fronds and a constant downpour, waiting out the monsoon (and the heartbreak) - a long exhale in the rain.
Mysore Zoo Animal Hospital[/caption]
Goa, 1997[/caption]
I’ve come to learn that challenges - when you let them - pull you back to your centre.
Stay with the pain long enough, and you are changed.