Update

Artist number twenty five

Thrilling news.  We have a date and a place for the Georgie Project show.  The Griffin Gallery will be hosting the it on 4th December and we have an auctioneer from Sotheby's willing to come on board.  The space is part of Winsor and Newton HQ, next to the Louise T Blouin institute and Mario Testino's office, in a tucked away section of Notting Hill.  They champion emerging artists and will also be hosting Matt Roberts Arts' 2012 Salon Art Prize in December so we are in good company.

meeting of the MINDs

Artist number three

I am happy to report that MIND charity will be the recipients of funds raised through sales of the works from the show.  Having discussed options with them, they have agreed to allocate 50% of proceeds to their Creative Therapies Fund which feels relevant to the inspiration for this project; Georgie found herself more than once in psychiatric wards and would turn to art to help her through those times.  Her endeavors were self initiated.  Had she been offered the chance to work through her struggles in a guided therapeutic environment using art, she may well have benefited further.

The venue has still to be decided but now that the charity is confirmed,  the rest should fall into place more quickly.  There is  a new person on board to help with the project.  George Little has recently graduated from the RCA and aside from making strange (in a good way) paintings, he is about to cycle to Denmark and back for the hell of it.  A touch of insanity is all that is required for the job so he's hired.

final stretch

artist number sixteen

"Thinking outside the box might be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box,"  

Fredrik Ullén, of the Karolinska Institutet,Stockholm.

I stumbled across this fantastic quote whilst reading on the web about links between creativity and mental disorders, of which there are too many to ignore.

Four more artists to go and we have reached the target of 27.  It is now time to smarten up the blog, hang off the coat tails of social networking (of which I have yet to grasp) and launch a campaign to organize an exhibition and book for this December.  

Feel free to contact me if you want to get involved.

21 and counting

The erratic blogging style is more a reflection on my personal life rather than the progress of the project I am happy to report.  Since the last entry, 5 more artists have participated, taking the  number to 21.  There have been giant peas on trees, technicolour forests, fountains and ten pence moons.

I intend to ask questions to each of the artists involved about their views regarding art making and the unquiet mind.  Does an art practice irritate or relieve symptoms of mental illness?  Or both?

After a hiatus period of focusing on my own art practice whilst fiddling about on a ukelele in between the humdrum of mothering small children, I have discovered how closely linked this project is with my own working process.  Freeform stories, always teetering on the edge of nonsense and only finding salvation in the tenuous threads lurking beneath the images that hint of a more substantial meaning.

Twinkle Twinkle

The apocalypse is upon us.  The atmosphere has transformed from menacing to ethereal as the last trio of artists have turned to the heavens above and the trees below for inspiration.
Just as my energy was starting to flag, I have been spurred on by their enthusiasm for and quick response to the project and cause.  Saatchi, Rose Issa, and Ceri Hand are all benefitting from showing the work of these artists too so the Georgie Project is honoured to have them aboard.
There has been interest shown by one major london gallery in hosting the show which has prompted me to expand my team and get whips cracking.  Watch this space.

The Menace Men

The Menace Men

Artist number 12 is about to pass the relay onto artist number 13.  I said previously that I hope to have 27 artists on board by August.  Maths has never been my strong point which is probably why nature pointed me towards the door of the arts.  Now that I have faced up to a few basic calculations, I realize that if each of the future artists were to complete their piece within two weeks, I am looking at November which makes the possibility of a show in December even more ambitious.  I shall not be deterred though.  Challenges are what life is all about.  Doing things safely may feel nice for a bit but after a while, one can smell stagnation in the air and then it's time to move forward again. 

Georgie appeared to bounce from one end of the spectrum to the other, as if she had no internal barometer for shutting down her system when things got too much or revving her up when she had been sitting in the same place for too long.  It was one of her endearing traits that she would say "yes" to almost everything.  Nothing was too big a task for her even when it clearly was.  One example that comes to mind is her job offer to head up the creative department of a prestigious bespoke stationary business in Los Angeles.  When she discovered the ad, stating the minimum requirements of a portfolio showing work from college and previous jobs, she did not allow a small issue of having never been to art college or worked in the industry before to deter her.  Instead, she stayed up all night before the interview, creating a portfolio from scratch.  She got the job.  Then the consequence would sneak up behind her a week, a month, or a year later and she would be stuck to her bed where the sheets hadn't been changed for two years and not move for days, barely finding the will to call into work with a fresh excuse for each day of doing a no show.  Georgie was fired from work a month before she died.  Tragic and probably inevitable.  Her medications were supposed to balance out these fluctuations but like many in her position, she had a disease that liked to tell her she didn't have a disease.  So days would go by where she would "forget" to take the pills.  And I won't be popular for saying this but I find it hard to judge her for this.  I saw what they did to her.  She was a creative person and this was taken away from her when she was on them.  Is there a way for a creative bipolar mind to keep the juices flowing AND be on medication I wonder? 

The image is of the most recent work made for the project.  The artist knows nothing about Georgie which makes it all the more poignant to me because I know she lived in a world of books and one could say she was certainly plagued by The Menace Men. 

A Deluge of Extremes

from Georgia's notebooks

I have been sifting through some of Georgia's boxes. 
It's all there.  Creativity, obsession, torment, and hope.  Drawings, poems, rare books, handmade jewelry, beautiful shoes, prayers of pleading, lists of medication - what she took, when she took it, and more often, when she forgot, and diaries filled with tiny writing in coloured inks.  The evidence of her illness is scattered everywhere.  Some of the darker poems have been written over and over again.  The jewelry is exquisite and nothing short of genius considering she was entirely self taught.  I know that she would sometimes stay up all night, often sitting with a tray in the bath, making this stuff.  She taught herself everything there was to know about semi precious stones.  Then there are all the designer shoes.  Stunning, quirky, and far beyond her means.  Some were stolen, some were saved up for and afforded by living off protein shakes and cigarettes instead of food.  The multiple piles of rare books hints at Georgia's partiality to hoarding.  Her apartment groaned under the weight of unread material, looked at once then abandoned in a stack behind the sofa.  The writing in her diaries often changes dramatically in appearance, as if more than one person is the author.  Most poignant have been the prayers.  Georgia was looking desperately for a God she could believe in and feel supported by.    Every deed and thought she regretted and documented, was followed by a prayer to stop her doing and thinking these things again, but to no avail.  The insanity of repetition is rife.

I did not start off with the idea of including or adding anything personal of Georgia's but I now feel it might be an interesting idea.  So I am creating a scrapbook alongside the project.   It is the visual story of a bipolar mind.  A deluge of extremes.  Tragic but also funny.  She was the first person to make jokes about her behaviour at the same time as despairing.  She once befriended a man with no legs or arms, living on the streets.  She wheeled him home and tried to convince her flatmate to let him live with them.  Needless to say, it didn't happen.  Without being conscious of it, I realize this project is emulating something of the absurd in Georgia's circumstances. 

If her life were an artwork then I would say the theme to it was CONVENTION or lack thereof.  Time and again she could (or would?) not conform to what people and society expected of her.  But imagine if it was possible for a person to live entirely free of others' expectations.  Would she have found some other way to torment herself or could she have found peace?