How do you feel now?

Julie, friend and creative assistant, two weeks after the RWA residency/exhibition, asks me how I feel, I say I am in recovery, thinking about how to evaluate and shall we debrief over a personally not publicly funded celebratory Tapas supper with glass of red vino, following the seven days, extended to eight due to visiting lecturers asking if I could stay on and they would send their students. There is lots to discuss and digest. Julie, who assisted me, wants to give back the money I posted to her to pay for her time and amazing support.  I can't accept it, she says. I say I costed it into the budget, and I couldn't have done the level of engagement without you being there installed with me in the Feddon. I can't accept it, she says again, sweetly. How can you get paid for something you so enjoy? Back at work for her was being in the environment of a health centre, missing the sound installation, the warm murmuring voices of Italian women and me saying "Where are we going"...."Cristina's voice, asking "Are you a believer". I felt like asking them to dim the lights at work, but didn't think that would go down well. How about you?  she asked. 

Well, for me it was strange.  Months of planning towards the trip to Italy, the experience, the trauma involved, coming back, deciding to apply for the rarified opportunity of Arts Council funding, the shock of getting a grant, planning an exhibition of new work, all undertaken in one year, organising what to print, how to install, how to present, the framing, the curation of the work...as Gemma the exhibition manager at the RWA said "A body of work that should be cohesive".  

"I love just love the way you create environs 
for us to wonder about the stories",

A time rich with layers of excitement, creative focus and worry, a condensed experience, responsibility about handling public funds, a project exploring identity and ironically Lloyds Bank sending the newly created AC funded account wrongly named cheque card and cheque book, so at the beginning of the exhibition, I had to draw on the Bank of Julie and my joint account at the outset; this, with organising assistants, sweating over the graphics possibilities and print results and making the budget stretch, resulting though as Mark at Hot Pepper Designs said "worth going the extra mile", being invited to be a feature in the Bristol free press Metro which bumped up the publicity; Bristol artist Anita telling me about Kat Quartermass, Director, Bristol Storytelling Festival, who was later to say "We loved working with Jill Carter and the RWA...how about planning something together for next year's programme; plus the making of work process through it all, driving up and down the M4 to Bristol, filling the car twice over with what I had thought to be an easily portable storytelling achive; installing over three days, wall hung works, plinth presented arrangements, over four hundred visitors, the overwhelmingly positive feedback, a large working table with me and assistant installed in the centre of the 40' long chapel shaped high ceiling room, with lights dimmed and sound created from archive in italy in collaboration with Gurchetan Singh who I never budgeted for and whom I hoping will forget the time we spent on making a layerscape of extracts of sound of the women talking in the square in Italy, the sound of creaking open doors to churches and found enclaves, the drawing posted back from Italy of the three Sibyls which later Barrington, an elder RWA academician said was "Amazing, free, flowing, form...I wish I can draw like that...Chinese/Japanese influences...I"m going to come and sit in the room and draw with you, and so he did, and finally, there we are on the first day, in the basement of the RWA, standing in front of The Beast, the antique vitrine filled with my journals, collections, bundles installed with a photographic print of myself in front of the Altar of the Madonna, when slowly to my horror I see the back panel collapsing on the most important part of the installation...it could have been the orchid in the porcelain cup, but no, it was The Pretend Flickering Candle Lamp with two traditional dolls arranged. There is a scream from me, then, Ben the larger than life hero and sculptor, plus RWA highly calm Technical Manager comes to help once again haul the huge weighty display cabinet, so I can manoeuvre my tiny arms into the back and we stick yards of gaffer tape to make the back panel stay in place.  There is a sigh of relief all round.