Victory for Kate!

Here are some pictures of my studio space:

Not bad eh?  It's changed a bit since taking these photos, I've swapped one of the panels for a nice big stable board, which is great.  It isn't a huge amount of wall space, but it's enough for now and the main thing is that it's not cramped up against loads of other little studio spaces like in London!  And of course there's all that lovely natural light.

Also, there was a rubbish strike in Marseille for about a fortnight that only finished a few days ago, and apparently it happens quite a lot...  Me and Nina took a LOT of photos the other night of all the overflowing bins we saw on our short walk home, but here are a couple of the worst:

Horrible!  Anyway, we live on the fourth floor, so fingers crossed the cockroaches won't be bothered to climb that high!

Now to the point - the title of this entry is Victory for Kate, because of a conversation I had with another student last week.  There's a Polish woman in my studio, who's probably in her late 30s and makes abstract paintings that don't really do anything for me (despite a new found appreciation for this kind of thing), and even though she's friendly enough, I've heard that she can be a bit tricky sometimes.  So, I was surprised, but not completely shocked when she came over to me at lunchtime and said, "How can you sit there and eat while you're looking at that horror in front of you?  It's disgusting!"  That 'horror' being my work!  I didn't know what to say at first, and I think she thought maybe I didn't understand her French, but it wasn't that at all - I understood every word she was saying, I just was a bit stunned that she was saying it!  I just sat there going, "what??" and trying to figure out why she was so bothered!  She said didn't like all the pictures of Iggy Pop with his tongue out and wanted to know why I was juxtaposing them with images from a church, and that religious imagery is very powerful and have I even thought about that?  And I kept trying to explain to her, but she wasn't listening and wouldn't let me get a word in edgeways - every time I started a sentence she's jump in with another accusation, evening asking me if I was mocking religious people!  Crikey!  She was being really quite aggressive, and I knew she was determined not to like what I was doing, and not to hear what it was actually about - and what was I supposed to do?  That'd be a difficult enough situation to encounter in England, let alone hear where I have to explain everything in French!  But I had to do something, because I couldn't just let her go on at me like that, so somehow I managed to get her to listen, and I explained that no, it's not like that at all - I have no intention of being disgusting or offensive and I'm not ridiculing religious people or saying that Iggy Pop is anything like Jesus.  It doesn't matter what religion I take imagery from, because I just really like religious art, I think it's great propaganda and it really hits you in a special place.  And that I really love 70s music, and it's not that easy to find other people who want to come out and find that kind of music with me, so sometimes I get a bit lonely in that sense, and sit in my room being nostalgic and wishing I could go back in time.. And the music is really important to me, and when I hear it it strikes a chord with me, somewhere very close to the feeling I get from religious art, both of which are very close to the most important feeling in the universe - which is that of being totally and utterly alive.  And I want to communicate this feeling through my work, and making these little shrines is how I'm trying to do that at the moment.  It's got nothing to with crazy juxtaposition, or saying 'hey look, these guys are like modern day religious icons', and I am completely aware that religious subject matter is extremely loaded and that I'm probably a bit young to understand it, but what am I supposed to do, wait for 50 years before I think about it?  I probably never will understand it, so I'm doing this now without any fear of what people are going to think, because it really, really makes me feel something, and I really care about what I do and art is a lot bigger than I am.  And as I was saying all this I saw her face softening, and I think by giving her a little snippet of my soul I made her understand - and I can't even tell you the feeling of relief and accomplishment that came over me!  Because now even if she still doesn't like it, at least she gets it.

And I feel totally fantastic for that.