The Women in the Photographs / Why, When and Where

Doing something for the first time is an inevitably fraught affair, especially if it involves a lot of repetitive work. When this process began, there was a vague sense of however long was programmed to complete it, I'd still come out of the journey stressed: nothing surrounding this has been anything other than highly emotional labour. I have willingly opened myself to a process of introspection.

In the end there are 36 women named in the project, and 34 poems, because there are two mother/daughter pairings who get words dedicated to them jointly. About a third of this had already been written at the start of the year, and it took several months of chipping away at past history, sometimes difficult experiences and often events I had forgotten to make the body of the exhibition real.

We finally uploaded the last of the poetry yesterday.

The physical aspects will be placed on Sunday and then there's a good three and a bit weeks where it will sit, with a single QR Code linking to online. The Box itself has a list of names inside, everyone who has been 'thanked', plus a larger version of what will end up being the physical 'thank you' that every woman receives. I'd hoped to do the exhibition a lot differently in February. Things change.

My first idea was utterly impractical. The biggest lesson learnt from all of this is how to use space effectively: there is simply too much emotional work to make any one poem an example of. We've got one last narrative post to do on the website, which explains for those people visiting this cold how the whole thing came to be real, and then it's all over when we take down the work on the 24th.

By that time the Art Trail will have come to an end.

The main reason this is happening now is to get the Instagram socials sorted and pinned before everything gets away from me at the weekend. There's two days of teaching coming up and a Poetry Showcase where I'm really not sure what should be read (gonna ask poetry mates for input shortly) and then it's six days of final route setting before we go FULL ON into two weeks of Art Trail madness.

How that was planned and how it will now run is also a lifetime away from what I'd initially anticipated would take place, but I have blogs planned for every other day (including the weekends) from July 4th onwards. When it is all over (Sunday 19th), we are going into radio silence until the start of August, for REASONS I hope you will all be able to accept considering this is my itinerary:

We will talk a lot more about this on Friday. For now, I have graphics to make and a hungry stomach to fill...