20Perspectives

As I mentioned in my last post, interesting developments have been taking place. It all started in July when I joined one of the bi-weekly zoom meetings for the SAQA Europe/Middle East region in which Susan Callahan said she wanted to start an international group. I considered for a while, then decided I was going to give it a try. The first online meetings posed some difficulties because zoom links were not correct, I was on vacation with weak internet connection, whatever. I had even written a few sentences already in which I said I would withdraw, but on the spur of the moment gave it all one more try. Then, finally, it worked, and the group has taken on momentum since.

At first I thought I would not be able to do a whole lot in terms of the administrative things required, but then it was I who started the WhatsApp group. (That’s easy, and not a whole lot of work.) We started discussing about frequency of challenges, size of pieces to be submitted, and when would we start. Suddenly we (that is, Paula Rafferty) were developing a website and writing blog posts to introduce ourselves. And then somebody suggested ‘let’s just do the first challenge with reveal day by the end of January’. The topic chosen was ‘bridges’, and I have described on the 20Perspectives blog how the piece took on a life of its own until it looked like it does now. 

Bridging the Cultural Gap (text messages??)
Uta Lenk, 2022

We are trying to establish and improve a presence on social media. We have more topics coming up. But we also have a first chance at exhibition with the Bridges collection because of a coincidence. For this exhibition all members have made one piece each, but we are also preparing a joint piece: every (participating) member is working on one of fifteen slices of this picture of Pont Neuf in Paris, which I took in September. Probably one of the more frequently photographed bridges in the world, but splitting the picture up into fifteen pieces is going to give a rather different outlook onto this famous piece of architecture.

 

I have only started to pick out fabrics for my slice of the bridge, and will hopefully get to work on it a bit on the weekend. It has certainly been a creative booster. I am really glad I did not send that mail that would have set an end to all of this before it started.