New Street Artboards, Margate / The Margate School

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The Margate School (TMS) is an independent not-for-profit postgraduate arts school, based in and for Margate, Kent – and I’ll be teaching on their new Visual Communication course, starting in January 2022. I’ll be working with students on their Image and Narrative modules over a period of ten weeks, and I’m looking forward to getting back in the saddle and getting into some new creative conversations with a new community of artists.

A while back, The Margate School did a shout-out for artworks from local artists and school staff to be featured on a newly-funded exhibition space on New Street in Margate. It was with proper surprise I learned via this link that a number of my own images had been selected for the first showing of the New Street Artboards. I’m yet to see the images in-situ, but I’m happy that work produced so freely and directly (and happily) for various Kick-Abouts has made it out of the online digital realm and into a public space. It’s also exciting to see these images at scale, particularly the Brian Rutenberg-inspired image produced for The Kick-About No. 32, which began life as a series of small, quickly-produced cardboard maquettes.

Motivation is fickle, likewise confidence. I speak routinely to other creatives who struggle sometimes to keep ‘doing the work’, to talented people who never feel talented enough, or special enough, or clever enough, or fashionable enough, so come to doubt the value of what they do, or its reason-for-being, or reasons to keep doing. I am most certainly one of those people too, but today, I’m comforted by the idea that work made for pleasure, and work made with no audience in mind, can find an audience and produce an effect somewhere else. I want to say a big thank you to the team at The Margate School for featuring my stuff in this way – and also to those who undertook the thankless job of wallpapering a series of giant posters to a wall while the north wind blew in from the sea.

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The New Street Artboards also include new works by Graham Wood and Brendan Parker, Vos Broekema, and June Mineyama-Smithson, along with two murals painted by Dream Safari and Catherine Chinatree.

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