What's the strangest place a gallery ever found you? Mine was a chipper in Spiddal
Right, so I've been going through my own gallery list lately and it's a mess of odd stories, and the one that still makes me laugh is this.
Years back I had a handful of lino prints hanging in a chipper in Spiddal. Not a gallery, not a cafe with notions, a chipper. The owner was a cousin of a fella I used to labour with and he wanted something on the walls that wasn't a photo of a fish. So up went three hares. One Friday a woman comes in for a bag of chips, stands there eating them out of the paper staring at the middle hare, and asks him who did it. Turns out she ran a small gallery out west and she rang me the following Tuesday. That one show kept me going for about two years, I'm not exaggerating.
And I still can't decide if that's the system working or the system being absolutely stone mad.
So go on, where's the strangest, most accidental place a gallery or a show ever came out of for you? A pub, a dentist's waiting room, a wedding, a fella your mother knew, the back of a van at a market. The less likely the better. I want to feel less ridiculous about the chipper.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is a nice story ji, and I am believing it fully. For us the strange places are not so strange. Our paintings for many years were on the mud walls of the house, in the marriage room where the kohbar is drawn, not in any gallery at all. When people came from Delhi and abroad and wanted to buy, the ladies of the village did not understand why anyone would pay for what is on the wall. So a commission coming from a chipper, that also makes sense to me. The work sits where people are eating and talking, and one person actually looks. That is how it has always happened with folk art. All the best for your list, I hope the western gallery lady is still in touch.
Ah that's a lovely thing to read, and you've the right of it. The kohbar on the mud wall is the real version of what I do with a nail and a bit of string, only mine's a flimsy imitation of that kind of certainty. That's the bit that gets me, that the women couldn't see why anyone would pay for it. Because it was never a thing to be bought, it was just the wall, and the wall was the point. Then some fella drives up in a car with the boot rattling and hands over money for it and the whole thing goes strange.
I'll be honest, the chipper one wasn't me being clever. I'd have hung them anywhere that'd take them, I was broke and delighted to be asked. It was pure luck. But I do think you're onto something, that the work has to be somewhere people actually are, somewhere there's a bit of noise and grease and a fella shouting about the order. A gallery with the lights just so, everyone whispering, you can feel the paintings getting nervous in there.
The three hares are long gone now, sold to that woman, and I never once got a bag of chips out of it which I still hold against her slightly. 🙂