Getting creative...

Artist's book (detail) 2012
by Jo Howell

This month has been one of those frustrating ones where you seem to work yourself to the bone doing nothing creative, simply working on all of the administrative boring things that are part and parcel of being a self employed person. Proposals, meetings, think-tanks, research and so on. Do not get me wrong I don't mind that side of the business I just wish that sometimes it was more balanced and that I could be sinking my teeth into something more hands on.

Close, Newcastle 2012
By Jo Howell

So, I have been working on a few things as mere distractions from the real burning issue of finding funding for another Big Picture event this year. I have finished several commercial projects in the form of the children's magazines for National Energy Action, I've worked on a proposal for the Rednile commission with Anna Welsh as a direct result of the Factory Nights event, and I have been finishing up the second artists book for submission in the Sunderland Book Project. On a personal level I have managed to take a few shots like the one above when I was on my way to a meeting!

After all of the business of being strapped to the computer for several days trying to put the waffling rhetoric in my head to good use, I decided to make a short animation with my partner, glass artist Phil Vickery. With no storyboard or real ideas other than "we are going to make an animation" we set to work with a lump of plasticine, a piece of slate, some cardboard space fillers and a cardboard box to make the odyssey below.

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