There’s a lot of real poor people in this neighbourhood,’ the shuttle driver says as a desperate woman with matted hair begs at our door. ‘Real poor and real lazy too’. I try not to catch the woman’s wild eyes. She’s filthy and open mouthed. Scabby and scratchy, she appears oblivious to the traffic. ‘Ah [...]
‘The problem with him is he suffers from sexual anxiety’, says one bellman to another as I pass them on my way to the Art Institute. That’s a pretty sophisticated level of conversation, I think to myself. ‘Hello. Welcome to “Working With Ceramic Tableware”. My name is Emma Biggs and for more than fifteen years [...]
I lie in the hotel bed. It is 3.30 am. I am exhausted but sleep eludes me. Tomorrow I teach ‘Working With Ceramic Tableware’. I will be in the classroom at 6.45am. We start at 8.00. Twenty trusting faces look up at me and … what? I think about my preparations of the previous day. [...]
When I set up the workshop there wasn’t an obvious career path to follow in mosaic. That had to change, I thought. Channel 4 had just been launched, and my husband – now former husband — worked in television, for an independent TV company supplying C4 with documentaries. Broad in scope, his interests swam against [...]
In London in the late eighties there was a fashion for the distressed and old. The city was gripped by a frenzy of house buying. Everyone — except me – was feeling rich. The Conservatives were greasing the palms of protest with oil wealth, and half the city seemed to be on the move, trading [...]
‘Do you have a sponsor in Oman?’ asked an exotic voice. ‘Not at the moment’ I said, attempting sang-froid. I gestured excitedly to Tessa, and covered the mouthpiece of the telephone, in the days when it was obvious which bit of the telephone was the mouthpiece. ‘He asked if we have a sponsor in Oman!’ [...]
We had a terraced house. On one side lived Monty, a bouncer at Ronnie Scott’s, the famous jazz club. Monty was an interesting character. He came home late, laughing and shouting loudly to himself in the early morning streets. His car was a boom box. It pulsed and vibrated with music. You could tell he [...]
I worked on my own for about a year. After a while I hired Tessa. I was happy to have her. She was a qualified architect, and understood technical issues. She was paid by the hour. Money was tight, and life became increasingly difficult. ‘Let’s just split the funds when we get them’ she suggested, [...]
In the eighties, the word ‘studio’ was everywhere. Its vaguely arty associations meant it was used to sell everything from real estate to packaging. I wanted a name for my new mosaic company. Mosaic Studio? Over my dead body! It had to be a word that suggested creative endeavour could be rooted in earnest toil [...]
In the heat of preparing for an exhibition or delivering a project, I find it easy to put off petty administrative tasks. Yesterday I dealt with some I have procrastinated over for months. It may be convenient to be too busy for tedium, but behaviour of that kind can have catastrophic consequences. Yesterday I spent [...]