When I first met Matt, my lovely artist and art critic husband to be, I shyly confessed to being a birdwatcher. ‘I know it’s a bit strange and nerdy’ I said, ‘but I’ve liked it ever since I was a teenager.’ ‘Don’t worry’ he said racking his brain for precedents of behaviour of this kind [...]
‘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 [...]
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 [...]
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 its finishing stages, I realised that all along, unnoticed by me, our show has a consistent and logical theme. While we worked, the components — paintings, wallpaper and mosaic — seemed more or less disparate. Wanting to create a sense of visual unity, I came up with formal correlates between one element and another [...]
This weekend my step-daughter Babette and I scarcely left the house. Babette has a piece in a group show at the Crypt Gallery, St Pancras, which opens this Thursday. Half-way through her foundation year, she has been hard at work on art school applications, which have to be in today. We broke from our respective [...]
Now and then I am going to look at a single piece of work, and explain the thought process behind its making. This week I am going to talk about my project Made in England. It is the first of five posts. I often explain to students that their work is likely to be most [...]
A problem has developed in the Biggs Collings household. Matt is jealous of my blog. Every time I go near my computer, which like anyone in the modern world, I do throughout the day, for a multitude of reasons, he says ‘Stop blogging. Our show is going to fail because of your blog. You are [...]