Rosie Stancer is the embodiment of the idea that with self-belief, motivation and application, anyone can push themselves beyond their perceived limitations and achieve the extraordinary.
Cinders and Operation Moth Ball
December 7th, 2011CINDERS & OPERATION MOTH BALL
Monday. Whistled through London faster than a Schumacher pit stop for meetings topped off with rather controversial private art viewing.
Like the girlie I am at heart, I still found a little black hole of time to seek out a suitable and suitably priced all-round winter party dress. Found nothing suitable for the Explorer’s Reception at Buckingham Palace on Thursday, unless you count a racy little pertex number. Going through clothes racks on fast-forward but all seemed a blur of dull beige, fawn, browns of every description with greys, dull dark reds and the must-be resisted black numbers. About as cheerful as a funeral pyre. Noted with passing interest, that the high street shops are now considerably better value than some of my fav chic 2nd hand shops in Knightsbridge, which seem to have uniformly come over all Chanelesque. Ah well. I’ll just have to nuke some moths out of some of my back-of-the-wardrobe numbers. I shall be Eau de Mothballs but so long as they don’t rip with age as I curtsey, it will have to suffice.
Devoid of any glossy shopping bags I headed into the GV Art gallery on Chiltern Street to peer curiously at the ‘Trauma’ group show. An exhibition designed to understand through art, the various manifestations of trauma both natural and man-made, physical and psychological. I felt quite traumatised myself when led up some wide-slatted stairs in my mini dress horribly close above the heads of guests below, not so much a private viewing as public. Really I was there because the physiological research I log on expeditions pushes my buttons – I find the psychological and physical aspects of coping with extreme situations & reactions (pain, fear, happiness, depression, exhaustion, hunger, loneliness etc etc.) in extreme environments, fascinating and a whole extra dimension in itself to ‘exploring’.
Rather controversially, human skin featured within some of the exhibits. Scanning some earlier reviews, I noticed that some thought this a bit too close to the bone. As I understand that the donors in question gave their willing permission, I wonder where these pious critics were when Damian Hirst used pickled cows without their permission. (although apparently his recent diamond encrusted skull of a baby did elicit horrified responses).
Rumours that Sir Ran might, as before I gather, pitch up but didn’t see him looming around whilst I was there. Very charming owner of the gallery, Robert Devcic, but this Cinders had to hoof off promptly to a train back home to more work and a spot of moth genocide.