In loving memory of my dear friend Keith Watson
(1961-2023)
Image: Keith Watson. Courtesy of the family.
Yesterday I attended the funeral of my dear friend Keith Watson. My relationship with Keith felt somewhat paternal, he encouraged and nurtured my creativity and skills. Keith was not just a friend but was also instrumental in my career as an artist and so I wanted to share my memories of the twelve years we have known one another.
I first met Keith back in 2011 while I was volunteering for Kinetica Art Fair as a fresh faced university art student. At the time I was studying BA Fine Art at Middlesex University and had become fascinated with using technology to create kinetic sculptures. I was so excited by Kinetica Museum and the possibilities it offered artists to exhibit their work to the public.
In 2012 I graduated from Middlesex University with a first class honours in BA Fine Art and interned for Kinetica that summer. Later that year I became the Studio Manager working alongside Tony Langford, Dianne Harris and Keith on the formidable Kinetica Art Fair 2013 where I also exhibited my work as part of the curated exhibition. Although I still had a lot to learn, Keith took me under his wing, welcoming me into this new artworld. He taught me about managing events, exhibitions, curation and sheer hard work - from which he never turned away. I remember the late nights, grit and determination to get our shows launched and how calmly he handled the pressure.
Image: Visitor with my work Composition X as part of Kinetica Art Fair 2013.
I continued to work as Studio Manager for Kinetica until 2014 and exhibited my work as a professional artist alongside this. Since 2008 Keith had been Public Art Officer at Canary Wharf as well as his work at Kinetica and as part of his role he curated exhibitions and commissioned artworks for the Canary Wharf Estate. As an emerging media artist my work with Keith on the estate was absolutely essential for my early career, without which I may not have continued to survive as an artist in this cutthroat world.
In 2016 Keith invited me to hold an exhibition of works on Level 39 at One Canada Square and thus started the beginning of our working relationship, with Keith as curator and supporter of my practice. That same year Keith commissioned me to make a permanent light artwork from my Composition series, also for One Canada Square. This was one of my earliest commissions which led the way for many more to come such as Sexy Sakura for Sexy Fish Restaurant in 2019.
Image: Composition XV, 2016. Commissioned by the Canary Wharf Group for One Canada Square.
Image: Sexy Sakura, 2019. Commissioned by the Ivy Group for Sexy Fish restaurant.
Around the same time, 2016, I was making a new series of work called the Diffuser series. This series was sound-reactive and was created by using reclaimed metal light fixtures. I remember, so clearly, Keith calling me up one day, he was very excited and said, “You know those metal light diffusers you are using in your new series… well we are renovating a building here and the builders have thrown loads of them out into a skip…they are yours if you want to come down and grab them!”
I leapt at the chance - drove down to Canary Wharf from my studio in Manor House and Keith and I went dumpster diving in the car park, filling my car up with the materials I needed for my works. These parts became my Diffuser works 4-9, exhibited most notably in the Mars and Beyond exhibition in 2020. This year two works from this series were commissioned by a very prestigious new client of mine (whose identity is under NDA until the launch). And a special and unique work from this series was gifted to Keith for his home on finding out about his illness.
Image: D6, D4 & D5 exhibited at the Mars and Beyond exhibition in 2020.
Image: D4, created with metal diffusers reclaimed from Canary Wharf by Keith and I.
Keith was instrumental in developing the Winter Lights Festival held in January in Canary Wharf each year. Light festivals can often be sensationalist featuring work that doesn’t have conceptual or artistic merit but not Winter Lights. It featured the very best artists and artworks from across the globe. Keith’s curation and tireless work on the festival really shone for the hundreds of thousands of visitors that they received each year - it was undoubtedly a success.
In 2016 I volunteered to help Keith at the festival, working with a group of artists from Paris to help turn their particularly tricky installation into reality. The following year, in 2017, I was honoured to be invited to exhibit my work at the festival. I showed a selection of my interactive artworks that had been created over the previous five years. This was the first time that my work was viewed by so many members of the public. Later I found out that my now partner Manuel Jimenez Barrio, (and soon to be husband), visited that exhibition and saw my work before we had ever met each other. So in many ways Keith was not only a champion of my work but also of my personal future too.
Image: Installation shot of my works as exhibited at Winter Lights 2017.
In 2019 I was commissioned to create a sound-reactive piano from my Synphonica series for the ‘Play Me I’m Yours’ piano project. The street piano I created was on display in the Canary Wharf Estate for a year and was subsequently exhibited as part of the Winter Lights Festival that year too.
In 2021 Keith created the Summer Lights Festival. Taking inspiration from Winter Lights the Summer Lights Festival was a public art exhibition across the Canary Wharf Estate of artworks that interacted with natural sunlight rather than emitting light themselves as in the winter festival. I was invited to submit a concept for the festival and was then commissioned to produce Ocean Rise. Ocean Rise is a mixed reality sculpture that highlights the rise in sea levels due to global warming and is accompanied by a soundscape created by my partner Manuel (our first collaborative commission). This work can still be seen on the Estate and was the beginning of the Ocean Rise series and project which led to an Arts Council of England funded community project and a commission for Oslo Kommune to be completed in 2024.
Image: Ocean Rise, 2021. Commissioned by Canary Wharf Group.
Image: Synphonica 0.2 - sound reactive street piano. Commissioned by Canary Wharf Group.
The last time I saw Keith before he passed away he and Maria Mencía, (his wife), came to an event at the National Gallery X run by an organisation I co-founded in 2016 called Art in Flux with my colleagues Maria Almena and Olive Gingrich. As Co-Director for 6 years, I used many of the skills that Keith had taught me at Kinetica to curate events and exhibitions to champion underrepresented groups in the media arts such as; women, disabled artists, LGBTQIA+ and artists with diverse cultural heritage. Keith was such a great supporter of our organisation, attending many of our social and curated events over the years and encouraging us to apply for opportunities in Canary Wharf. The Transformations event was attended by some of the best and brightest curators and gatekeepers in the media arts and I am so pleased that my final memory of Keith is of him in his element, surrounded by artists, curators and friends who all thought the world of him.
Image: Sasha Gomeniuk (Hales) Aphra Shemza, Keith Watson, Ali Hossaini (National Gallery X), Olive Gingrich (Art in Flux) and Ghislaine Boddington (Body>Data>Space) at the Transformations event 2022, National Gallery X.
Image: Keith Watson and his wife Maria Mencía watch the Art in Flux, Transformations event at National Gallery X.
Without Keith Watson my life would not have been the same. Keith’s support and belief in my work as an artist has not only led me to succeed in my career but his keen eye and curatorial understanding has literally shaped the output of my artistic practice over the years. Keith was also a dear friend, we exchanged messages checking in with one another, sharing artworks and exhibitions we thought each other would like and visiting shows together.
Keith was instrumental in not just my life but the London artworld as a whole. He brought digital and media art to the public. He made it possible for artists to not just survive but thrive in a sustainable media art ecosystem that brought creativity and the corporate world together and for that we are forever in his debt.
Thank you Keith so much, I will miss you x
Please consider making a charitable donation to St.Christopher’s Hospice that cared for Keith here: https://www.stchristophers.org.uk/donate