I don't know what they can't remember what they called it but ones that didn't want to be into the and go through the judging process they were showing or something yeah just just for just for sharing or something like that which was I thought was a really nice touch because that can be really off-putting to people to know that they're going to be judged and then they get this feedback and it can be I mean I found it quite hard to get this you know middling feedback but it certainly wasn't you know it wasn't enjoyable to receive this you get this little slip of paper when you get your quote back with the sort of tick box where you scored on um certain criteria you know of good average poor or terrible you know i can't remember exactly what they are but it's a bit crushing it's a bit like getting a school report okay

it's well i mean it's a very thankless job being a judge i'm sure it is and you know and they they rely on people who want to become a judge and the judging pool you know like is refreshed by that and I think you know another kind of interesting area would be to have appointed judges or occasional judges you know like so that I mean I do really like the kind of judges choice that they have where individual judges can pick out things that they themselves have but you know I think it's very difficult to work within a kind of constraint that actually in our world today is quite difficult it's not really something that we do very much you know you don't get a school report that looks like that anymore that's for sure you still get that you know it's quite an old-fashioned way of sort of assigning power and you know asserting kind of a hegemonic kind of understanding of what is good and what isn't and and they're sort of working within that you know and there's obviously a lot of kind of pushback that you can place on that in terms of how do you make a judgment and who gets to make a judgment.

Um, I think individual judges, you know, obviously try their hardest within that, but the system is a system, isn't it? You know, and it's very difficult.

I mean, I, you know, I think, uh, we're preaching here a radical gospel.

Yeah.

Which is that there aren't categories that there isn't judgment that there's, you know, like, and it's very difficult to then actually kind of say, well, what does that look like in, in practice? I mean, I think what we're both saying is that what is missing perhaps for us in some senses in terms of walking the kind of exhibition galleries is context.

You know, it's about, you know, what is this work speaking to? What else have you made? I mean, one of the things I wrote on my list when we were talking about doing this podcast was about, you know, my kind of thoughts about visiting quilts at Festival of Quilts was about this idea of quilts as being something that as an artist you make in a sequence rather than an individual object that stands alone in its own you know white wall and you know we don't really have any kind of sense of people's evolution I mean there's a little bit in the book about you know your inspiration and you know, and these sorts of things.

that