Are you the girl on the poster?

I was on my way to a conference in Australia and I decided to stop for a day in Dubai, and when I got to Dubai, I’d already booked a hotel, and it was one of these airport hotels, it a Premier Inn. So I wasn’t expecting anything grand from the hotel itself, but one thing they did offer was a free shuttle bus from the airport to the hotel. I thought, ‘well, that’ll be nice, because I might want to sleep for a little bit and then go out and see some of the city, and see if there was any possible culture that I could get from a city that was so young where it wouldn’t have been my first choice of places to stop.’

At the bus stand, waiting for the shuttle bus, I met a woman who told me that she was an artist, and she had also come from London, and she had come from a different flight, she was going on the next day to Shanghai, and she was going to (I think) do some research there related to an art project she was working on. So we got talking, and because there was a London connection we got talking pretty much straightaway. She told me quite early on that she was an artist. She was also a photographer and I have an amateur interest in photography, so I enjoyed talking to her. As we were both staying at the same hotel, we talked in the bus about what plans we might have for that day, and she was quite amenable to doing similar things to me, so I said, “well, why don’t we both go together?” and we did.

So we walked around in the peak summer heat of Dubai, like crazy people (no-one else was out in that kind of heat), and I mentioned in the evening I was going to go to the desert. They do dune buggy stuff where they put you in a 4×4, deflate the tyres, and then drive up and down like crazy people, in the sand dunes. And although I don’t really like being a typical tourist, it just seemed like it was something that was different to do that I could fit into my day. And so I thought, I’ll do that and make the most of the day, and then the next day I’ll fly to Australia, and she liked the idea of that, so she came along with me. So I felt as though that meeting had been fairly useful for her. And over the course of the day she told me a bit about her artwork, and I just said, as you would, well, I’d like to come and see that sometime in London, let me know, let me know when you next have an exhibition somewhere and I’d like to come and see. And that was genuine, but it was also a bit of being polite – I didn’t know whether I would actually make it to one of her exhibitions. We spoke about her artwork, we swapped contact details, and we broadly kept in touch when we got back.

Then, about a month ago, I was taking my regular tube journey home, and I saw a poster at my local station, where I’d got off after a day of going to the office. The poster was for some short artistic films that were being projected at a London tube station. And they were on rotation, so there were different artists that would do different films. And I noticed that there was a name on the poster that matched the name of the woman I’d met a couple of years ago in Dubai! I thought, well, that’s probably quite a common name, but also thought, ‘well, I need to interview creative people, and I don’t know if this is the right girl, but I can always send her a message and you never know.’

So I contacted her and it transpired it was the same person. So I then arranged to go and see her film, which I managed to do on the last day that it was screened, and then we arranged and met up. We then met up and she helped me out by providing very interesting and useful interview data! And then, afterwards, on our walk to the tube station, she asked me how I analysed my interview data – which led to me giving her an informal qualitative data analysis tutorial later in the week at UCL!