Coming back to my blog after a while spent thinking. The format has changed while i have been pondering which is a little disconcerting. This happens on social media platforms too & i know i am not alone in hauling up sharp with a jolt when the change is effected. These things are meant to stay the same. My creature response is similar to my creature response to the aisles in my local supermarket being changed. I mention this because its really not a big deal but it is something that paused me before i started to write and that moments pause has altered the path of my thought thread. 

If my thoughts are like water running in a stream a stop will hold the water back until the stop is overwhelmed, crashed over or else slid round. Thought is a constant, an ongoing movement. The body of us, us being that which is alive maybe, is a mass of thought, a sea, an ocean, a forest or jungle being a sea of green holding, containing the thought of time now, time passed & the seeds of time that will be. This seems like a big thing to make out of a small change to my blog platform changing but its the butterfly in Kyoto effect what i say next is not what i would have said if my blog platform had not been altered. 

This year has been shocking & we have each adapted to the changes imposed on us by Covid-19 differently. Our bubble lives are now shockingly visible. Bubble lives are not a new thing, a workplace is a bubble, a family, a nation lives within a bubble, we have class/wealth separated bubbles, skill bubbles, the sporty, the arty, the musical, the dreamy, the logical, the mathematically minded, the feelings focused. Passing through life our journey takes us towards those we are most like, have most affinity with & as we connect to those the opportunity to meet minds less like ours diminishes.

What had i hoped to begin my blog with was an update of my thoughts, a posting that lets me look back at the past year and i guess that is how i will continue now. The slight alteration in platform format really being no more than a hop over a puddle really. One of the things i have noticed happens to me now is finding myself lost in memories. I don't recall this happening when i was younger but now i find myself in times & places that are my long ago. I wonder if this is a collecting of that which has formed me, a reconciliation with what i cannot change but may now see with eyes & being that is different to the person that experienced the moment even tho the person was me & is me or part of me. I am like a boro garment holding the past, patched up & threadbare in places, still whole in others, a work in progress. Is this how a soul evolves ? 

Looking back at old photographs is a peculiar game, fresh faced we gaze out of the images, a snapshot of a moment that may or may not tell the truth about that time. I have spent a lot of my life longing for another life, i know that is a bad thing, i look back at my life & wish that i had revelled more in the intimacy of bringing up babies but being a single parent i was often lonely, craving adult company & struggling to get by, i smoked too much hash & was lost in a vapid unsatisfying external wannabe lifestyle. I also learned in that time to be content with the small things, began to know my body through yoga, dance & shiatsu, became softer in essence through meditation & have learned (& am still learning) how to express myself through my creative practice & i hope that i mothered my children adequately if not perfectly. 

I wonder if one of the things i struggled with on my MA was how inconsistent it felt with my truth. It may only have been me that felt like this. I struggled with the pushiness, the get yourself seen, put yourself out there, make connections for connections sake, display for displays sake, it felt gross & quite alien to my practice. That is my experience. It is a relief to no longer be swimming in that sea but also my failure to rise to the challenge has knocked my confidence. I had hoped i think to be seen but ended up feeling unseen maybe because i was unable to engage with the modus operandi we were being taught to follow & hold my integrity as a person & artist. 

If i feel like a misfit maybe it is because i am a misfit. Being a misfit doesn't make me a bad person but perhaps makes a solitary life more likely because not fitting i am not a comfort zone. I am quite a lot not comfortable myself, i don't mean i am physically uncomfortable but i am prone to question & doubt. The comfort of certainty is not often mine.

But of some things i am certain. These things are most commonly feelings. I trust my feelings. Trust is i guess a key player when it comes to certainty. One of the things that help me to trust is my movement practice. This lockdown i have given myself an hour each evening to move. I have given myself an hour each evening to move, i have also made it an appointment, a thing i don't change. I did something similar for some months when Jon died & my grief was so vast i needed a holding space. Then, i marked out a square (about 1metre by 1metre) with masking tape & tho my body could go out of the square in space that which was tied to the ground could not. It gave me a safe boundary in a most peculiar time that allowed me to reconnect with life. Similar to now i also fixed a time boundary. There is much to be said for creating self determined boundaries when large parts of life feel (or are) out of one's control. 

Walking is part of my creative practice but i have been lazy about it this year. This is daft, walking would help me stay sane but i can't seem to motivate myself to get walking. I am not sure what the block is but i am giving myself room to meet it in the hope that meeting it i will overcome it. I have found that forcing through blocks does not work well for me. My encounter with my body in my given hour each day lets me come to myself like a sea meeting shore. There are no wrongs or rights in that hour & giving my body control lets my mind free flow in a way that is similar tho not the same as walking and maybe will see me past my block. Yesterday i hit up against some ancient rage, i suspect that will keep surfacing until whatever pain has caused it has been healed. The day before my mind/body working together gave me this: 

step by step, one step after another, and another, and another. step by step, can be fast, slow, sideways, backwards,

forwards, one step after another. the destination is death. the way, life, is the path chosen.

I guess it is a poem tho i am not a poet so i feel shy calling it that. I guess it is just because of how the words link & because they are in a slightly odd shape it feels like a poem & not just notes jotted down tho in fact it is just that. I guess that is what i wanted to blog about today, the comfort that step following step gives me, the uncomplicated ease that the thought of putting one "foot" in front of another without mind for the step after, or step after the step after. This sequence is i think how we lead life, knowingly or not. Who would have thought this time last year that our lives would be being lived as they are now but step by step this is where we have come to. And the course that our steps take now, into the future, will determine the shape of our lives to come. It may seem like all is lost but each one of us has within us that butterfly in Kyoto & our being, our movement may alter the course of the world history whether that being is as an individual or a collective. We are maybe more in control than we really want to acknowledge.

It would be a strange diary if i didn't write about the death of my little cat Comfrey. On thursday October 8th i had to take him to the vets to be put to sleep. He was a brilliant cat and i loved him. They say its the final act of kindness we do for our pets, and maybe it is or maybe it isn't, but it never feels good and the memory of it never feels good. But seeing him in pain and knowing that death comes to only a few of us easily i made the call. Archie took me there because i don't have a car and i didn't want to carry his poor tired little body in a cage in the rain to his final moments and i wanted to be able to cuddle him home. Amis came over before and we cried and he said goodbye, and Rich video called him on wednesday and Jessamy saw him on sunday which was the day when it became clear that he wasn't going to get well again. I spoke to the vet, Tom, on tuesday in a phone consultation he had seen him a couple of times over the summer so he knew his condition and he had been his vet for the past four years. i made the decision that evening knowing it was the best course, it hurt. It feels like betrayal not mercy, but not doing it also feels like betrayal not mercy. 

Comfrey had been ill in January and it didn't seem like he had long to go then but he made a recovery. From then i knew really that i was on borrowed time with him counting each day as a blessing but also wondering if in the morning i'd wake to find him dead, everyday my heart would leap with joy when i came downstairs and was greeted by a little mew or if he came upstairs to wake me. 

The thing with animal friendships is that they are so innocent. I guess being different creatures we are not part of their politics and they are not part of ours. The connection is special if you love them. Watching him go downhill i was struck by the courage of old things which is different to the courage of youth. To be in a body that is letting you down and to keep going, keeping letting good in is no mean feat. 

I don't know how much of this is diary, how much blog, how much me thinking out loud but Comfrey was my Covid companion so it seems right he should have special mention in my Covid Diary. Rest in Peace little one. You were brilliant.  

Dedicated to Comfrey died October 8th 2020

October 10th 2020

Covid19 Diaries - part 3

Also thanks to Archie & Amis for helping me bury him.

....

And in response to stained glass artist Sophie Hussain's kind comments on his facebook obituary

"Sophie Hussain xx he runs past me in the garden when i go out in the dark to check for foxes so he knows it is safe ... is on the wall coming back from a roam ... is in his tiny old poor sad body on his bed in the hall ... is lithe and young and re-meeting his mummy who i had to have put to sleep in summer 2016 ... i hope she is looking after him ... he is a kitten in my son Richard's base drum bashing the skin with his paws ... and snubbing Amis on his way home from a night shift in the small hours ... he is exploring the house and the garden we used to stay in on holiday ... he'll always be my boy xxx"

Here we are in October already and it feels like this year disappeared while i was away. Away where ? No where. At home mostly. Lucky to have a home but home alone is lonely. Sometimes when i am lonely my best cure is deeper solitude, connecting to the place and space i occupy. But the yearning for understanding and witness by another being like me, for exchange of thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams, feels like a trapped flame. Will i ever meet a like companion again ? Has the virus made the lack of such a companion more painful or is it just another environmental circumstance, a convenient excuse for my discontent. Here i am in my life, like a fish in the sea, a bird in the air, a flower in the field, excuse the tired language, but just that, here i am a being in a body within a body like any other living thing and it is life that is the purpose rather than the arbitrary goals i or other people set. My MA fail is a wound that has not healed yet. A flesh wound perhaps but still sore, still hurting. And it is on and on and on with covid and it isn't just the lack of physical liberty that troubles me but that my mind is also feeling trapped. I do not know what to do with these thoughts so i thought i would write them as part of my covid diaries to give them some release and so i have them to look back on later.

Oct 1st 2020

Covid19 diaries - part 3

Rain falling, soft & luscious, i feel the plants drinking it in, bathing in it, bodies meeting, water on leaf, branch, bare root. Last night the prime minister made another speech about covid, i didn't watch or listen, he sickens me. As we enter a new phase of dealing with the virus i hope that me & mine get through it without death or mishap but uncertainty is this year's guest. He/she/they have outstayed their welcome, it doesn't feel good to be permanently anxious. My way of coping is to take each day as it comes & make things as simple & gentle as it is possible to make them. Step by step, breath by breath, & taking time to pause & be still as & when pausing & being still is needed. 

Covid Diaries - part 3

23rd September 2020

Coming out of lockdown. Yesterday afternoon, junkies shouting down the street, fast paced walking in the middle of the road, a small dog at heel.

July 10th

Covid19 Diaries - part 2

...

Because we are still in the thick of a killer pandemic aren't we. And its hard to say "this is the new normal" but this is the new normal: masks in shops and a slight fear when doing something that isn't safely done within my own house boundaries: a bus ride or train trip is risk assessed, a meet-up with a friend or member of my family is weighed and measured to make sure all parties understand that guarantees of clean contact are only as sure as the guarantor's word and integrity. 
The birds still sing tho' not with quite the same great loveliness as when we, man, were briefly silenced. The flowers still flower but Spring has become Summer has become Late Summer will presently be Fall/Autumn. Car traffic has resumed and with it its choking fumes that stifle breath. 
And because the virus is still here, not under control, and in the UK our government is uncaring and unwise, the edge of uncertainty, the knowing how little my life is worth, makes , each day a little odd and sad, and also precious because it could be anyone's last.

July 29th 
Covid19 Diaries - part 2

Today is also my youngest's birthday.

Feels like the season has changed. Not autumn but summer's middle to end. Blowing out wind in the trees, and light coming from a falling sun. I can't think about covid but i will wear a mask in enclosed spaces, for my sake and other peoples, because the virus scares me.

July 4th 

Covid19 diaries - part 2

I come to my blog this morning because i think my mental health is beginning to break. There is a fine line between being able to cope and not. People who are good at masking are often the ones whose line is finest. I may smile and seem ok, and i may be ok, but i may also be covering an inner turmoil, and only the sensitive will notice. And even they, busy with their own lives and handling their own stresses and strains, may not pick up on the hidden trauma. 
Coping is a habit. Learning to cope is a life skill. Fall over. Pick yourself up. Fall over again. Pick yourself up again. If you are lucky you'll have been caught before you fall as a child or held when the catch was not quick enough, this creates a sound base for coping. The childhoods of each of us are different, even within the same family children are treated differently, character and birth order affect this, rapport with other members of the family, and the environment into which a child is born all go to make up a person's notion of themselves and this affects our ability to cope and our life outcomes. 
So i have had a fall. I failed my MA units. Both of them. Four learning outcomes to each, and one marginal fail on each. 3/4 and 3/4. It hurts. I received my marks about a month ago. I am still taking it in. It is hard. But it gets worse. There isn't support from my uni. Responses to emails initially were curt and offhand or just didn't happen. University policy maybe. It didn't help. Eventually they came back with two tasks for me to do to pick up my grades. Two essays that both require time and deep thought. 
I pondered these essays for some days after receiving the brief but i am also currently making work for the Raveningham Sculpture Trail, an exhibition i have been in before curated by Sarah Cannell who is quite brilliant. I have a choice. I can try to do the essays but i suspect i will not pass and the energy it takes for me to do that will mean that i can't make the work for the trail. Or I can not do the essays, accept my fail, let go of my MA. I know that my mental, emotional and physical strength will not allow me to do everything. I will break. 
I had hoped that my university, especially in the peculiar circumstances that Covid19 has created, would be wanting to be flexible around students. Maybe they feel they are. I had hoped that perhaps i could retake the term, but no that's not possible. I eventually picked up the threads with my course tutor in a long and emotional tutorial on Monday. I said what i would most like to do and he intimated that he thought it unlikely but would make enquiries which he did. The post-grad team got back to me and i to them and my understanding is now that if i fail to submit the essays for the tasks set my mark will be down graded to Fail. It is semantics, word-play, both fail and marginal fail are fails but a fail is a harder fall. And because i submitted for last term i cannot re-do the term again. There are forms to fill in. And just thinking about it all pushes me further to breakdown. 
So here is my dilemma. Let me paint a picture. I have fallen over a cliff edge and landed on a small outcrop of rock, if stay here i will die anyway, i can try to climb back up to where i was, i may fail and fall in the attempt, or I can take a leap of faith and go over the edge into the abyss beneath me, it might feel like flying, both scenarios are a risk. 
What do i want ? I want to be able to make the work i am making for the sculpture trail as well as i can. It may or may not appeal to all eyes but i hope that it will make some people happy. It's a take on Alice in Wonderland, a prayer piece, a contemplative journey through Wonderland. Making it is helping me to stay alive. It is about hope, joy and curiosity. Curiosity keeps me moving forward, whats this round the bend ? how is this feeling moving me ? who are you ?
The tasks set by the university are not unreasonable, they are interesting even, and i might at some point do them for pleasure, tho i probably won't, but with a deadline and judgement at the end, and a head that is full of fear and sadness, screwing my head to a table trying to fulfil criteria that i have already failed once is driving me insane. 
Also, I am exhausted. I don't know if others are feeling this way but the huge surge of adrenalin that pumped through my body before lockdown in March and after official lockdown in March, and during that lockdown while trying to put together an online hand-in knowing that it was taking the time i had allotted to picking up the shortfall in my studies (this shortfall was what i failed on), receiving my fail, assimilating my fail and then to this point receiving the tasks asked for if i want to be called good enough, whilst also taking in the peculiar political space we are living in, where the government is seemingly winging it with not much care about who dies or gets hurt but mostly minding the money bags and shovelling what they can into the hands of the people who have put them where they are, has left me brain shattered, bone tired and sad. 
How do i close this blog today. I must close it because i have stuff to do. I suppose that i know that thought is a stream that keeps flowing and, having reclaimed this space as my own and not part of studies, my voice is free again which feels lighter. Covid19 is making me rethink my values, what i want, what makes me happy, not superficial happiness but true joy. At the beginning of lockdown there was a peculiar rapture that happened, humanity silenced and largely stopped created a beautiful void that got filled with birdsong and flowers. It was not that i'd not noticed or loved them before but absorbing nature's grace fed my heart and soul at a time when i was screaming inside, with fear, for myself and even more for my family, my children and grandchildren, mother, father, stepmother, godparents, humanity. Nature softened the edges in a way that university emails and teams meetings did not. 
I wonder now if i should have let go of my MA then, not bothered to submit, i might have made more soul-healing use of my lockdown time, but then i would not have written my term up in my blog which i have a feeling will be useful to me in future for reference, and similarly would not have created my MA page on my website which presently i will need to add an NB to to mark that it was not completed and that my work failed. 
So there i leave it. My head feels softer for writing and that i guess it what i use my blog for, voicing that which i cannot voice to a blank page and letting it go where it will without strictures or edicts. I have learned a lot over the past six months and made work that i needed to make. So although i am marked as a failure. I feel i can hold my head up and say that i tried. Now, back to my cliff edge scenario, what do you think ? jump or climb ? 

Covid19 nightmares last night.
Death, hunger, conflict. Not good.

In the morning bees on the hypericum next to the back door, 
their hum soothes my soul.

And later a male blackbird washing in the birdbath, quite gently for a change, 
quiet water slopping in dull summer light.

I am unsure. The virus is still with us. 
The pain of this moment is intense and peculiar.

June 30th 

Covid19 Diaries - part 2

Reclaiming my blog ... and catching up on the last of my Covid19 diary entries 

Bee in a buttercup. 8am.

May 24th 2020

Covid19 Diaries

...

Thursday night clap,
the last we are told.
Doctors go down on one knee
at the gates of downing street.
A placard reads "doctors not martyrs".
In Norwich 
i look up to the sky
as i always do.
A small half moon
is chalked on the blue blue sky 
and the leaves on 
my neighbours acacia
are lit yellow-green
by the evening sunshine.
Two swifts,
my first this summer,
fly high 
above us. 
I am glad for their lives.

May 28th 2020

Covid19 Diaries

The Acacia may be a Robinia 

...

The Bombus Hypnorum are buzzing around the entrance to their nest. Four, five, half a dozen. They make me think of my friend Susan who told me their name when she visited my open studio in 2014.

May 30th 2020

Covid19 Diaries

Bombus Hypnorum aka tree bumble bee 

...

soften, release

1st June 2020
Covid19 Diaries 

The lovely silence of the beginning of lockdown is done ... builders are back to work and their noise drowns out the birdsong

May 21st 2020
Covid19 Diaries

Blue tit fledgeling in the bird bath

May 14th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

...


Blackbird fledgling fly-hopping from one slender bough to another slender bough in the apple tree while i am hanging out my washing.

May18th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

Its been MA hand-in week. And i have handed in. But after i handed in i realised i'd forgotten to put my Pecha Kucha notes and images in and i wonder what else i have forgotten and if what i have handed in will be good enough to pass or not and i feel horribly sad because i have busted my ass to learn this term and it feels like it may be for nothing. Post hand-in blues.

May 13th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

ASU2. SNU. And here it is the end of this term. The last hand-in blog post. I feel sad because i don't know if what i have done is enough and after i submitted i realised i'd missed things out, the Pecha Kucha presentation for instance and its frustrating and i hope that links to here and my website will be enough but i'm anxious because i didn't submit folders of images and word documents, but it is now in the hands of my assessors, and my horrible lack of certainty in my ability to express myself as i want to express myself is overwhelming. A part of me likes that my submission includes opening one folder and then another to find the work within but i don't know if my tutors will feel like that or if it will draw a black mark. Whatever the result now of my submission i can only hope that the little ship sails and reaches port. And if she doesn't, if what i have done is not good enough i will have to try again. I had forgotten how painful the constant testing of education is. It is what i wanted but now i find it very difficult. Maybe it is too honest of me to say that in blog post that will be read by examiners. But maybe it connects to the themes of my projects this term, the awful stripped down nature of both of them demanding i lay everything bare, not a demand from outside but from within, to expose, reveal, let be seen that which is normally unseen. Why did i go there ? why did i do that ? it may be that having done that, and by necessity not just in the safety of studio space but also now online, i regret being so open. And if i had written what i have written on a word document would i have written it the same or is the nature of writing a public document also part of the process. Does it bring me closer to christ's very public death ? what a daft thing to say, or think, but maybe it does, so much of what hurts, what makes us vulnerable is kept out of sight, hidden, disguised, a part of this terms work has been to step out of the shadows and this too is what is happening here, now in this moment with a sickness that is terrifying, under a government that doesn't care, the good and the bad is now shown up. And there needs to be conscious reflection perhaps, a preparedness to see what we don't want to see. But after we have seen, what then ? 
My sadness today is perhaps also exhaustion, day after day of writing and writing, a term of working my butt off, weeks of re-orientating myself, to a new social climate and a new ask from my course, the same for everyone, and for each one of us something that will have thrown up its own problems. Still it is done. I will only post Covid19 Diaries for now on my blog until i am graded pass or fail. The Covid19 entries are one of the ways i found to make sense of the oddness of now, and my blog is where i put them so i know where to find them for later. They feel simpler and smaller, and i find them more comforting than all of the words i have been typing this past month. So i sign off and close this part of the story with this blog post hoping i have given enough. 

ASU2. I was planing before lockdown to go into the countryside and make shrines in specific places, leave them and return a few weeks later. I wasn't able to do this and then lockdown changed everything so i made three shrines over the course of the weeks to this date that we have been closed in. They are on my website as images too and i think that i will probably look more into shrines and shrine making over the course of my life. 

SNU. Acetates not used for screen printing.

I pick flowers from my garden and put them on a broken slate in front of the mirror on my dressing table. This week i have a big red rose, alexanders and and the green seed heads of honesty in a p.nut butter jar.

May 12th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

...

My godmother died 5/5/2020

May12th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

A pigeon came into my house. Somehow it got through my studio space and kitchen and into the downstairs toilet/washroom without breaking anything. I was upstairs and heard a crash. The cat was asleep in the sun on the bench outside. I found the pigeon. It was very fluttery. But i said shh ... and it paused for a moment that let both of us collect ourselves. Then i put my hands gently around its body under its wings which were outstretched, carried it to the back door, and put it down on the paving stones outside. It flew away straight away.

May 11th 2020
Covid19 Diaries

SNU. ASU2. And what would i have done if time had not been stopped when the country went into lockdown. 
For SNU i had made acetates ready for a screen that i hoped to print in the last week before the holiday. The acetates were of the message in the bottle enlarged and of seagulls. I was looking to layer the colours. I intend to try the acetates as lumens but will do it after hand in for pure pleasure. I had also hoped to make three further copper plates of Jon's hands and the two sculptures in the southward garden i may do this when all being well i return to uni for the final term. I also wanted to have more digital prints made up of the CMYK image, to experiment with screen printing over the top. 
For ASU2 i was going to draw into the hard ground on the copper plates that i made and also to make collagraph plates from the train tickets over Easter with the intention of printing them in the week we returned. It is possible that i was being overambitious in thinking i would get both these projects done in the time that was left. I was also hoping to mount them in a concertina book. I was frustrated not to have done more bookbinding this term but glad that our tutor arranged for us all to have a morning workshop which opened the door to bookbinding and let us peep in. I hope over the summer holidays to practice a little. The plates i was hoping to make will now all have to wait until next year after i have hopefully finished my MA. 
   

SNU. And this. I found a small bottle on my way to uni one day. And I made the silicone mould from it after lockdown. And cast a plaster and an epoxy resin bottle with a message inside (this is the trial run epoxy resin cast, the one that told me i need to put the message in upside down if the bottle is upside down). The second bottle came out quite perfect.  

ASU2. Then it made sense to see if i could make a mould without help at home. And i could. One of the reasons i wanted to do this was because an artist on instagram had posted a lead cast and said it heats at a low temperature and can be cast in plaster or wet sand. I have not tried this but i hope to cast this bowl in lead if i can after testing the process with smaller objects and maybe wet sand first. There are images of the mould making process on my instagram. 

ASU2. Candles. Bronze, plaster, original candles and epoxy resin. 

ASU2. Bronze casts. Glass 1, bowl and base. Glass 2 x 2.

ASU2. Cast glasses. glass 1 tests in slush wax. glass 2 in beeswax and paraffin wax. 

ASU2. I think i am making less and less sense as i am writing this blog/research file/reflective journal. I feel like i may have missed things out but also that time is running away with itself and i need to get the main things down before it is too late. 
To this end i am writing about candles. I made silicone moulds of candles, a beeswax candle and a thin red christmas candle that i found in a drawer with a couple of others. I also cast, using burn out, two beeswax candles that are bound together by flashing, i kept them bound, it felt right. The candles go with the matches i cast last term. They represent light, hope, prayer. A candle is powerful symbol. In difficult times light a candle, if you can't literally light a candle do it metaphorically. And you can be that candle, a light, for someone else too. I wonder if that was who Mary Magdalen was for Jesus.
Just as the candle is a symbol so too is the cup, or the chalice, goblet or bowl. When i was out looking at representations of the stations of the cross i went to Norwich cathedral and came across the cathedral's collection of  silverware. The christian church has hoarded wealth for many a century and continues to do so but the chalices and salvers represent more than their financial worth. They are objects that have been used in ceremony as manifestations of the cup and plate that Jesus offered to his disciples at the last supper. In all the Jesus stories there seems to be the story as it is and then an underlying tone that is not about individuals within the tale but all of us. Any one of us can be any one of  the characters. Stories take us into the mind and body of others and objects within stories carry meaning and take on meaning as a result of the story. The wine, the blood, the bread, the body, for me are like earth and water, but also the symbols that i use to conjure those i have loved who have died, Jon, my granny, my auntie Leska.  
I made bronze cups but only the broken off base of glass 1 is beautiful, the other casts are ok but not great. I made wax cups and discovered that all waxes are not the same, If i had had time i was going to make a latex cup and i would like to go back to ceramics now that i know more about mould making. 
The candles cast well and might be impressive in quantities, tho i think maybe that work has already been done. I am writing now and wondering what i have not written about or recorded and it feels like lots but i think it is not. I hope it is enough. I hope it is not too much. As i have to finish at some point i will turn over the next few blogs to image posts and then maybe end with a what i had hoped to do post to close. 

ASU2. SNU. It is hard to know when this research really ended. I refer readers to my website for my portfolio submission to both units. But as hand in draws close and this and that and something else i hadn't thought of has to be submitted i'll admit to getting in a muddle. It maybe that my SNU practical work and research is mostly documented apart from some moulds and casts that i made after lockdown one of which is still drying in its mould at this moment. I am not sure where the tap chat with The Art Practitioner on instagram fits in but i know that it does. And all the while i am doing this i also have a mind on the work i am making for the Raveningham Sculpture Trail which may or may not go on on site but which i think is likely to happen online if it can't be the experience it was meant to be when the call for artists went out. 
I am making lumen prints with some old photo paper that a friend and fellow artist gave me a week ago and it is linking to the photographic prints because i am using some of the acetates and learning more about positive and negative images. The lumen prints are also the beginning of my masters project because my this terms work was always leading to my masters project and my mind had already cleared a path and stepped into that project before lockdown all it took were my footsteps to follow.
I am not sure if i have put in this blog the 3d prints of my boots. Then as i write that i remember i have. One of the positives about having to do hand in online, and believe me i have sworn about it too, and i'm still swearing and will be until it is done i daresay, is that it has forced me to document my process pretty extensively. I would have handed in my half a hundred or more prints for SNU and moulds and casts and 3d prints and a similar portfolio for my ASU2 and maybe that would have been better or maybe not, what is is. Certainly the feel of things would be different but i think i have grumbled about that in previous blog posts/ research file posts so enough said. 
But another thing that i struggle with and i guess there is no harm in saying it in a reflective journal or research file is that a lot of my work goes on in my head, i'll be running with more than one line of thought at any one time and i don't tend to write most of it down because stopping and writing tends to stop the flow. Having to relive it by writing it up afterwards has been interesting but is it the same as if i had written it at the time. In fact on this blog thread there is now two editions of the same story, the one that is pre-covid19 is the original and the one written up for hand in is the second edition and i haven't yet re-read either to know where they meet and where they part, what gaps i've left. As part of my MA path is to learn how to tell stories, the telling of this very ordinary unexceptional story over again gives me chance to see how a story gets edited as it is retold. This is particularly pertinent to the ASU2 module because it is dealing with the story of christ, birth to death to resurrection, but particularly the stations and so what i learn about myself i also learn about his story. 
The stations is interesting because the interpretations of this short part of his life (and death) have been made quite concrete by the body, the church, that grew up around the man. The gospels it is said were written some time after his death prior to that was the story passed from mouth to ear, how much is true ? When i was researching the stations i visited four different religious buildings to look at the images they had of the stations, most were quite similar but the first that i visited was not, it did not take the vatican story but made up its own modelled but not exactly following the churches line. I liked this work but i met at that church a cannon who said that he didn't like them and i understood. The discrepancy between the story thread of these modern interpretations and the older story did not invalidate them but made them a different thing. I hope that my two versions of my path from December to now are not too different to each other. But having to repeat myself i beg for patience and generosity of spirit from the reader.     

SNU. "me 1986" monotype using plate as matrix, and chine colle using ghost print from monotype print 

SNU. Prints from "me 1986" plate showing first print, a la poupe print, print showing deterioration of plate.

  

SNU. Testing paints, crayons and ink on "Spain Years" print. "Spain Years" print, and altered "Jon" print.

  

I dreamed 
i was given
a very young
bull calf.

I wondered
what i
would do
when it grew up.

May 10th 2020

Covid19 Diaries

SNU. Altered prints. 

 

SNU. Back to the blog spot/research file grind. I have been updating my website. More of that later. Putting my MA term 2 portfolio into slideshows that hopefully will give some kind of sense of what i've been doing this term along with this blog and the SNU essay.
Having left this blog a few days i will need to run around a little to try to pick up the thread that i've dropped but i think where i've got to is colour. And time back in the print studio. I think that i am at the point in my research where i am playing with the plates that i made of my sons coming down the stairs from an aeroplane, and my sisters and i and our neighbour, and me in a very deep bath with my mum holding on to me from the side. And also the plate of Jon. And two plates that i made from the same photograph of me in 1986 that i made the CMYK print from. One of the whole photo and one of the wallpaper.
I will begin with print of my sisters. I think that i am not very good at applying aquatint. I think that i put the plate into the box when the dust is still too thick. I had hoped after Easter to go back into the studio and practice this but lockdown put a stop to that. I will do it when i get back to university. It will be good to start the new term that way. I think that i am not very good at applying aquatint because the plate of me and my sisters, and me as a baby in the bath never printed well and began to get messy very quickly. As did the plate of me in 1986 which gave me only two prints before it was obvious that the darkest tones were perishing. I made eleven prints in all including three chine colle, three a la poupe, and two inked as mono type. At this point although the deterioration suited the image i chose to stop because the plate getting spent and i liked the plate as it was, slightly trashed. Copper print plates are kind of beautiful in themselves. The plate of my sons was also patchy. 
However the good thing about prints being poor quality is that they feel less precious. I wanted to experiment with ways to colour a print after it had been made. I tore up one of the prints of my sons into five pieces, keeping one as a control piece i worked into the print in different ways. I had hoped to do more of this over the Easter holidays but cataloguing my work for on-line hand in has taken up the time that i might have spent making work so i will do this over the summer. The piece that i liked was not coloured but drawn on with a fine rotring pen. i would like to do more of this. 
I also decided to scribble out my face on the picture of me and my sisters and neighbour. It felt like an act of violence. Later i made a viewfinder and explored how it felt if i cut out my sisters. Again it felt violent. One of the things i have been addressing as part of the emotional process of this project is my relationships to other people. I often felt unwanted as a child and to date i still struggle with this feeling. Taking myself out of the family picture was, after the initial shock, quite empowering. A choice to not be part of the picture rather than painful exclusion. Removing my sisters was also empowering, it reflected how i feel about them, separate, other. Addressing issues like social exclusion that are common and difficult make art useful. If i show my small print and one person sees it and understands then the work has done it's job.
There is a history of artists working over work, sometimes to make better a painting but sometimes an artist/artists use others work and make work over. Jake and Dinos Chapman did it with Goya prints and also a dot to dot book. I saw this work in exhibition some years back it was good, it was fun. Jenny Holzer redacted pieces of script, very pertinent to now tho she was making this work some years ago. And using packaging, and cutting and snipping, and working into old text, can all be effective and cathartic to do. Collage is something i want to explore further. The chine colle prints that i made feel like a beginning of a new creative path that i hope to explore over the next year using print as a part of the mix up and mash.  
The chine colle prints came about because I was working into the plate of "me 1986" with colour, being subtle at first, and then less so, until i stopped trying to be subtle and went wild with the colours that i'd mixed up, and painted the colour on to the plate with my finger, i took a ghost print of the first inked plate on tissue paper, and two ghosts from the second, these then all gave me opportunity to chine collie the last three prints that i made with the plate. Each of the chine colle prints was different. I have portfolio-ed my favourite on my website so will give a different one on here. 

End of April to the 2nd of May. 
Squirrels !
Two babies and a mummy.
In and on my neighbours roof.
Sweet but bad.

2nd May 2020
Covid19 Diaries

...

I made thyme, chestnut, almond and honey cake.
May 5th 2020


Covid19 Diaries

SNU. ASU2. Boots and shoes. Imagine walking in someone else's shoes for a while ? How did it feel ?

SNU. ASU2. You might wonder why i keep slipping in diary entries into my blog. I am noting them down because i have a mind to make a small book or pamphlet of them at some point, to have on record this moment in time and how it was for me. I see that this is what artists all over are doing. Its an obvious impulse how creative people manage disruption is to meet it with hands open. The virus is what it is. The governments response is what it is. We have little say about the external circumstances we find ourselves in but we do have control over our internal response. One of my other external circumstances is this hand in. It has to be done. It is frustrating because my heart wants to paint and draw but what i have to do is tap tap on a keyboard. Writing out what i had hoped would be seen. And then after i've done this i will likely have to write it out again to save my tutors the bother of reading it all tho i will hand it all in. 
But that is as it is. The covid19 diary is a side project but it is also connected because it is happening now and everything is tied to this virus. Our befores and our afters presuming we have an after and don't die. I'm using the royal we i guess we are all in this together but also we are not. Another thread i have come back to over and over again the notion of being in someone else's shoes. It is the capacity to see this that seems to be the crux of the problem with man as a species. We do know it. Babies will cry if another baby cries, empathy seems to be mostly innate but somewhere along the lines it stops to a greater or lesser extent. It ties in with the collaborative project about how homeless people are seen/witnessed/judged. It ties in with the way that i have begun to illustrate the stations of the cross. It ties in with my childhood and my relationship with Jon. Is it just too much effort in a world on sensation overload, is it a thing that we drop to survive, looking away because looking asks us to feel what we would feel if we were in their situation. I had printed some little caterpillar boots because boots and shoes are a bit of a leitmotif for me. The boots were the subject of work i made for a multi-generational series of workshops in 2017. And are the beginning of my masters project which is suspended until lockdown is done. The silver shoes are a memory, another part of my childhood, and i've put up an image because i was hoping to work with them but the lack of time mean they are just part of the picture, the packet of seeds not sprinkled or planted. They connect to the red dolls shoe and the boots and where that story will go is not known and likely will drop to the bottom of the stream to be picked up sometime later along the line.       

The government are saying they will give 60K pay offs to health and social care workers who die because of covid19 as if money can replace someone you love. I think it is hush money, don't make a fuss money. I don't think this is ok. I'd like to know what health and social care workers and their families think.

Covid19 Diaries

27th April 2020

SNU. Very simply a dusky hopping mouse. Because the event was cancelled before i made my shield i did not make my shield but i did draw a dusky hopping mouse. The dusky hopping mouse notomys fuscus lives in the australian desert in burrows in groups of up to five. It does better where the dingos are let be because the dingos stop the introduced predators catching the mice. 

SNU. ASU2. Now i am going to pick up some loose ends. Blogging the terms progress has been, along with making the work, a learning process. I know that i will have to write it over again but having started this way of retelling the story i need to make myself get to the end. I am counting down days now to hand in which means i may pass through this sketchily so i have time to document in another way that meets my tutors asks more succinctly. Each way is a retelling. I guess that i came to my MA wanting to learn how to tell stories and this is one way of learning what works and what doesn't. 
A part of this terms learning outcome demands was to engage in new and unusual ways with an audience. The brief is as wide as the takers imagination. Most of my previous work exhibited work might be said to have been in unusual contexts and stretching the notion of textiles and sculpture, from temporary site specific pieces (2015, 2016, 2017 & 2019) to dialogical happenings (2017) to my human rights act project (2015). I wanted in many ways to make work that i could sell because selling my ideas is costs, it is great to be exhibited and to have opportunity to offer ideas to an audience but in a world driven by God-money it means that i am always subsidising my work and i need it to pay for itself. I wanted to know how to make smaller pieces that held their integrity but were work i could sell. I have not yet learned how to do this. Even the way i have blogged my whole process this term is giving away free my life story. Isolation ironically is forcing me more into the open. 
Before isolation I had already applied to be in exhibition at the Raveningham Sculpture Trail (still happening) and the Bishops Art Prize (postponed) the Self-Love exhibition (accepted then rejected) and to be part of the local XR group's Pilgrimage of the Animals (cancelled). 
As part of the Pilgrimage of the Animals i acted as helper to local artist Maria Paveledis when she led a printmaking workshop. It was good to learn from an experienced workshop facilitator and because it was held at St Peter Mancroft Church i also had opportunity to speak after the workshop to the ministers of the church about art, politics and Christianity. The pilgrimage was to have run from the cathedral to the church with stopping points for contemplation and each participant was to make a shield bearing the name and image of an endangered animal. Mine was a dusky hopping mouse. To get to know our creature we were advised to look up our creature in order to know it. This is how to engage, knowing gives insight, and insight understanding.
One of my tutors recommended i go in the direction of dialogical art and i have been researching people who practice this from Yoko Ono to Miranda July. I need to give more time to research it is always hard to strike a balance when studying between thinking and doing. I think i engage in this practise all the time but i have also been a dialogical happening in exhibition before (see above & 2017). It is interesting work but it is a physically and emotionally demanding practice i found. Maybe i need to find a way to practice opening dialogue in which i am less important. To create the space rather than be the focal point. Maybe that is what i hope to learn in the course of this MA. How to open a door or a window that lets people through, in or out but which doesn't demand that i always take that journey with them or if i do it is as a subtler presence. 
I ought to know how to do this. It is part of my shiatsu practice. To meet. To witness. To engage and connect, to see, hear, feel, a clients patterns whilst maintaining a border that protects both my client and myself. To touch with weight that is weightless. To make contact without making contact. Maybe my next step of learning in my creative practice is to find a way to make art that is like that. Art that has boundaries that act let the wind though a hedge or a wire between posts rather than a wall. I need to learn what kind of boundary is appropriate for what and for when. Boundary or space. I guess there is an element of this in the learning outcome ask. 
I must ask: where does my work belong ? How does it fit ? Can i make it fit ? or is it better to find a place where it fits ? Is it better to be seen in the right place by fewer people or the wrong place by a larger audience ? Who is my audience ? What is it that i am trying to communicate to those who see my work. Do i need an audience ? If i need an audience why do i need an audience ? Its that old chestnut if nobody sees a tree fall does it still fall ?