Easter Monday ... what is destiny ? some weeks back, when most British people (including myself and the government) were still being stupidly blasé about the covid19 virus thinking it happened to other people in other countries, my mum and i were talking about the Jesus thing and his being crucified and it not being a great way to go when she said "well, it was his destiny". Hmmm. Is destiny changeable ? Sometimes in life when things go wrong there seems to have been a horrible inevitability that has brought about the wrong. Sometimes its obvious, a chain of events shows how one decision after another led to the calamity. The same could be said when things go right. Here the foundations for good things were laid. The corner stones set in place with care and so on.
Its easy to look back and say "ah well, if only" but "if only" is no good at all if you fall victim to the wrongs of others. In England/Uk I'm thinking about the Grenfell Fire, I'm thinking about the thousands of Covid19 dead. What if the government had moved sooner ? What if the media had got behind the other man, not Johnson but Corbyn ? What made them make the decisions they did ? Why are we where we are ? And the thread of thought goes way back into an unfathomable eternity of which we are a small part, we as individuals within our own tiny lives, we as a nation, what is a nation ? we as a species, we as beings. Our being is the most important part i think. Being is our common ground. Strip away everything else and leave just the notion that we exist and we find ourselves in unity with all things, the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, i'll spell it out, we, who consider ourselves lords of this earth, are one with all bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral. And in that grand mass of bodies i suspect that the animal bodies are least likely to survive an apocalypse. 
What has that to do with destiny ? Is destiny inevitable or can we change our stars ? When my mother said that Jesus was destined to be crucified because it was prophesied i baulked at the notion that anyone could be born to that fate. Looking at the story of Jesus as i have done over the past few months, i have thought about the trajectory that led him to be who he was. 
In life we meet good fortune and bad. It might seem like being born rich is good fortune but i look at the man we are supposed to call our prime minister and i see a great chubby lummox who has developed a joker's mask to cover his failings. I see a man whose father uses his son's position to platform his opinions. Was it the prime minister's destiny to play puppet-king for men whose ambition was blocked by their lack of charisma ? At what point was he trapped into the being he is now ? When did he begin to become the monster he is now ? Surely no child is born bad.
Being a parent is a hard job. I think of Mary holding her tiny baby, married off to whoever would have her it seems, after, god knows, a rape, i guess, of some sort. I think of this young mother holding the body of her son after he is taken down from the cross. Was his life mapped out not because it was prophesied to be as it was but because his start was difficult ?
When i was beginning to look at the story of Christ i kept finding images of Shamina Begum in the newspapers i was using underneath my plates as i wiped them in the print workshops. I am not saying that her situation was all that like the Virgin Mary's but she and her now dead child were treated without kindness or care. They were just two whose lives are/were considered expendable by the Uk Government, a young girl and her tiny child. Will we look back and say it was clear from the way that our government treated those two that later they would see us as expendable too. Should we complain  or realise that our complicity then has led to the dreadful debacle we are living through now ?
I'm yarning on. Not saying anything that anyone else with half a mind isn't saying or thinking or has said or thought already. Maybe i need to draw back to my project work, how does today's politics connect to my work. I started my MA with the hope that it would give me a year to explore how to tell a story, specifically how to visually represent a story. But stories move. A picture or statue only moves as far as the viewer will take it. 
For my SNU module i've been learning skills using photographs and objects that tell a story to me but how do i let a viewer know that story without giving it to them explicitly. And if i have a photograph of someone other than me i can tell the story from my perspective and i can guess at theirs but i won't know it bodily because each of us own only our own being i think. Jon's ex-wife talked about how if there was something they didn't want in Jon's possessions they might let me have it as a memento. I give her credit for naming the part of my project that is dealing with objects i cherish that recall a moment. I think that her use of language was meant to belittle me and i spit it out on to this blog page feeling still hurt and pissed off. But what made her speak in that way ? What causes a person to be who they are ? Back to destiny. 
In all our life, all the time choices are being made and we don't know the outcomes our choices will lead us to. And i think i have spoken about this before in this blog and most likely a number of times because i am fascinated by maps and the choices we make are markers on the maps of our lives. We stand at a crossroads, or divide in a path, and decide to go one way or another, and one way (or more) is "The Road Not Taken" as described by Robert Frost. 
As part of my Memento collection i have a red doll's shoe that belonged to my doll Matilda that i had as a child. A single red shoe with Cinderella in small capital letters on the back of the heel. I made a mould and have cast this shoe in wax, plaster and bronze tho none of the cast shoes have come out very well. I also was able to have printed 3d replicas of my Caterpillar boots that have walked many miles with me and these too are part of my Memento collection. Lastly i have two small 1940's silver party shoes that maybe belonged to my mother or aunt and were part of my childhood too. My hope for my SNU project was to do something with these but i haven't as yet. I speak of this set of shoes/boots because as i look through the passage of destiny, the judgement calls others have made, and i think that shoes represent our journey and how not knowing another's path to where they are makes it difficult to know why they make the decisions they do. 
Where am i going with this ? I'm wandering i think, and do i keep going or start afresh ? Where am I going ? I think i am trying to find my feet in this strange space we are living in. To validate letting this blog fly. When putting out work for exhibition or even submitting a proposal there is an amount of beavering away, background work, preparation but in the end you have let go, allow that which you've made or propose to make out to survive or fail as it's worth justifies. Is there a measure of destiny in this ? 
A thing born out of the best of us must surely have more chance of survival than that which comes from our worst. Perhaps that is where i am at at the moment and though this blog is perhaps a bit fluffy it is my way of putting one foot in front of another at a point in my life when i do not know how to move forward because moving forward seems to be a blocked path. I come back to my learning outcomes which i don't love but which may be helpful. I think i am being asked how my work fits into unusual contexts and it might seem like this, this virus situation, is the unusual context, but what if this is our new usual how does my work fit into contexts that go beyond the now common online exhibitions, how do i reach an audience outside of that space ? what am i trying to get seen/witnessed ? and who do i want to see/witness it ?