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.       

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 ?     

Before I go any further with my meandering conversation with myself about identity I want to write up a little bit about the boots and also the Walk a Mile project. 
Quite a while back at the beginning of the summer my facebook-feed threw up a flyer for Zannie Fraser's intergenerational Walk a Mile project, a series of ten free workshops leading up to and culminating in a performance session. Now I don't really see myself as a performer (more about this later) but the project looked really exciting. Zannie is a professional puppeteer working all over Britain using shadow puppets and the project was based around the clothes we wear and the stories that are linked to them. I love clothes, stories, puppets and shadows. And I had crossed paths with Zannie a few years previously when she was researching a work based on Rumplestiltskin so I knew she would be interesting to work with. 
The brief for the first session was to bring an item of clothing with a story. I took my boots, boots that had seen me through the past ten years, four just about identical pairs. Why buy four pairs of the same boot, oh because they fitted like a dream and I don't love shopping but I do love walking. 
The story of these boots really goes back to before I had them. Way back when my children were small and I really was struggling to keep my head above water, I used to read books about the Holocaust. Grim reading you might think, a bit dramatic, maybe. But in bed hungry and cold and feeling wretched and alone they somehow gave me the strength to keep going. I used to think that if people could survive that then i could surely get through what I was going through which was nothing in comparison. 
As a result of reading around this period of history I came across Primo Levi and various books by him including 'If this is Man' and 'The Truce'. One of the things that hit home was how footwear made the difference between survival and demise in the lager at Auschwitz and later on the journey back to Germany. I think good boots may also have came up in 'All Quiet on the Western Front' by Erich Von Remarque which I also read at this time. Anyway the message hit home, especially as I had just spent a winter walking around in boots with holes in the soles because I couldn't afford new ones, that keeping my feet well shod would likely make a difference to my life and ever since then I have had at least one good pair of walking boots. 
The boots that relate to the workshop had only been around for ten years but all of them were/are reaching the end of their days. One pair is no longer useable even in the garden and only two pairs are good for walking, and even they couldn't do the long walks they did back in the day. 
Oh boots. They are only boots, but they are marvellous boots. Boots that hold the memories of that decade. 
One of the things that was very exciting about the workshops was that it was mixed age groups, this is uncommon. The mixing of teenagers with pensioners and myself and Zannie and a couple of assistants in between made for a challenging but very inspiring atmosphere. Sometimes it felt quite chaotic but somehow Zannie would pull us all together and I would always leave with my head full of thoughts brought on by the sessions. Now a month on there are still things that spring back to mind that I'd like to follow through.
But, there was a pitfall, I had seen that the workshops led up to a performance on the flyer, but for a good six or seven weeks I was in denial, I think I was hoping that everyone else would be desperate to be centre stage and that I could hang back in the wings pouring squash or sweeping up or something else kind of menial. However as the performance date drew closer it became clear this was not an option. And I felt unprepared which as someone nervy and unused to performance made the whole shenanigans a tad too much. I bottled it. Or really nearly bottled it.  
But Zannie and her partner Bob came to the rescue, gave up a couple of hours on a sunday mid morning to lunchtime, by the end of which there was something showable. And hats off and gratitude to them for doing that because, as they said at the time, if I'd bottled it I would have been disappointed. 
The night came and each participant and/or piece of clothing got given a moment in the spotlight. And Zannie and Bob showed us the multiple pieces they had been working on which was fascinating and worth the gulping down of stage fright just to see. How they pulled off the show they did in ten weeks is beyond me, I am always astounded at other people's capability and cleverness. Huge hand clap for all the work they put in. 
And oh boots, what a wonderful hero's send off. Those boots have been a part of me and my life. They have been to Cornwall, Devon, Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, the Lake District, the Dordogne, Italy, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Manchester, Bristol, and all over Norfolk and Suffolk and even a little bit of Kent and London. They have seen me through university, various jobs, rapturous love and desperate deadbeat love and heartbreak and coming back to myself after heartbreak, and illness, and from full-on mothering to my children leaving home and on to becoming granny. Those boots represent a seminal chapter in my life, a period in my history when the changes came so fast they were falling over each other, an exhilarating, exhausting and enormous period of time in my life. And so it seems a bit appropriate that I should have had to face up to one more fear to celebrate their being before they take their final bow. 
Thank you Zannie. 

But actually, just because this is part of why I wanted to think about clothes I will post these pictures of the boots that have been my companions over the past ten years and took me walking and most recently were the subject of a short performance piece that Zannie Fraser managed to wring out of me over the course of her intergenerational  project - Walk a Mile - that she was working on this summer in which I was a participant. I will write more about this in another blog post because it was a deep learning experience and I want to make notes about it before it fades into yesterday. But for now ... the boots