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 ?     

Thinking on. I realise that i have spent a large part of this term railing against my university and the binds and rules that it as an establishment body asks me to adhere to. I guess this is what happens when you pick a rebel as your inspiration. Jesus has become a somewhat watered down rebel over the past century or so in art in Western culture, bizarrely pale complexioned, often blue eyed and blonde, generally he looks a bit wet, fit but wet. The Jesus i have encountered through research including deep meditation is nothing like that milksop. I don't think my Jesus is much like Tony Blair's or Theresa May's or the awful banker turned bishop, Justin Welby, who threw in his lot with the Conservatives at the last general election aware perhaps of how tied up the Church of England is with the moneyed elite. 
As I have walked the Via Dolorosa with Jesus these past few months i have found myself beside a man who took on the establishment, who spoke out against injustice, who was betrayed by Judas, who was betrayed again by Peter. I met the most celebrated women in his life, Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen whose relationship with him is subject to debate. I met too his fearful father, not Joseph, tho' maybe Joseph, the man who married his mother but God the father. Who is this wicked character that would send his only son to suffer for the world ? Why do the strong always ask the weak to carry the load ? I think of priests buggering children, and those children silenced, carrying that rape as their crime, their sin. I think of the rich sitting on the backs of the poor. And i know that tho' i am not filthy rich like Branson or the Wetherspoons man, or the Tory cabinet, still my wealth, my wardrobe, my spanish strawberries, my kenyan green beans, my tea, my coffee, my so-on and so-on are the produce of someone else's underpaid labour. Is that right ? No. 
I came to the end of my stations meditation on Passion Sunday. The day given to mark Jesus riding in to Jerusalem to crowds lining his way, laying palm leaves before him so it is told. They wanted him to save them but he was only a man. The reason the images of the stations of the cross began in churches was because most parishioners did not have the money to spare to go on pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem and so these stood in their stead. I have been to see four sets in different churches, the fourth moved me to tears and i hope to return to look at them when England is open again. Journeying with these images has allowed me to feel the passage of christ's path to the cross. 
In Colm Toibin's Testament of Mary, which i wish i had a copy of, his mother gets thoroughly fed up with him. Its a reasonable maternal response to a son who is pushing his luck with the law and questioning and defying authority. Just as Jesus is depicted as being pretty fine with his suffering especially in recent years, his mother has also been made to be compliant and accepting. How convenient for the patriarchy as symbolised by God that these two take their punishment for existing so gently. 
Many years ago i made a nativity scene including, obviously, a Mary figure holding her baby, Jesus. As a link between my ASU unit and my SNU unit I asked Steve, one of the 3d workshop technicians, if she and another old made-by-me ornament could be printed on the 3d printer. One of the joys of this printer is that the objects can be sized up and down. Another is the scaffolding the object needs to be printed. Mary being fairly compact needed not so much, but the two figures in a sympathetic embrace needed loads. Why do i speak of these now, except as a link between my two units ? Why ? Because the scaffolding made me think about how much we take from the earth to support that which we raise above the earth whether that be high rise buildings, space travel or a billionaire lifestyle or aspiration to that lifestyle and worship of money. 
It seems to me that the bible is pretty clear that when man gets above himself and starts to live an insupportable life, God turns on man. Perhaps this is the moral of the story of Jesus. Here is a man named the son of God, as we all are sons or daughters of some kind of god i guess, if god is creation and not obliged to belong to a single faith or religion. This son of god, a man who had the courage to stand up and say "no", was prepared to die for his right to speak out. Why then are those who profess to follow him so abject in their worship of all that he seemed to abhor. Is the cross a choice we have to make ? 
Here as we stand at a crossroads, i am sure now that this virus will separate further humanity into those who believe that others should suffer for their comforts and those that don't. And of those that don't, those too will also divide in two as their response to catastrophes whatever they are. differs and leads them away from each other. Easter is close now. We as Jesus must prepare to carry our cross, the choice we make will be how we move into the future, so we need to choose wisely i think.