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 ? 

ASU2. I feel with this blog now a bit how i did months ago when i was at this stage of the term, my head spinning and like i have too many balls up in the air. I was aware that i had done very little for my ASU2 project. Remember, The Stations of the Cross. I'd been thinking the story, walking it through in my mind, the last days, Jesus' in the desert, Jesus' ride into Jerusalem, Jesus at the temple, the last supper, Mary Magdalen washing his feet, the conflict within his inner circle, the shared meal, the feeling of foreboding, Jesus talking about betrayal, "one of you shall betray me tonight", "one of you shall deny me before the cock crows three times", the blessing "eat, drink, this is my body which i give unto you, this is my blood". Who knows if he actually said those things but this is the story that has been passed down through the ages. 
And then Jesus and his disciples leave to go to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray to contemplate or maybe just to hang out, a group of twelve men after supper taking a walk on a warm evening or night, was it warm ? or was there a chill or a breeze ? maybe there was tension in the air, did they feel Judas' absence ? did they care that he was absent ? Was he the fall guy, the mate that got pranked and teased ? Was he fed up with it ? Was he jealous ? Jealous of Jesus ? Jealous of the other disciples ? Jealous of Mary ? Was he a bad tempered lout ? or too stiff for the group ? or too sensitive ? what made him give Jesus to the men of the temple ? what drove him to do that ? his suicide after suggests he regretted it ? was it an impulse ? a fuck you ? a cry for help ? a please see me ? his name has gone down as the name of a betrayer but maybe he too was destined for the role he plays in the story, maybe his life led to his end as inevitably as Jesus' life is led him to his. 
Jesus went with three of his friend to the mount of olives. I guess they were the favoured few, the inner circle. I imagine him looking out across Jerusalem, the sounds of city at night, animals, insects, and the small lights of windows, fires, the smells in the air. I feel him to be tired and sad, worn out with being idolised, by crowds and even his friends, i feel like he is thinking that the show is over. I don't know if he knows he is going to be crucified. Maybe he thinks he will get a hard beating and that afterwards he'll take his girl home and let go of his boyhood. Or maybe the atmosphere is so weighted its hard to ignore the feeling of impending doom, the dark politics that require a sacrifice, a scapegoat, an example to be made, rebel and you'll suffer, see, see how this man you all thought was great can be taken down, can be shamed, can be broken, can be killed if we like. 
At last as dawn is breaking Judas comes with the temple guards. He greets Jesus with a kiss. The kiss is the sign. This is the one. How does that kiss feel ? is there a moment of love between the two ? a warmth from that contact that strikes like a knife ? the guards move forward to arrest Jesus, one of his friends, Simon Peter ? steps forward and strikes the guards ear with a sword or a knife, protecting his master, the leader of the gang. Jesus remonstrates. He knows now that some rough justice is to be handed to him. Does he know that fighting is pointless ? Does he seek to spare others ? Why doesn't he fight ? Why does he yield to punishment ? Does he feel he deserves punishment ? What is his back story ? What is he thinking. The guards take him away. Peter denies him three times before the cock crows, realising only on the third crow that it was he his friend spoke of. Or was the story made up after. Stories are fluid at their beginning, it is only later that certain parts become set, the bones of a myth. 
And I am thinking about this part of the story of Jesus and i'm thinking that i want to make fourteen, or maybe fifteen if i include the resurrection, prints each depicting a station. I am thinking that i want to learn how to do drypoint on a copper plate and also how to make hard ground plate. These are pretty much new to me processes, i have done a little drypoint a good decade ago on aluminium and plastic but nothing really since, hard ground i have never tried. 
I am feeling exhausted and my nerves are rattling particularly because of the collaborative project so i ask to be excused from a taught session because i know i need to drop down a gear, i cannot take in other people's seed ideas and i cannot let mine out without losing it. I should not have asked. I should have just taken. I thought i was being polite. I regret trying. I stop trying. I hate everyone because all i wanted was a moment to breathe and because i asked i have less moments. It is resolved now. covid19 makes before covid19 feel like years ago, another life, but i write it because it was part of the process. 
I took the time tho i was told not to. And let myself scratch into a small copper plate front and back and an aluminium scrap too. Not good work. Resting scribbles.
The following day I took two scrap copper plates of the same size and worked on the back of one in drypoint with Jesus' face showing as Judas comes to him and worked into hard ground on the other with Judas' face as he approaches Jesus. Then after the hard ground was etched and cleaned i printed from them, one print each, and wrote on them to show what i liked and what i didn't, what was a typical drypoint mark and so on. The following week i worked into the plates again rubbing out parts and making further marks. I did not have time to write on them. I had planned to keep working into them. But there is never enough time. I printed on two types of paper the second time to see how that changed the prints. The prints are not good work, they are working work, learning work. I like how they look with the writing.     

This blog is me trying to get to grips with handing in the work i have made this term. I am using my blog today because i feel all at sea with this hand in. Until the covid19 virus i was on a trajectory to hand in physical documentation. And I had a mental trajectory of where i was going to take my work. There is nothing i can do about the change of circumstances, they are what they are, i/we will have to wait it out hoping that the people we love get through this and feeling bad for those who lose their lives and their bereaved families and hoping our minds and hearts can bear what is happening. We are supported, or not, by our governments and those who have control over our wellbeing. 
One of the bodies that has control over my wellbeing is my university. In order to finish this term i have to submit the portfolio of work that i would have given them as a physical body as an online catalogue with a description of how the work was made, why, what i learned, and what i was planning to do, but not necessarily including work i made after lockdown tho of course it is relevant to the work i was making before tho not the same. If i had made less work, worked less hard, this would be an easier task. As it is i put in the hours and built a good physical portfolio made to be seen and handled. 
I am glad that i only missed one of the timetabled sessions with tutors, it means that if they were paying attention they have seen my work on paper, not just as photographs. Photographs are a good but limited format, bad work can be made to look better and good work rarely looks as good in a photograph as it does in reality. Photography can of course be the medium an artist uses and that is another matter. I have been exploring print, using photographs, perhaps i should enjoy the circular journey that necessity has forced upon me but to date i am not, its annoying, frustrating and saddening and is forcing a long dull path on me that i have no choice but to follow if i want to pass this module. And heaven knows if i will pass because i'd worked my butt off during the term and was planning to do the reading and writing in this time which now i have to use to essentially re-do the work in a format that allows my tutors and their assessors to see what i have done. 
I think i am going mad with this submission. I don't know how many people have died from this virus so far 13,000 or 14,000 and still more every day to date i think in the uk alone. Learning outcomes feel like part of a world that is no longer fit for purpose, a world that will need a new score, a new way of recognising value that is not tick boxes and bean counting but built upon worth that is clear in the way that birdsong, butterflies, love and care are clearly worth something and badges, medals and political platforming and promises aren't. 
I guess this blog is an introduction. I am handing in these blogs as my reflective journal. God knows the blogs at the beginning of the term will probably seem as irrelevant as the marking system i'm struggling with. I know that i have no choice but to walk the designated road to submission on May 14th because if i don't all the days before will be erased from my work sheet and i will have to start again but if this blog is anything its an explanation for the next few blogs being a bit stiff. If you are reading this and are a regular reader you may want to skip the stiff pages. And if you are one of my tutors or an assessor and obliged to read the whole shebang i hope that it passes muster and that i don't repeat myself too often tho' i suspect that i will by accident because not having designed my hand in to be handed in in this way i am building with materials that were made to be shown in a different way.   

I am hoping that if I jot down a few words, a few more will follow, and if i let them flow out of me maybe i'll find a way to take in what is going on, inside me and outside me. This is British Summer Time weekend. The hour springs forward as if nothing has changed but everything has changed. Everything is strange. This afternoon i thought "its Sunday, what am i doing on Monday ?" but one day is not so different from another. I will try to pull my next week into a more work-shaped form because i think it will help me to re-orientate myself to how things are now. 
This week past tho' has been about absorbing and assimilating. I had tutorials on Wednesday with my uni, the first one reduced me to tears because the tech didn't work and so for twenty minutes we tried until i broke down and said that all i wanted to do was cry and it was hard to see the point of learning outcomes. Full credit goes to my tutor for being patient and understanding and sending me a helpful email and letting me answer it in my own time. I think everyone responds to stress and/or change in different ways i have needed to go inside myself to find out what is happening there before venturing into the big wide world of zoom chats and video link-ins.
My MA is now to be done online and it feels all wrong. A communication  design student from the RCA made an instagram post that was about online art school not being art school and i'm inclined to agree with the gist of what was said. I know that what my course leaders are putting together is the all they can do, that corvid 19 is circumstances beyond their control, but a cobbled together online course is unlikely to be worth £2.5K, the value of the course was for me access to equipment, expert technicians and material resources at an affordable price, also interaction with other students MA and BA from first year to third, we learn from each other, its a creative network that cannot be replicated online. I hope that the university will find a way to compensate students who stick with them rather than leaving or deferring. Perhaps they will offer students what they have missed out on for a further term or 6 months maybe after their course ends. This would be fair and honourable tho' I doubt that they will offer this if students don't ask so next week i shall have to write to ask. Thats assuming that i'm here next week because the scary thing at the moment is no one really knows what the next few weeks and months will bring. 
The ideas and processes i was previously working on are mostly in arrest at the moment, the planned creative trajectory stalled.  The new work that needs to be done for me to get through course units is cataloguing and writing up which makes my heart sink, handing in a digital folder rather than a body of physical work, feels dry, cold and stiff. I am trying to think of ways to do this that allow me to own my submission to love what i'm giving to my tutors to assess rather than dutifully ticking the boxes which is how i feel at the moment. 
Oh listen to me, people have lost their friends and family to date well over a thousand people have died from this virus in the uk alone how can anything be more important than that ? And world wide it goes into tens of thousands and is set to rise steeply for some time. Trapped inside today I have been watching Born into Brothels a documentary about a photographer who went to live in one of India's infamous red light districts. As she photographed the women's lives she got to know the children there, a group of whom she became particularly fond of through teaching them to take photographs. I would recommend this film, it is humbling on many levels. 
Last week i was speaking on the phone to my godfather and we were of course talking about the virus, it was why i phoned. We agreed it was scary, it is. And then he spoke of India and called to my attention the horror of Covid in the slums of India where people live cheek by jowl, then an instagram post came up on my facebook thread saying much the same thing, how self isolation is in fact a rich person's luxury and so it feels. 
Those on the inside are fussing about cleaning their houses, entertaining children, occupying time and feeling the weirdness of their strange incarceration, it is strange, it is uncomfortable. Meanwhile the essential workers, nurses, doctors, shop workers etc are on the outside with letters showing they are essential  There's a new them and us, the inessential workers safe but imprisoned, and the essential workers, heroic  in their activities. we are living in different worlds. I wonder how we will reconnect when all this is done.  Surely it has to be the beginning of a new world order, a new understanding that the values we have been living with can no longer be tolerated.  
I hope if you've read this far you'll forgive me for returning to my journey through the stations of the cross. At the beginning of the week my meditation which has lasted some months now had me with Jesus dying on the cross and then being taken down, with his mother holding her lifeless son in her arms after he was taken down, then the man, the body, the corpse, laid in the tomb. This is where the stations end tho sometimes they are finished with a resurrection scene. Here in my necessary solitude i could be Jesus in my tomb. We could all be. Our time entombed could be a time for contemplation. A meeting of grief, the emptiness, the loneliness, these feelings give way to change, there is no choice, change will be. 
I think this week i amongst others have been preparing myself for grief, i don't know if i'll see people i love again and it hurts, i want to be able to give my mum a hug, even if she and i fight passionately, i still love her, she can be sweet and funny and wise. Likewise my dad and my stepmother and my godparents and oh my god my children and my grandchildren, please may they pull through and my ex husband, and my friends and all the people they love too and so on and i imagine most are thinking along these lines. Please let my family be safe, please let them be well.  
I step away from the stations because the moment takes over. Art is just art, to be relevant it must meet the moment i think. If the moment changes then the art must change too which means that as i look at the body of work i have made this term, and there is good work, i need to see if the good work still stands as work that meets today or if it is still good work but good work that belongs to yesterday. How do i know if it still stands only time will tell. The wheat is being sorted from the chaff. The chaff will blow away in the wind only that which is good and of worth will remain.  

It would be a bit daft not to mention covid 19 aka the corona virus in this blog. I am in England and it has begun to take lives and there is fear in the air. We saw China lock down Wuhan and we thought this is a Chinese thing, then it shifted to Singapore and we thought it's an Asian thing. Then it hit Italy and still it felt like something that happened to other people. Oh the innocence. Oh the wilful ignorance. 
A week ago when i was writing my blog i was blithering about this and that, all relevant then, all relevant now, but also very yesterday. To coin a phrase "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". Britain is discovering who it is in crisis. Each of us is discovering who we are when trouble hits the collective. My university is apparently still opening on Monday. Academics are now teaching online - I imagine this will feel weird - but technicians are required to come in as the workshops will be open. Is this right ? I guess that what we see as all but essential workers pull in is who is essential and who isn't. I went in to uni on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week as i had things i wanted to finish or at least saw off their sprues and pouring cups so that i could take them home. I also had a few print things i wanted to do. On Monday I questioned my decision but also had shopping etc to do, by Thursday it began to feel really socially irresponsible to be doing things that were not essential and so from Thursday evening i have seen and spoken face to face with no-one. 
Ordinarily this kind of solitude would be something of a treat. I am reclusive by nature. I need solitude as much as, maybe more than, i need company. But in the current atmosphere its a little scary. Rough voices on the street outside on Friday evening remind me that not everyone has pulled in. Friday was supposed to be the last day of trading for pubs, restaurants and bars. I gather that many were packed. Of course they were. 
Of course they were ? Why ? Because for some the response to the proximity of Death is to want to go out in flames, do or die, i live to live let Death take me if he can. Why is Death male ? Is Death male ? I am shyer of his embrace. In retreat i worry that i have a temperature, is that a tickling cough. Will I die ? Am i strong enough to beat the thing that threatens my, and others, existence. 
It is odd to be so close to a disease that may or may not be biblical but surely is a reminder that many years ago disease took more of us than most of us can remember, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis all common enough, my grandfather's parents died of TB leaving him an orphan at 17. Hard to imagine but TB has become a hidden killer in recent times, some strains resistant to antibiotics. Please fact check me on this. 
Death has stalked me all this year, in the form of grief for Jon, yes years gone now, but not forgotten and still loved for better for worse. And also poor Jesus sentenced to death by crucifixion, carrying the bloody cross to the site of his execution. This week i have been dying on my cross, it can surely only get better from there. Stations 13 and 14 are "Jesus is taken down from the cross" and "Jesus is laid in the tomb respectively". The resurrection is optional. I have cut out 14 pieces of copper and covered them in hard ground and i hope to scratch out marks on these over Easter. But whether i do the resurrection will depend i guess on whether the resurrection feels pertinent. 
The Easter story is a potent tale. It is one man, calling out for justice, willing to carry the sins of the world on his shoulders, to die for that world. Make no mistake this is a hero. No wonder the story has lasted. Its a shame he has too often been poorly represented by his priests and worshippers. 
One of the things about stories that last is that they resonate. They resonate with a part of us. My blogs about grief and Jon have had more hits because people relate to the story. Lovers torn apart, death, grief, all these things are invested in our body memory. If we have never loved, we may long for love, if we have loved we may feel another's pain, if we are a wretch we may scorn love and the ring is different but the call to our hearts path is still clear. 
Here i am blogging, let me say its my reflective journal. Because i went in to uni last week i have lots of bronze things to finish at home, they would have been finished amateurly even with Jim's help and guidance in the workshop at home their finish will be even less well executed but they are symbols of my trying. I doubt that it will be clear how much work i have put in in a digital portfolio. That's sad but not the end of the world. This term has been hard it has taken resolve and determination to carry on. There have been falls and i have had to get back up. But what i know is that in my body like invisible ink i carry the work i have done. This i think is all we can ever take out of life that which we have done is ours to bear. 
I think its awful that Jesus had to carry the sins of the world. I think if God was his father and made him do that then he was an awful father. I think that each of us must carry the weight of our being. Not in the manner that Thatcher's selfish-me-first cult decrees but as our belonging, as our knowing that that which we are is the trace that we leave behind when we die and to be mindful of the trace we leave for it makes a difference.