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.

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.

  

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. 

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.       

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 ?