SNU2. The reason i might have lost the thread is because i am writing up a bit of time in which there was a lot going on and i was mentally and physically exhausted and felt overwhelmed,  vulnerable, strung out and cranky. There were a lot of different tasks and deadlines going on simultaneously. Submissions for proposals for 3 exhibitions each with a different deadline and brief. And the deadline for the Creative Odyssey postcard auction. The UEA/NUA collaborative project presentation deadline. The deadline for making work to be invested for the next bronze pour. The MA symposium taking a day out from workshop time. Applying to help with a printmaking workshop for The Pilgrimage of the Animals event organised by XR and St Peter Mancroft with local print maker Maria Pavledis. Meeting with Maria to discuss the workshop and what she needed me to do as her helper. There was also an artists meeting for the sculpture trail. And through that a further meeting with another artist who gave me a link to a residency which in fact i did not apply for because covid19 made travel plans a little unpredictable. 
And i was feeling hemmed in because when i meltdown i need to retreat but all that was happening was asking me to push out. And i was dealing with Jon grief and unresolved child's grief for my grandpa and wanting to get in touch with my father to ask when my grandpa died but not being able to because my oldest sister was in the country and when she is in the country my family prefer me to stay out of the way and not make contact which added to the grief i was feeling about Jon because when i met him he'd been my home, my happy, my soft space, away from my difficult family. 
There's a book called "Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice" which i read some years back that spoke of resilience being born out of feeling loved. I wonder if that is why i hold the love affair i had with Jon so close to me. I felt loved in his arms, and his love gave me the courage to believe in myself, believe i was ok, not rotten, ugly, useless, horrible, but what i wanted to be, someone worthy of love. My anger towards his family stems in part from the way they refused to acknowledge our love affair as anything of worth when it was of huge worth to me, and maybe of worth to him too. 
One of the things that was also bugging me was the issue of some letters of mine that he'd apparently kept which his ex-wife had told me about about two years before. I'd assumed they were a couple of postcards and maybe a birthday card that i'd sent him after our break up when we were close but not lovers. Cards he'd stuck on his fridge maybe. After a session about copyright law in the symposium i was thinking about how i wanted my words to Jon even if they were likely to be disappointingly flat to be in my hands and not the seemingly hostile hands of his ex-wife. A part of me thought "let it go, it doesn't matter" but another voice kept saying "you need those letters". In the end the "you need those letters" won over and i sent an email to nudge the ex-wife into sending them not really daring to hope she still had them, but chancing my arm anyway. Our email exchange was a bloody fight but she sent the letters to me.
What i hadn't expected was a package nearly a kilo in weight containing, it seems, all the letters and cards i sent him when we were together and a couple of notebooks; a holiday diary we'd made together, and one with poems and pictures and things that belonged to us and my thoughts collected together for him at the beginning of our affair. The stuff was so personal it seemed mad that she'd kept it for so long. It was devastating to receive. But also amazing. It made me feel not-crazy for loving him and believing he loved me too because surely he'd not have kept all that stuff and taken it with him if he didn't care. It made me want to swear because damn fool i loved him and would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he'd asked. It made me feel better about making work about him. Not silly but honest. 
This post is an explanation, i guess, of the emotional landscape in which the SNU work was growing. I think that everything the maker-creator is thinking and feeling when they are making-creating becomes part of whatever is made/created so giving this much space to my heart-work feels appropriate if somewhat exposing.  
  

Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts. 
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from. 
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about. 
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart.