SNU. Having got into the studios my first push to work was taking photos i hoped to work with, and putting them into photoshop so i could play with them to greyscale them and accentuate the blacks and whites to make them better for making acetates for putting onto copper plates coated with a photochromic ink and also for putting onto screens for screen printing. 
I had a picture of Jon which i chose because it was the whole of him. Using photographs to make my etching plates allowed me to look with new eyes at my photographs, to view a picture as someone unconnected to the story and to see what drew my attention, held my gaze, was distracting, amusing, frustrating, divine, it gave me information about composition, what makes a picture work, what makes it worth a second look. This was/is valuable information, it is what i call hidden learning. 
I have mentioned in previous blogs how working with pictures of myself made me see my image as an object, this happened too with my Jon pictures. It made me sad and unsure, i wondered if i was being exploitative even though the intention behind working with his picture and my feelings about him was to give him place in my life, a belonging that felt important, was it alright to do that ? And it was strange having his photograph in the studios at university. It may sound weird but giving him presence there was both comforting and uncomfortable simultaneously, it is funny how opposing feelings exist as companions. The need to hold on and let go acting against each other. These contradictory feelings fed into my ASU2 project, the cross that Jesus bore being perhaps a metaphor for the swaying balance which is consciousness calling to us to constantly reweigh, reassess, rejig our values, notions, ideas and systemic patterns so as to keep them alive rather than dead weight, habitual. 
The picture of Jon that i used is one from our last holiday together. We have stopped in our walk and are taking a break, gazing over a view of fields, the sun is shining, a tractor in the distance is stacking bales of straw in a field of golden stubble. You can't see that in the picture. You can't see the rest of the walk either, can't hear the buzzards call, or the feel the fear when the farm dogs attacked us, or the relief of the trees in the woodland behind where we are taking pause. You can't know the conversations we had that holiday or any of the other details because you weren't there. All you see is a man, smiling, looking to the side, he has a roll up in one hand, the other hand holds his wrist, the time is a quarter to noon, he is stripped to his waist which means his tattoos on his upper arms are part visible. You don't know how it feels to be me to see those tattoos that were part of his skin, part of my waking with him for the time we were lovers. You don't know anything apart from what you see and what you project on to the image and so it is with all images. Is the power of an image its ability to draw the viewer, to give the viewer what they want to see, to allow a viewer to project their being on the picture ?
The other picture was chosen because of its weirdness, the statues, the chair, the wall, the house behind and the dogwood stems behind the wall. I chose it because it had meaning for me but also because its oddness conveyed the oddness of that day which being a return to soul place within a time in which i was so deep in grief i was more dead than alive. I may speak more about this in reference to an object made in a blog further along the line. For now perhaps i say that i chose to make this image one of my first plates and that i was planning to also make plates or perhaps screen prints from photographs of the statues but lockdown stopped that from happening. 
Also in this week i was looking at photographs i had taken of seagulls and planning to use them to make screens for screen prints. They were taken when my daughter and I visited the beach at Bray, nr Dublin, my daughter was feeding them chips and i was taking photographs. It was the weekend before my birthday in 2017. I returned to an email telling me that Jon had died. 

The problem with not getting it together to write my reflective journal/blog as a good habit is that weeks go by and i haven't made a record of what i've done (most important for uni), what i think about what i've done (also important for uni), and what motivated me to do what i did (possibly less important for uni but important for me). So then i have to consciously re-run the days/weeks not recorded and surely some stuff gets missed out. The missing out of some stuff may be a good thing and i think when things are going too fast, or are overwhelming in a way that means i can't verbalise my being and doing, i can only hold my process and hope that i will remember enough, remember what is most important. 
Important, important, important. I wonder if the same happens on other courses but one of the things i have thought over the past few weeks is that it is very difficult to know sometimes if, or if not, you have lost perspective and become a self important wanker. Excuse the language. What i mean is that in arts degrees it's very easy to become very obsessed with yourself and what you do. I've noticed myself doing this, me-me-me thing and other people too. Talk to pretty much any of the full time MA students and they all talk of exhaustion, stress, deadlines, anxiety. Third year students coming up to their final hand in and graduation are even more wired. I remember living that thread, the end of year show was critical tho' looking back it feels like much ado about not so much. But there, you work three, four or five years, depending on how you built up your portfolio before starting your degree, and the need to make the energy those three, four, five years took worth expending becomes a high pitched whine. A mosquito that won't give up. If you knew then what you know after, which is that life goes on, you'd be a bit less fraught but it's hard to hold on to that. It is holding onto that that stops you being a wanker. 
Those are this weeks observations and they stem from me being in a filthy mood for the past week. I think i was pretty cross at the end of last week but this week my patience is so stretched it snaps at the least inconvenience, being even halfway nice has been a struggle and some people have caught my sharp side. Some people have deserved it but not everyone.  
Anyway all that said i'll try to jot down the course of the past weeks in work. For some time i have been sitting (not literally) on my CMYK plates of myself as a teenager, my brief bit of adult life before i became a mother. This is a funny stage of life, there is a breaking free, but also a not knowing how to be other than how your parents raised you. I'd been looking at the plates i'd made of this girl woman and calling her "horrible girl" because she has a face on her, sulky and dark. I do remember the moment the photo was taken, i was very hungover and totally fed up with the two blokes i was living with never clearing up.  But the more i looked at her, the more sympathy i felt for her (remember she is me but she is also just an image i am working with). I thought about how i needed to find my way. I thought about where my "fuck you" attitude stemmed from. Oddly this week with my fed-up-ed-ness i felt enough love for this younger part of my self to re-integrate the person she was, her mosh-pit elbows, her daring dress sense, her wilfulness and longing for risk. I was making the CMYK prints with a view to putting them in one of the MA curator's shows but the work didn't fit with the vibe of the show and i didn't fit with the vibe of the show. This was mutually agreed with the curator but there is an awkwardness that is not yet resolved. It is uncomfortable being told you are not wanted and do not fit, even if you agree that you do not fit. The course brief, i think, for the curators is to hold an exhibition in an unusual space and so they have chosen various venues. My not fitting into my curator's venue has made me think about where i do fit. I think this is LO11. It has made me think about how i would mount a show if i was putting it on myself and not relying on a curator to find and make the space. Where draws me ? and what would i put in ? I'm giving this thought, and more thought.
But reeling back to the beginning of the week after my last blog. If you've read it you'll know i had hit a pretty low ebb. I went in to uni on the Monday with my head down, feeling very sad and like i didn't belong. Was too wobbly to work in the 3d studios so retreated to the print rooms to finish the various photo etched plates i'd begun the week before. On the Tuesday things got worse, i'd gone in to make a plaster mould and my anxiety levels were so high i was in floods of tears and panic-y when the plaster leaked out from the mould. One of the technicians suggested i let myself go home and i took his advice and it was the right thing to do. On the Wednesday i was cheered by a really interesting lecture by two of last years MA students, one of whom, said "go with your gut" which was what i needed to hear. And a helpful chat with my SNU tutor. On Thursday we had a guest artist Melissa Pierce Murphy for our ASU seminar who also spoke of following your gut, nice to have it re-iterated. I loved her work and how it met other practices, dance and science, The workshop she led after her presentation with magnets and drawing and shards of polished steel was food for my hungry soul. Friday i think passed without too much friction and a feeling of starting on work for my ASU module helped me feel less shaky too. It is hard to balance the two modules, one always seems to dominate the agenda. However they are drawing together as the weeks go by and hopefully i am building a body of work that will meet the criteria i need to fulfil to pass.
Criteria and learning outcomes are frustrating. I know why they exist. In my head i know that they are useful and help us to draw focus but they are hard to make sense of and sometimes education can feel joy sapping. It makes me think "Of Mice and Men". If i remember rightly there are two brothers who are walking to a farm to find work. One is simple but strong and the other clever. The simple one has a mouse in his pocket but he squeezes the life out of it, later he breaks a puppy and a girl i think. It's a long time since i read the book so i may not have got the story all right but this is the way education can feel sometimes. The student is the mouse in the pocket of the big man.
After making a two part mould and realising that what i wanted to do wasn't going to work i then had to make a three part mould the following week. I managed a little bit better with this one because having made moulds the week things like mixing up plaster felt more familiar. After the moulds were made and wax cast the wax casts had to be set up on cups with sprues and risers ready for investing last Friday and the pour which is happening this Friday coming. Uni has lots of deadlines, the deadline for investing, the deadline for the Pecha Kucha presentation which is next Wednesday. All the time there's a feeling of needing to get this done, that done and not enough hours to make it happen and home is crazy, not a room tidy enough to be called comfortable and all the time more art (i guess it is art) pouring in and books from more than one library calling to be read. Not enough time, not enough time. 
There has to be enough time. One of the ways not to be a self important wanker is to remember that it is only art, that it is not life or death. It is hard to remember this tho because the desire to make something good or better is the thing that keeps me going. But being a horrible person isn't going to make my work better it's just going to make me and the people around me either miserable or cross. Yes keep going, keep trying, push to the limit but know the limit. And maybe hold back a little from the limit so there is a little gas in reserve for closer to the deadlines. 
The work that i was working on for the exhibition i am not anymore going to be part of has come out beautifully. It's exciting to know now how to print with more than one colour using multiple plates. This term i have used photographs mostly and it feels a bit of a cheat but has also got me looking at photographs and image making and learning basic print skills. It has been helpful because i have several pictures to work from and each of them is different and tells a different story and learning how to story tell with images is part of what i have come back to education for so that is a mission being achieved i guess. 
Enough with the blog/reflective journal i fear i have said too little and not enough but it's words down and they will lead to the next set of words like a stairway cut into a mountain path. There is more to say but the need to put together my Pecha Kucha is making a noise in the background so if there is more to say i'll have to say it another time.