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. 

Well there now, the new term has started. I got my grades for last term's modules on Tuesday evening, they feel fair to generous and put me in a mid bracket. The need was only to pass and i was worried that i wasn't good enough to have passed and so a pass feels nice, but then there's disappointment in myself that i do better, no question in me about my grades, they were as good as i deserved, but can i be better ? is this where i rest ? or is there another ounce or so that i can give ?
On Thursday we had tutorials with our main subject teachers and they were helpful and positive. I will continue to explore printmaking and trying to make "pictures" out of stories. In one of my last term's tutorials my teacher questioned me wanting to back off from my own story. I wanted then to see if i could make work that was not related to me, to take more universal themes and give them my mark but it seems that the way i give them my mark is to take them inside of myself and then re-release them as i have found them within me. 
I failed to get to grips with the RIPU project until almost too late. Thankfully just in time i broke in, breaking in has shown me new ways to enquire but i was not quite forward enough to really make the most of this module. It has made me aware that i need to dig deeper, to read other people's thoughts and go further with my own. 
Last term i gave myself a hard task, i set out to explore a story i was only slightly familiar with, from a culture that was not mine, and which i had only indirect experience and no real physical reference points. I think i took on too much. Maybe i needed to take on too much. But it meant that i was unable to go as deeply into the story as i would have liked and that researching the story distracted me from other research and meant that the MA modules barely linked. 
This term i'm exploring for my ASU 2 unit the stations of the cross, christ's journey to his crucifixion. Not a cheery subject but it calls to me so i'm going with it. I begin with an easier in because christianity and the Church of England church are part of my formative years. I have no religion now, i am perhaps polytheistic, interested in religion but not committed to one, i err most towards nature as my source, but a light christianity forms the bedrock of my being. And the bible as a storybook is no worse than any other book of stories as an aid to understanding. 
I am not sure how i will move with the Stations. At the moment i am looking at artists, poets and film makers for inspiration, taking in the journey, the passage, that Jesus took to his death on different levels, considering his life as it is given to us by the saints who wrote the gospels, thinking about those who according to those gospels shared his life and death. Wondering about telling the stations not from his perspective but from those whose lives he touched. I trust my creative process to take me where i need to go. 
That leads me to my SNU project which is coming from my own story, my memories, my being. I was drawn to do this because i found some old photos of Jon on a memory stick over the christmas holidays. It made me realise that i needed to allow myself to bear witness to the life i had with him, in part because there is no one for me to share witness with him, our life together was mostly just him and i. I have buckets of memories but no-one to turn to and say "do you remember ?" and cannot bring him back to life in that way. I cannot bring him back to life physically but this is how we bring our dead back to life when we have need of them. 
When Jon died my counsellor said glibly that my grief would be a complicated grief. She spoke truly. My relationship with Jon was both light and dark and to deny either would diminish the whole. So i have to take in the good with the bad, and the bad with the good, they are front and back, left, right, night, day, up, down, a pairing. Finding balance between the pair creates a tension that i must meet or else lose the truth.  
My feeling is that my SNU project and my ASU 2 project will have meeting places but it will only be by travelling their paths that i will find them. Already i have widened the scope of the SNU to a broader theme that is memory and remembering tho i think this theme will dilate and contract as the pupil of an eye dilates and contracts, to meet circumstance, both past and ongoing. Widening the scope changes the theme but maybe that is actually the need i am meeting. Placing my relationship with Jon within the context of my whole life. Giving him, giving us, our being together, the space, the worth, that he, that we, that i, that he and i together, that i think we merit. His family have been absolute in their condescension, i am sure i am written out or cast as worthless or worse within their narrative. I guess that hurts. No, i don't guess, i know. It hurts. Maybe this project is also part of healing that hurt.  
I linger too long on a delicate subject. Of course being blanked, excluded or cut is painful. It may be that it is in felt experience that my SNU and ASU meet. Feelings run clean through time. Feelings may be the path that connects one story to another.