Why do people do what they do ? What is it that makes an artist pick up a pen and begin to draft an idea ? What is it that makes any man or woman do what they do, do what they do when they do, do what they do as they do it ? I am looking at motive. If living is an art, and i think it is, then we are all artists. 
I have had a couple of weeks at university i would rather not had happened. I was struggling to assimilate conversations i'd had earlier this month with my GP and the surgeon who would perform the operation they advise. I was feeling drained, my body was giving me issues, run down and exhausted i asked my tutor if i could be excused from a taught session that week because i did not feel strong enough to hold my fledgling ideas intact if i gave them to a group of other students i hardly know. I also felt too debilitated to engage with their ideas without damaging my wellbeing. I have been told since i should have emailed admin to say i was unwell and therefore unable to attend but i didn't i spoke face to face because it felt more honest and respectful and adult to explain why i felt unable to attend. I thought as a fellow artist he would understand. I was wrong. He did not understand. It has been implied that he thought i was being high and mighty and picking and choosing what i wanted to do. Anyone who knows me well will know that i have chronic & destructive low self-esteem and an inner critic that loves to take me down. I think because i smile it makes people think i am more confident than i am. Should i smile less ? 
As a result of trying to explain myself I received what felt like an aggressive email from the person above my tutor to whom i am given understand he had complained. The email seemed to accuse me of poor attendance and not engaging with other students. It felt like slap in the face, a denial of my need to self-care at that moment. I was hurt and bewildered. I asked others if they had received emails when they missed class. It seems i am the only one. It felt wrong and has made feel wary of certain people and my trust in the university is no longer as it was. I do not know how I will move forward. I hope i will re-find my flow. I feel less open and less free.
Trust is a gift given. If trust is given, be careful with that trust. Trust is like a rope. If trust is broken the cuntline within the rope is irretrievably divided and the feeling will never be the same. Trust comes into all our relationships. If we cease to trust our sense of safety is compromised. It is hard to regain trust. It is hard to trust again someone or a body that has broken trust. It is political.
How can errors be made good ? It has to be ok to fail. But what lies behind a fail is important. The intention behind an action or word makes all the difference. In shiatsu, as i have come to understand, it is the triple heater meridian that paired with the heart protector regulates and holds us to appropriate social boundaries.  I have been studying and practising shiatsu for over twenty years now. Intention is key element to my practise. How do i come into another's sphere what is my intention when i address another. My intention when i spoke to my tutor was to let him know that my absence was born out of my needs and was not a rejection of his teaching or the other students. I am sad i was misunderstood. I think it may be better not to speak if i can stop my mouth.
As an artist ... ugh, what is an artist ? As an artist, i want to give presence to ideas that i can't express in words, to make thought tangible, that i guess is my intention. Other artists will have other driving forces. Maybe one of the good things that has come out of a bad week is that it has forced me hard up against why i am doing my MA because when i considered leaving i had to think about what i would be leaving. What i would be leaving is the chance to explore further with people who i like and respect ways and means of doing the above, making thought tangible, giving ideas presence. And there now i feel like i've blogged the best of me and want the world to go away, not look, not see. 
I came to my MA with a desire to learn about printmaking, specifically etching, drypoint, mono print, collagraph and screen printmaking. Last term i occupied space in the print studios and this term i have too. I have been working with photographs exploring what makes an image worth a second glance or a longer look, how images connect, how to tell a story using my own story, and also how to print, how to print CMYK, seeing how coloured layers change a picture, how to print the same image unaltered, what is the difference. What is it that draws the viewer in. I love sampling it is a serious part of my creative practice. I sample and compare and by sampling and comparing i learn how i need to make what i need to make.
Currently i am making plates of an image of myself as a nineteen year old. It is a strange thing to look at oneself, to look at oneself over and over again. It feels peculiar and narcissistic at first and then the self becomes an object, a thing that could be a teapot or a flower or somebody else. A few weeks ago i screen printed a picture of my five year old self. I think it would have been around about the time my grandpa died and i need to look into that because this week while all the horrible-ness has been going on, as well as finding myself in the thick of Jon-grief, i also discovered i have a child's grief. 
My grandpa was the only adult i remember as playful from my childhood. He would swing us under his legs. When he got ill i remember being told off for showing him a book i'd been given and was proud of. It was a big book, he was in hospital and i lumped it onto his chest as a child would and was told off and he said no it was alright. He was dying but i didn't know it. Even dying he was kind. I remember the phone call we received when he died, "grandpa is dead" i was told. I was in my bedroom with red curtains reading "The Cow Who Fell into the Canal". And i remember going to see him at the morgue and thinking if i cried on him he might come back to life but of course i wasn't allowed close enough to cry on him and it wouldn't have worked even if i had would it. And now i remember his absence. Absence i think is a huge part of grief.
Photographs trigger memories. My nineteen year old self has flicked switches on the lack of self worth i had then. I have put in a proposal for one of the Curation MA students exhibitions, the brief is Self Love and my working with this image, whether she accepts my proposal or not, is an act of love back passed to the girl-woman i was then. I have over time learned to love myself a little more, i cannot change my past and my innate lack of self confidence is a demon i think i will always struggle with but i can give my self of then kindness and understanding i couldn't give myself then. 
For me understanding is the bedrock of my practice. Understanding on lots of levels. My SNU project is a lot about sampling, i am exploring the emotionality behind the images but also those images are giving me the opportunity to learn about the materials i am using and this for me is how i build my practice. If i know my materials i am better able to use them. I often say that thought is my medium it is true even if it sounds a bit pose-y, but university gives me the chance to explore the physical process under the guidance of experts. NUA has some fantastic technicians.
So what else have i been up to this week. Well last term i and others met with some Business school students from the UEA and we were given a brief and asked to give a presentation based on that brief which we delivered last Friday. That has taken up the best part of three days this week. Although we are in the same city our campuses are about an hour apart and collaboration has not been easy as we are all studying at MA/MSc level and have ongoing commitments to our courses. Still my group managed three further meet ups, a brainstorming session, a brainstorming for the presentation session, and then a presentation run-through, before presenting last friday. 
I learned from this presentation, i was a relatively silent party but I nudged to get things going when there was silence from the other side. My four partners were hard working and committed and we all made all the meetings and we all had a voice in brainstorming sessions. They made the questionnaire and slides but i gave ideas and i think created emotional connection to the subject matter. I was impressed by how cool they were and unafraid. I suppose if you have travelled from far away to study for a year in a strange country you have to be a bit plucky and able to handle yourself. I learned from their courage and self confidence as well as their skills and it was good to be in company with their self assurance. It was hard to speak in front of people especially as i was having a difficult week but i did speak albeit for just a few minutes. 
Also I finished making and made some new silicon moulds of things. I am learning and brushing up on mould making in case i should need to know how to do this for my masters project and also with a view to making things for my ASU 2 and SNU tho time is always a factor. Everything takes longer than i think it will which adds to the stress as the weeks and days tick down towards deadlines and finally leaving. 
And i had a meeting with Maria Paveledis who is a printmaker who works in Norwich. I have seen her work in exhibition and like it a lot. She asked on facebook if anyone was free to help her with running a print workshop for the XR pilgrimage of the animals this Easter and i said i would love to and so i am, it feels like a privilege.
Maybe on that note i have to give myself credit for holding it together through a rough week enough to make four extra-curricular meetings (3 x St Martin's Project & Maria), to have made six new copper plates almost finished and prepared one more to also finish next monday, I have made some new moulds and a two part mould and have begun exploring how epoxy resin behaves in a mould. And I have made new marks on my drypoint and hard ground test plates which has also led me thinking more about Judas' kiss. And yesterday i went to Holt Church to see the representations they have there of the Stations of the Cross. And by chance met and spoke to a retired Cannon about the Stations which was very interesting and he gave me the name of an artist to look up. Life goes on. Life always go on. 
My SNU began with grief as its seed and a need to look back and look forward. All the time this balance is something that i feel. Perhaps this is my cross. Maybe this is how i carry forward my ASU 2 work. And there again i say more than i want to about my creative process. Reveal too much. let myself fall and be vulnerable. But how can i make work if the work i am making asks that i be that and i refuse. It can't be done. If i must feel the scourge of whips, of nails in my hands and feet then so it has to be. But i must remember that imperfection is ok, for me and for others. And if i fall its ok too.  

My blog as my reflective journal continues. I have had a week of ups and downs, not a roller coaster but a bumpy sea. On Monday i finally with quite a lot of help from Jess got my copper plates photo etched and ready for printing. Jess is amazing. I see how she holds every student that comes into her studio, how each of us is given the time that we need and the help. She meets every project it seems with respect and kindness. Actually the technicians at NUA are pretty much all great. Generous with their guidance, sensible to where we need help and to where help is not needed and their best help is to stand back or nudge us to think and do for ourselves. They are the lynchpins, the angels, the quiet heroes. We learn from the technicians in a way that we cannot learn from our tutors who, having the job of holding a mass of students in their care, are not able to engage in the same hands on way. 
So with the plates etched I was able to move on with them. And while i'm praising Jess i'm going to mention that she'd also let me talk about ideas i am considering for my SNU project, and given encouragement, being able to give voice to an informed listener counts for a lot when a thought thread is young within the body.  On Monday afternoon, after the plates were etched, i began to make test prints using strong black and bone black. There are six black intaglio inks on the studio shelves and although they are similar they are not the same. My intention after last term was to have a look at these and so it made sense to print the two plates in each of the blacks so that i could see and feel the difference. Feel ? Yes feel, because each ink moves a little differently, and sits on the plate a little differently too. I know it might seem dull to make the same print over and over again but coming from a textiles background testing the materials i use is a key part of my creative practice. It serves as a bedrock, i know that leaving the university at the end of this MA my printmaking will still be rudimentary but i hope that my understanding at base level will pass muster and be a ground that allows me to keep going. 
By Wednesday when we had our first taught session i was feeling good about the new term, two etching plates made and six inks tested on each plate throwing up interesting information, two projects (ASU & SNU) that seemed to be calling to each other albeit across a fairly wide divide but both live and kicking and feeling good to go. 
But then comes the mood drop, the academic part of this course confuses me. I did less well in my RIPU last term (RIPU stands for "Research Into Practice Unit" i think). Part of that stemmed from my not knowing what was being asked of us until a very few weeks before our hand in. I think it may be that i am not good at learning with the teaching method, it seems like the module is coming in bite size mouthfuls but i feel like i'm tasting blind and not sure what i'm supposed to do with the new taste. Or perhaps a better analogy would be that it feels like being shown around a city by someone who knows the territory but not really taking in the way to here or there and so feeling lost. I will have to sharpen my senses and get with it and know to ask for help sooner rather than later if i am still struggling with knowing what the SNU brief is asking for.   
It is disconcerting tho' as i thought i had a handle on what i needed to do and was following a clear path but both the lecture and seminar confused me, leaving me feeling sad, and stupid, and frustrated with myself, and mentally petrified. Useful things that came out of the seminar session for me were the notion of an elevator pitch and the double diamond. And we discussed the learning outcomes that we are assessed by, boxes that need ticking, hoops that need jumping through. I am not so good at jumping through hoops but in her ASU lecture Marie Brennan, the MA course leader, spoke of learning outcomes as the skeleton and i liked that metaphor, it felt like something i could get a handle on ... "the knee bone connected to the thigh bone" and so on. 
The ASU lecture and seminar were generally less disconcerting. It was nice to meet more formally all the first year MA Fine Art part-timers. And Desmond sensibly asked us to draw in and map our creative vision/focus in silence for ten minutes before it was put out to be seen, met and spoken about. A lot of my creative process is done in this way. In silence and unseen i will think through an idea, testing it and pushing it, researching and assessing, before i feel ready to give it visible presence. I was thankful to be given that space to move in a class setting. 
My work process is intuitive, i work with my senses, i wonder if my process is a little primitive, i think education asks me to be more cultured and sophisticated, it feels alien but will up my game if i can take with me the primitive part and not lose it in the process of being civilised. Raised not razed. I suppose it's a need to maintain the poetry whilst building skills. 
On Wednesday, Thursday and Friday i spent time on the print studio computers as well as attending taught sessions. The computers are definitely civilised machinery, i struggle with even the basics but i am using photographic images for my SNU project and i need to know how to scan them and fiddle with them to get them to a point where they can be used to make prints so working with the computers are a must. Under Jess' guidance i have made eight images to be screen-printed in CMYK in half tone and diffusion dither (i think i've got those names right). Eight images is one for each colour, in each setting (?). All the same picture but to be printed on top of each other to make two whole prints, one in diffusion dither and one in half tone, each in four colours CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow & black). That is my next week's project and will probably take up the week after too. It is going to fry my brain i think but will hopefully be exciting and will lead me to knowing better how colours blend and also how to register a print which is one of my personal MA learning outcomes. 
I intend to alleviate the head-stretching screen printing with gentler work printing from and playing with etching plates and mono printing and hopefully some mould making and casting in the 3d studio too. Whoosh the time, i know, will fly by. 
Lastly to cap the week off nicely on an up i received this morning an email from Sarah Cannell the Raveningham Sculpture Trail curator saying that i have again been chosen to be one of her artists on the trail. This is a lovely way to start a weekend as Sarah is a joy to work with and the sculpture trail has been one of the highlights of my year in all the years i've been a participant.  

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. 

Because i'm not an academic my day to day life does not call for Harvard referencing but doing my MA does. It's something i find difficult. I think i am more forager than farmer by nature, with all sources of sustenance. But, i figure that while i'm studying it may be sensible to have a bibliography blog entry that i can easily amend and update as i go along. i think if i do that it will make things easier when i come to write essays and will allow me to track my inspiration pathways. Tracking is mapping & i love mapping so even if it feels a bit of chore now, the chances are i'll like it later. So this blog is my referencing for the term to 12/12/19. Forgive it being a bit sketchy to start with, i'm learning how to do it  

Books
Chetwynd, M.G. (2014) Bat Opera. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig
Hughes, T. (1967) Poetry In The Making. London: Faber & Faber Ltd
Lewis, J and Rigby, P. (ill) (1976) The Chinese Word for Horse. London: Bergstrom & Boyle Books Ltd
Okri, B. (1996) Birds Of Heaven. London: Orion Books Ltd
Sattar, A and Zohra, S (ill) (2018) Ramayana: an illustrated retelling. New York: Yonder
Jacabon, B. (2015) Ay! Mi Amor. France: Benoit Jacques Books
Patel, S. (2010) Ramayana: Divine Loophole. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books LLC
Hegley, J. (2013) New and Selected Potatoes. Hexham, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books
Journals


Webpages
Swansea University (2019) Research as Art: available at https://www.swansea.ac.uk/research-as-art/ (accessed 25th November 2019)
Firer, S. (2018) "Transubstantiation": available at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/12/transubstantiation (accessed 25th November 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Rachel Cusk: You Can Live the Wrong Life : available at https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/rachel-cusk-you-can-live-the-wrong-life (accessed  3rd October 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Jan Grarup: The Dark Side of the Lens: https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/jan-grarup-the-dark-side-of-the-lens (accessed 29th September 2019)
Louisiana Channel (2019) Erkan Ozgen: When Language is Not Enough: https://channel.louisiana.dk/video/erkan-ozgen-when-language-is-not-enough (accessed 1st October 2019)
Christies (2019) Quentin Blake on doing things a writer can't do: https://www.christies.com/features/Quentin-Blake-a-retrospective-forty-years-of-alternative-versions-9274-3.aspx?lid=1 (accessed 2nd December 2019)
Hass N (2018) Kiki Smith & the Pursuit of Beauty in a Notably Unbeautiful Age: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/26/t-magazine/kiki-smith-artist-profile.html (accessed 26th November 2019)


Films
Kar-Wai, W (dir) (2008) Ashes of Time redux (DVD) Jet Tone
Zecca, F.  (dir) et al (2012) Fairy Tales: Early Colour Stencil Films from Pathe (DVD) BFI 
Trueba, F. (dir) (2012) The Artist and The Model (DVD) Axiom Films
Renoir, J. (dir) (1951) The River (DVD ) London: BFI
Boyle, D (dir) (  ) Slumdog Millionaire (DVD)
Van Sant, G (dir) Elephant (DVD)

Paintings

You Tube
BFI (2010) Temples of India: available at https://youtu.be/VI-l-dn_hFA (accessed September 2019)

BFI (2009) A Road in India: available at https://youtu.be/cOsv6kWGxGI (accessed September 2019)

This is the end of this terms MA units December 11th 2019 ... the bibliography is incomplete and no doubt full of mistakes but i have started to think about how to reference. At the weekend i will start a new bibliography for the next terms units and hopefully i'll make a better fist of it. Just as with my degree it seems like there are skills that will be learned beyond the making art malarkey. It's value for money really, an added extra, learning how to research, learning what i'm interested in, and how to lay markers on my trail that allow me to see how i have got from A to B.