I come to my blog this morning because i think my mental health is beginning to break. There is a fine line between being able to cope and not. People who are good at masking are often the ones whose line is finest. I may smile and seem ok, and i may be ok, but i may also be covering an inner turmoil, and only the sensitive will notice. And even they, busy with their own lives and handling their own stresses and strains, may not pick up on the hidden trauma. 
Coping is a habit. Learning to cope is a life skill. Fall over. Pick yourself up. Fall over again. Pick yourself up again. If you are lucky you'll have been caught before you fall as a child or held when the catch was not quick enough, this creates a sound base for coping. The childhoods of each of us are different, even within the same family children are treated differently, character and birth order affect this, rapport with other members of the family, and the environment into which a child is born all go to make up a person's notion of themselves and this affects our ability to cope and our life outcomes. 
So i have had a fall. I failed my MA units. Both of them. Four learning outcomes to each, and one marginal fail on each. 3/4 and 3/4. It hurts. I received my marks about a month ago. I am still taking it in. It is hard. But it gets worse. There isn't support from my uni. Responses to emails initially were curt and offhand or just didn't happen. University policy maybe. It didn't help. Eventually they came back with two tasks for me to do to pick up my grades. Two essays that both require time and deep thought. 
I pondered these essays for some days after receiving the brief but i am also currently making work for the Raveningham Sculpture Trail, an exhibition i have been in before curated by Sarah Cannell who is quite brilliant. I have a choice. I can try to do the essays but i suspect i will not pass and the energy it takes for me to do that will mean that i can't make the work for the trail. Or I can not do the essays, accept my fail, let go of my MA. I know that my mental, emotional and physical strength will not allow me to do everything. I will break. 
I had hoped that my university, especially in the peculiar circumstances that Covid19 has created, would be wanting to be flexible around students. Maybe they feel they are. I had hoped that perhaps i could retake the term, but no that's not possible. I eventually picked up the threads with my course tutor in a long and emotional tutorial on Monday. I said what i would most like to do and he intimated that he thought it unlikely but would make enquiries which he did. The post-grad team got back to me and i to them and my understanding is now that if i fail to submit the essays for the tasks set my mark will be down graded to Fail. It is semantics, word-play, both fail and marginal fail are fails but a fail is a harder fall. And because i submitted for last term i cannot re-do the term again. There are forms to fill in. And just thinking about it all pushes me further to breakdown. 
So here is my dilemma. Let me paint a picture. I have fallen over a cliff edge and landed on a small outcrop of rock, if stay here i will die anyway, i can try to climb back up to where i was, i may fail and fall in the attempt, or I can take a leap of faith and go over the edge into the abyss beneath me, it might feel like flying, both scenarios are a risk. 
What do i want ? I want to be able to make the work i am making for the sculpture trail as well as i can. It may or may not appeal to all eyes but i hope that it will make some people happy. It's a take on Alice in Wonderland, a prayer piece, a contemplative journey through Wonderland. Making it is helping me to stay alive. It is about hope, joy and curiosity. Curiosity keeps me moving forward, whats this round the bend ? how is this feeling moving me ? who are you ?
The tasks set by the university are not unreasonable, they are interesting even, and i might at some point do them for pleasure, tho i probably won't, but with a deadline and judgement at the end, and a head that is full of fear and sadness, screwing my head to a table trying to fulfil criteria that i have already failed once is driving me insane. 
Also, I am exhausted. I don't know if others are feeling this way but the huge surge of adrenalin that pumped through my body before lockdown in March and after official lockdown in March, and during that lockdown while trying to put together an online hand-in knowing that it was taking the time i had allotted to picking up the shortfall in my studies (this shortfall was what i failed on), receiving my fail, assimilating my fail and then to this point receiving the tasks asked for if i want to be called good enough, whilst also taking in the peculiar political space we are living in, where the government is seemingly winging it with not much care about who dies or gets hurt but mostly minding the money bags and shovelling what they can into the hands of the people who have put them where they are, has left me brain shattered, bone tired and sad. 
How do i close this blog today. I must close it because i have stuff to do. I suppose that i know that thought is a stream that keeps flowing and, having reclaimed this space as my own and not part of studies, my voice is free again which feels lighter. Covid19 is making me rethink my values, what i want, what makes me happy, not superficial happiness but true joy. At the beginning of lockdown there was a peculiar rapture that happened, humanity silenced and largely stopped created a beautiful void that got filled with birdsong and flowers. It was not that i'd not noticed or loved them before but absorbing nature's grace fed my heart and soul at a time when i was screaming inside, with fear, for myself and even more for my family, my children and grandchildren, mother, father, stepmother, godparents, humanity. Nature softened the edges in a way that university emails and teams meetings did not. 
I wonder now if i should have let go of my MA then, not bothered to submit, i might have made more soul-healing use of my lockdown time, but then i would not have written my term up in my blog which i have a feeling will be useful to me in future for reference, and similarly would not have created my MA page on my website which presently i will need to add an NB to to mark that it was not completed and that my work failed. 
So there i leave it. My head feels softer for writing and that i guess it what i use my blog for, voicing that which i cannot voice to a blank page and letting it go where it will without strictures or edicts. I have learned a lot over the past six months and made work that i needed to make. So although i am marked as a failure. I feel i can hold my head up and say that i tried. Now, back to my cliff edge scenario, what do you think ? jump or climb ? 

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.