Back to my blog after an absence and thinking to again change the way i use it. I began it way back in 2012 when i was in the second year of my BA. I used it to catalogue and document my creative process back then as suggested by the tutor in a class session about blogging. He also recommended that we limit our blogs to our creative practice and not post personal stories and i pretty much kept to that for the duration of my degree but how do you keep creative practice and personal separate ? i think for those with a mathematical mind this is easier than it is for those who are more sense & felt experience responsive. 

Regular readers of my blog will know that in 2017 when faced with the death of someone i loved i used my blog to scream my grief, my pain, into the ether. I needed to give voice to my feelings and my blog was a safe space for me to open up and give voice, all the boundaries that others were giving me could be abandoned and i could express at least some of my need to speak, to tell my story. It belonged to me. My blog belonged to me. My story belonged to me. i abandoned the notion of right and wrong feelings which i think helps with grief and let myself be who i needed to be in that time. Now my grief has softened, it's still there but now i am more at peace with my broken heart and i don't need to talk about it so much.

Before 2017 i had used my blog to explain the process behind work that i was making for exhibition or sometimes to just muse upon life. Often story telling the journey i took with the seed of an idea to it's flowering as a piece of work in exhibition or not, sometimes just watching it grow.

 I wonder if this is something that others have found when blogging that their blogs evolve to suit their needs in much the same way a home evolves to suit the needs of those who live in it. 

Once upon a time my home was full of children, now my children are all grown up and as my youngest said a few years back on a brief visit it is now pretty much all art studio. He's right. Before my children were my life, now my work as an artist, be it good, bad or indifferent, is my life. The river keeps on rolling. 

Now it seems that i need to jiggle up my blog again. Almost to return to it's original being as i am studying for my MA and my MA has become the most demanding factor in my life. I am about six or seven weeks in to my one year course and time seems to be rushing rushing rushing by. It's fun and exhilarating but also i have a sense of if-i-am-not-careful-i-will-lose-things-in-the-rush. So it makes sense to use my blog as my reflective journal. 

I have tried notebooks and no doubt will continue with them, but they start off neatish and then become unreadable scribble, and maybe my thoughts on paper tumble out so completely unregulated by contemplation or consideration it is unreasonable to ask anyone to read them particularly some poor soul whose job it is to look at my work. I guess i will hand them in but i'd like to have something easier to read and access to give to my assessors and for me to refer to later when my MA is done. 

Also writing by hand on paper is not the same process as writing on a screen. I am a little more aware of needless words on screen. If you think i waffle here you should see my notebooks. And then also if i write a blog i can then post it to my social media platforms and may get response especially if i ask for a response and in my next blog i hope to begin to ask questions of my readers that if they are happy to give response i will be pleased to receive.

So what is this blog ? This blog may be a grandiose announcement "behold, look at me" but it's also a statement of intent meant more for me than any reader, i am changing, i can feel myself changing, i can feel myself sloughing off one skin to become a new being and my blog may be part of that sloughing off process.