Thinking on. I realise that i have spent a large part of this term railing against my university and the binds and rules that it as an establishment body asks me to adhere to. I guess this is what happens when you pick a rebel as your inspiration. Jesus has become a somewhat watered down rebel over the past century or so in art in Western culture, bizarrely pale complexioned, often blue eyed and blonde, generally he looks a bit wet, fit but wet. The Jesus i have encountered through research including deep meditation is nothing like that milksop. I don't think my Jesus is much like Tony Blair's or Theresa May's or the awful banker turned bishop, Justin Welby, who threw in his lot with the Conservatives at the last general election aware perhaps of how tied up the Church of England is with the moneyed elite. 
As I have walked the Via Dolorosa with Jesus these past few months i have found myself beside a man who took on the establishment, who spoke out against injustice, who was betrayed by Judas, who was betrayed again by Peter. I met the most celebrated women in his life, Mary his mother, and Mary Magdalen whose relationship with him is subject to debate. I met too his fearful father, not Joseph, tho' maybe Joseph, the man who married his mother but God the father. Who is this wicked character that would send his only son to suffer for the world ? Why do the strong always ask the weak to carry the load ? I think of priests buggering children, and those children silenced, carrying that rape as their crime, their sin. I think of the rich sitting on the backs of the poor. And i know that tho' i am not filthy rich like Branson or the Wetherspoons man, or the Tory cabinet, still my wealth, my wardrobe, my spanish strawberries, my kenyan green beans, my tea, my coffee, my so-on and so-on are the produce of someone else's underpaid labour. Is that right ? No. 
I came to the end of my stations meditation on Passion Sunday. The day given to mark Jesus riding in to Jerusalem to crowds lining his way, laying palm leaves before him so it is told. They wanted him to save them but he was only a man. The reason the images of the stations of the cross began in churches was because most parishioners did not have the money to spare to go on pilgrimage to Rome or Jerusalem and so these stood in their stead. I have been to see four sets in different churches, the fourth moved me to tears and i hope to return to look at them when England is open again. Journeying with these images has allowed me to feel the passage of christ's path to the cross. 
In Colm Toibin's Testament of Mary, which i wish i had a copy of, his mother gets thoroughly fed up with him. Its a reasonable maternal response to a son who is pushing his luck with the law and questioning and defying authority. Just as Jesus is depicted as being pretty fine with his suffering especially in recent years, his mother has also been made to be compliant and accepting. How convenient for the patriarchy as symbolised by God that these two take their punishment for existing so gently. 
Many years ago i made a nativity scene including, obviously, a Mary figure holding her baby, Jesus. As a link between my ASU unit and my SNU unit I asked Steve, one of the 3d workshop technicians, if she and another old made-by-me ornament could be printed on the 3d printer. One of the joys of this printer is that the objects can be sized up and down. Another is the scaffolding the object needs to be printed. Mary being fairly compact needed not so much, but the two figures in a sympathetic embrace needed loads. Why do i speak of these now, except as a link between my two units ? Why ? Because the scaffolding made me think about how much we take from the earth to support that which we raise above the earth whether that be high rise buildings, space travel or a billionaire lifestyle or aspiration to that lifestyle and worship of money. 
It seems to me that the bible is pretty clear that when man gets above himself and starts to live an insupportable life, God turns on man. Perhaps this is the moral of the story of Jesus. Here is a man named the son of God, as we all are sons or daughters of some kind of god i guess, if god is creation and not obliged to belong to a single faith or religion. This son of god, a man who had the courage to stand up and say "no", was prepared to die for his right to speak out. Why then are those who profess to follow him so abject in their worship of all that he seemed to abhor. Is the cross a choice we have to make ? 
Here as we stand at a crossroads, i am sure now that this virus will separate further humanity into those who believe that others should suffer for their comforts and those that don't. And of those that don't, those too will also divide in two as their response to catastrophes whatever they are. differs and leads them away from each other. Easter is close now. We as Jesus must prepare to carry our cross, the choice we make will be how we move into the future, so we need to choose wisely i think. 

British Summer Time - Covid 19

time is less important when not screwed into a system that asks for punctuality. I live now by breaths, by night falling & sun rising, by the weather, by birdsong, bee hum & butterflies, flowers mean a lot, & my grown up children's hallo back on messenger each day.

March 29th 2020

I am hoping that if I jot down a few words, a few more will follow, and if i let them flow out of me maybe i'll find a way to take in what is going on, inside me and outside me. This is British Summer Time weekend. The hour springs forward as if nothing has changed but everything has changed. Everything is strange. This afternoon i thought "its Sunday, what am i doing on Monday ?" but one day is not so different from another. I will try to pull my next week into a more work-shaped form because i think it will help me to re-orientate myself to how things are now. 
This week past tho' has been about absorbing and assimilating. I had tutorials on Wednesday with my uni, the first one reduced me to tears because the tech didn't work and so for twenty minutes we tried until i broke down and said that all i wanted to do was cry and it was hard to see the point of learning outcomes. Full credit goes to my tutor for being patient and understanding and sending me a helpful email and letting me answer it in my own time. I think everyone responds to stress and/or change in different ways i have needed to go inside myself to find out what is happening there before venturing into the big wide world of zoom chats and video link-ins.
My MA is now to be done online and it feels all wrong. A communication  design student from the RCA made an instagram post that was about online art school not being art school and i'm inclined to agree with the gist of what was said. I know that what my course leaders are putting together is the all they can do, that corvid 19 is circumstances beyond their control, but a cobbled together online course is unlikely to be worth £2.5K, the value of the course was for me access to equipment, expert technicians and material resources at an affordable price, also interaction with other students MA and BA from first year to third, we learn from each other, its a creative network that cannot be replicated online. I hope that the university will find a way to compensate students who stick with them rather than leaving or deferring. Perhaps they will offer students what they have missed out on for a further term or 6 months maybe after their course ends. This would be fair and honourable tho' I doubt that they will offer this if students don't ask so next week i shall have to write to ask. Thats assuming that i'm here next week because the scary thing at the moment is no one really knows what the next few weeks and months will bring. 
The ideas and processes i was previously working on are mostly in arrest at the moment, the planned creative trajectory stalled.  The new work that needs to be done for me to get through course units is cataloguing and writing up which makes my heart sink, handing in a digital folder rather than a body of physical work, feels dry, cold and stiff. I am trying to think of ways to do this that allow me to own my submission to love what i'm giving to my tutors to assess rather than dutifully ticking the boxes which is how i feel at the moment. 
Oh listen to me, people have lost their friends and family to date well over a thousand people have died from this virus in the uk alone how can anything be more important than that ? And world wide it goes into tens of thousands and is set to rise steeply for some time. Trapped inside today I have been watching Born into Brothels a documentary about a photographer who went to live in one of India's infamous red light districts. As she photographed the women's lives she got to know the children there, a group of whom she became particularly fond of through teaching them to take photographs. I would recommend this film, it is humbling on many levels. 
Last week i was speaking on the phone to my godfather and we were of course talking about the virus, it was why i phoned. We agreed it was scary, it is. And then he spoke of India and called to my attention the horror of Covid in the slums of India where people live cheek by jowl, then an instagram post came up on my facebook thread saying much the same thing, how self isolation is in fact a rich person's luxury and so it feels. 
Those on the inside are fussing about cleaning their houses, entertaining children, occupying time and feeling the weirdness of their strange incarceration, it is strange, it is uncomfortable. Meanwhile the essential workers, nurses, doctors, shop workers etc are on the outside with letters showing they are essential  There's a new them and us, the inessential workers safe but imprisoned, and the essential workers, heroic  in their activities. we are living in different worlds. I wonder how we will reconnect when all this is done.  Surely it has to be the beginning of a new world order, a new understanding that the values we have been living with can no longer be tolerated.  
I hope if you've read this far you'll forgive me for returning to my journey through the stations of the cross. At the beginning of the week my meditation which has lasted some months now had me with Jesus dying on the cross and then being taken down, with his mother holding her lifeless son in her arms after he was taken down, then the man, the body, the corpse, laid in the tomb. This is where the stations end tho sometimes they are finished with a resurrection scene. Here in my necessary solitude i could be Jesus in my tomb. We could all be. Our time entombed could be a time for contemplation. A meeting of grief, the emptiness, the loneliness, these feelings give way to change, there is no choice, change will be. 
I think this week i amongst others have been preparing myself for grief, i don't know if i'll see people i love again and it hurts, i want to be able to give my mum a hug, even if she and i fight passionately, i still love her, she can be sweet and funny and wise. Likewise my dad and my stepmother and my godparents and oh my god my children and my grandchildren, please may they pull through and my ex husband, and my friends and all the people they love too and so on and i imagine most are thinking along these lines. Please let my family be safe, please let them be well.  
I step away from the stations because the moment takes over. Art is just art, to be relevant it must meet the moment i think. If the moment changes then the art must change too which means that as i look at the body of work i have made this term, and there is good work, i need to see if the good work still stands as work that meets today or if it is still good work but good work that belongs to yesterday. How do i know if it still stands only time will tell. The wheat is being sorted from the chaff. The chaff will blow away in the wind only that which is good and of worth will remain.  

It would be a bit daft not to mention covid 19 aka the corona virus in this blog. I am in England and it has begun to take lives and there is fear in the air. We saw China lock down Wuhan and we thought this is a Chinese thing, then it shifted to Singapore and we thought it's an Asian thing. Then it hit Italy and still it felt like something that happened to other people. Oh the innocence. Oh the wilful ignorance. 
A week ago when i was writing my blog i was blithering about this and that, all relevant then, all relevant now, but also very yesterday. To coin a phrase "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". Britain is discovering who it is in crisis. Each of us is discovering who we are when trouble hits the collective. My university is apparently still opening on Monday. Academics are now teaching online - I imagine this will feel weird - but technicians are required to come in as the workshops will be open. Is this right ? I guess that what we see as all but essential workers pull in is who is essential and who isn't. I went in to uni on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday last week as i had things i wanted to finish or at least saw off their sprues and pouring cups so that i could take them home. I also had a few print things i wanted to do. On Monday I questioned my decision but also had shopping etc to do, by Thursday it began to feel really socially irresponsible to be doing things that were not essential and so from Thursday evening i have seen and spoken face to face with no-one. 
Ordinarily this kind of solitude would be something of a treat. I am reclusive by nature. I need solitude as much as, maybe more than, i need company. But in the current atmosphere its a little scary. Rough voices on the street outside on Friday evening remind me that not everyone has pulled in. Friday was supposed to be the last day of trading for pubs, restaurants and bars. I gather that many were packed. Of course they were. 
Of course they were ? Why ? Because for some the response to the proximity of Death is to want to go out in flames, do or die, i live to live let Death take me if he can. Why is Death male ? Is Death male ? I am shyer of his embrace. In retreat i worry that i have a temperature, is that a tickling cough. Will I die ? Am i strong enough to beat the thing that threatens my, and others, existence. 
It is odd to be so close to a disease that may or may not be biblical but surely is a reminder that many years ago disease took more of us than most of us can remember, measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis all common enough, my grandfather's parents died of TB leaving him an orphan at 17. Hard to imagine but TB has become a hidden killer in recent times, some strains resistant to antibiotics. Please fact check me on this. 
Death has stalked me all this year, in the form of grief for Jon, yes years gone now, but not forgotten and still loved for better for worse. And also poor Jesus sentenced to death by crucifixion, carrying the bloody cross to the site of his execution. This week i have been dying on my cross, it can surely only get better from there. Stations 13 and 14 are "Jesus is taken down from the cross" and "Jesus is laid in the tomb respectively". The resurrection is optional. I have cut out 14 pieces of copper and covered them in hard ground and i hope to scratch out marks on these over Easter. But whether i do the resurrection will depend i guess on whether the resurrection feels pertinent. 
The Easter story is a potent tale. It is one man, calling out for justice, willing to carry the sins of the world on his shoulders, to die for that world. Make no mistake this is a hero. No wonder the story has lasted. Its a shame he has too often been poorly represented by his priests and worshippers. 
One of the things about stories that last is that they resonate. They resonate with a part of us. My blogs about grief and Jon have had more hits because people relate to the story. Lovers torn apart, death, grief, all these things are invested in our body memory. If we have never loved, we may long for love, if we have loved we may feel another's pain, if we are a wretch we may scorn love and the ring is different but the call to our hearts path is still clear. 
Here i am blogging, let me say its my reflective journal. Because i went in to uni last week i have lots of bronze things to finish at home, they would have been finished amateurly even with Jim's help and guidance in the workshop at home their finish will be even less well executed but they are symbols of my trying. I doubt that it will be clear how much work i have put in in a digital portfolio. That's sad but not the end of the world. This term has been hard it has taken resolve and determination to carry on. There have been falls and i have had to get back up. But what i know is that in my body like invisible ink i carry the work i have done. This i think is all we can ever take out of life that which we have done is ours to bear. 
I think its awful that Jesus had to carry the sins of the world. I think if God was his father and made him do that then he was an awful father. I think that each of us must carry the weight of our being. Not in the manner that Thatcher's selfish-me-first cult decrees but as our belonging, as our knowing that that which we are is the trace that we leave behind when we die and to be mindful of the trace we leave for it makes a difference. 

Ok ... keep going. Its been a week of grief and tears but like walking in the rain its no good stopping. The pain of losing someone you love doesn't seem to get easier. Sorrow this week has manifested as a great dark weight in the centre of my chest that hurts with an insistence that cannot be denied. One step in front of another. I can hear voices saying stop making a fuss, what a fuss, silly fuss, stupid woman, let go. But also kinder voices including Jon's. I think it was him nagging me to ask for the letters. He knew what they were of course, that it was important that they came back to me. That sounds a bit mad but the dead do seem to hang about. I used to sometimes appeal to my granny for counsel, my mother's mother, who was fierce and not to be crossed but fair. And i feel my great aunt Leska as a benign presence in the background. I have one of her rosaries, red plastic beads and a metal cross made of some cheap light metal. I also have a little painting of a nun that came to me after she died. They are not things of value to anyone but me. Its how it is with things that belong to people who take up heart space. The pecuniary worth is of less matter than the moment or person that an object represents. Objects carry secrets. A thing picked up by two on a walk may be of no consequence to anyone else but could well be a port-key to another time and place for either of those two. It is how the letters i received have been this week. I haven't looked at them all but some of them take me back to his living room seeing them on the mantelpiece below which stood the two chinese figures that had come from his parents' house when his mother died. Some i can remember being attached to his fridge with magnets along with other things. Of course it means i've been occupying his house in my mind. Remembering the feel of how it was when we were together there. The stairs, the porch, the living room and kitchen, the bedrooms and bathroom and the views from all the windows and his beautiful garden, the smell of fennel on my hands, bees on the flowers and dragon flies and tadpoles, gold finches on teasels, the plants we bought together.
Enough. Enough already. Nostalgia is an addictive drug. Its a trip. It is but it isn't. I can return to a place, feel what i felt there, but it is out of body material. One of the things that Jon's death made me very aware of is that that which physically touches me has a worth that is different to that which is distant, historical or geographical. I can go back to my grandparents houses or my childhood home or any number of other places in my mind and they are real places but it is not real in the way that my body returning is real. My grandparents house was knocked down and rebuilt when they died. And Jon's house is just a 1980's end terrace housing estate house now. The place it was when it was his house and my home from home is in me. I wonder if the walls remember me and him but houses have so many occupants, our ghosts may be there, but they are also here and elsewhere. It's strange how even the living have ghosts. 
And ghosts reside within our bodies too. Ghosts of our past selves and those whose lives have touched us for better or worse. The mediocre tend to not be remembered so well only the very good and very bad. This blog is surely not reflective journal writing but it will be handed in with all the others when hand in comes. Because my work is always born out of felt experience. It is where it stems from. 
This week past we were asked to make a Pecha Kucha presentation, 20 slides 20 seconds talk per slide. I can't say i was looking forward to it, but i could see the point. I was less prepared than i would have liked but time just skids past and so it felt like an achievement just turning up and having a crack at it. And tho' i was dreading it, good things about being asked to do it, were seeing other people's presentations and being inspired, going back over the term's work and realising how much i had done and putting it together as a story, and being given feedback. My class mates seemed to like it more than my tutor who wanted more information about my process. 20 seconds isn't really long enough to explain the difference between a two part mould and a three part mould or why i needed to make both or any of the other things i learned from making those moulds and filling them with wax and setting the cast objects on cups with sprue and risers and if i'd gone into detail about that i'd have had to miss out other stuff so i went with my heart and made the story the process that i spoke about. 
I am not sure if it was this week or last week that we had a lecture in which it was suggested we go back to our manifestos and remember why we started out MA. It's good sometimes to go back to why. I've been disaffected this term. I did have a hiccup a month or so back but the disaffection has hung about for too long. I need to remember how lucky i am to be studying what a gift it is that i'm giving myself. I am too uptight at the moment, irritable and not nice to be with. It could be my projects' subject matter both of which have been problematic. I am currently being nailed to the cross for my ASU 2 Stations of the Cross project which clearly is not great. And having spent the past couple of weeks focusing on my teenage self i seem to have picked up some of her post punk "fuck you" attitude. Not very helpful when trying to conform to learning outcomes. It could also be a desperate need to play make, to make for pure pleasure and it may be that i have to let go a little of trying and just let what needs to come come. It's been inspiring to be in the print workshops with the first year BA students working on etching plates. Being with so many people working on one project producing such different work reminds me that there are many ways to get to a place, be that place a finished etching plate, the top of a mountain or the end of a long rainy walk with a heavy pack or heavy heart. 

And then another blog not so much for uni as for me. Long time readers of my blog will remember how broken i was when Jon died. I guess it is relevant to uni because Jon is the seed that i planted at the beginning of my SNU project this term. My need to acknowledge him as a part of my life. To give him place and substance but also to move forward with him in my heart, holding my back but not holding me back. 
A couple of years ago his ex-wife emailed me before my planned trip to see his grave and pay respects to the man i loved/love to say that in the box of possessions his daughter had received after his flat was packed up were some letters of mine that i'd sent him. I couldn't think of any letters i'd sent to him while he was in Gozo, we emailed, it was free and immediate, and so i figured the letters were the half a dozen or thereabouts cards i'd sent him after we reconnected post break up. A get well card sent as we were tentatively reconnecting after his first hospitalisation after collapsing in the street in 2015, birthday and christmas cards, a post card of Southwold, which was one of our places, sent at the beginning of 2016 before or maybe after he was hospitalised again also after collapsing in the street.
I don't know if those cards are in the packet i received but it turns out that the letters were actually seemingly most or all the cards i sent him during our time together. There are many "i love you"s. A few longer notes. A shared diary from our first holiday. A book of not exactly poems and memory things. Stuff i'd figured he'd discarded years before he discarded me. God knows where he kept them while he was in Bungay. We were careful of each other's space and so i guess they were just stashed somewhere i wouldn't look because people need privacy and so closed cupboards were left closed and not pryed into. 
It is amazing to have them. Also heartbreaking. Because i guess his keeping them and taking them with him stands as some testament to our affair. If he had not cared he'd not have kept them would he ? I have felt his care but as i'm here still in the physical world, physical testament has a different quality. Feelings are deep but they are also personal and can be denied by others or in moments of doubt. They make me believe a little more in the love i know i felt. 
It feels weird that his ex-wife kept them for so long. I wonder if i hadn't nudged her this week if she would have ever sent them. I think she regretted not destroying them. I am glad that she didn't. They allow me to feel ok for cherishing his cards and notes and making him part of my this term's SNU project. 
I don't think there is more to say. i have near on a kilo of paperwork now as record of our love affair and i don't know if the smell of them is his or his ex-wifes but they bear his trace and i am thankful for receiving them. 
            

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.