Coming back to my blog after a while spent thinking. The format has changed while i have been pondering which is a little disconcerting. This happens on social media platforms too & i know i am not alone in hauling up sharp with a jolt when the change is effected. These things are meant to stay the same. My creature response is similar to my creature response to the aisles in my local supermarket being changed. I mention this because its really not a big deal but it is something that paused me before i started to write and that moments pause has altered the path of my thought thread. 

If my thoughts are like water running in a stream a stop will hold the water back until the stop is overwhelmed, crashed over or else slid round. Thought is a constant, an ongoing movement. The body of us, us being that which is alive maybe, is a mass of thought, a sea, an ocean, a forest or jungle being a sea of green holding, containing the thought of time now, time passed & the seeds of time that will be. This seems like a big thing to make out of a small change to my blog platform changing but its the butterfly in Kyoto effect what i say next is not what i would have said if my blog platform had not been altered. 

This year has been shocking & we have each adapted to the changes imposed on us by Covid-19 differently. Our bubble lives are now shockingly visible. Bubble lives are not a new thing, a workplace is a bubble, a family, a nation lives within a bubble, we have class/wealth separated bubbles, skill bubbles, the sporty, the arty, the musical, the dreamy, the logical, the mathematically minded, the feelings focused. Passing through life our journey takes us towards those we are most like, have most affinity with & as we connect to those the opportunity to meet minds less like ours diminishes.

What had i hoped to begin my blog with was an update of my thoughts, a posting that lets me look back at the past year and i guess that is how i will continue now. The slight alteration in platform format really being no more than a hop over a puddle really. One of the things i have noticed happens to me now is finding myself lost in memories. I don't recall this happening when i was younger but now i find myself in times & places that are my long ago. I wonder if this is a collecting of that which has formed me, a reconciliation with what i cannot change but may now see with eyes & being that is different to the person that experienced the moment even tho the person was me & is me or part of me. I am like a boro garment holding the past, patched up & threadbare in places, still whole in others, a work in progress. Is this how a soul evolves ? 

Looking back at old photographs is a peculiar game, fresh faced we gaze out of the images, a snapshot of a moment that may or may not tell the truth about that time. I have spent a lot of my life longing for another life, i know that is a bad thing, i look back at my life & wish that i had revelled more in the intimacy of bringing up babies but being a single parent i was often lonely, craving adult company & struggling to get by, i smoked too much hash & was lost in a vapid unsatisfying external wannabe lifestyle. I also learned in that time to be content with the small things, began to know my body through yoga, dance & shiatsu, became softer in essence through meditation & have learned (& am still learning) how to express myself through my creative practice & i hope that i mothered my children adequately if not perfectly. 

I wonder if one of the things i struggled with on my MA was how inconsistent it felt with my truth. It may only have been me that felt like this. I struggled with the pushiness, the get yourself seen, put yourself out there, make connections for connections sake, display for displays sake, it felt gross & quite alien to my practice. That is my experience. It is a relief to no longer be swimming in that sea but also my failure to rise to the challenge has knocked my confidence. I had hoped i think to be seen but ended up feeling unseen maybe because i was unable to engage with the modus operandi we were being taught to follow & hold my integrity as a person & artist. 

If i feel like a misfit maybe it is because i am a misfit. Being a misfit doesn't make me a bad person but perhaps makes a solitary life more likely because not fitting i am not a comfort zone. I am quite a lot not comfortable myself, i don't mean i am physically uncomfortable but i am prone to question & doubt. The comfort of certainty is not often mine.

But of some things i am certain. These things are most commonly feelings. I trust my feelings. Trust is i guess a key player when it comes to certainty. One of the things that help me to trust is my movement practice. This lockdown i have given myself an hour each evening to move. I have given myself an hour each evening to move, i have also made it an appointment, a thing i don't change. I did something similar for some months when Jon died & my grief was so vast i needed a holding space. Then, i marked out a square (about 1metre by 1metre) with masking tape & tho my body could go out of the square in space that which was tied to the ground could not. It gave me a safe boundary in a most peculiar time that allowed me to reconnect with life. Similar to now i also fixed a time boundary. There is much to be said for creating self determined boundaries when large parts of life feel (or are) out of one's control. 

Walking is part of my creative practice but i have been lazy about it this year. This is daft, walking would help me stay sane but i can't seem to motivate myself to get walking. I am not sure what the block is but i am giving myself room to meet it in the hope that meeting it i will overcome it. I have found that forcing through blocks does not work well for me. My encounter with my body in my given hour each day lets me come to myself like a sea meeting shore. There are no wrongs or rights in that hour & giving my body control lets my mind free flow in a way that is similar tho not the same as walking and maybe will see me past my block. Yesterday i hit up against some ancient rage, i suspect that will keep surfacing until whatever pain has caused it has been healed. The day before my mind/body working together gave me this: 

step by step, one step after another, and another, and another. step by step, can be fast, slow, sideways, backwards,

forwards, one step after another. the destination is death. the way, life, is the path chosen.

I guess it is a poem tho i am not a poet so i feel shy calling it that. I guess it is just because of how the words link & because they are in a slightly odd shape it feels like a poem & not just notes jotted down tho in fact it is just that. I guess that is what i wanted to blog about today, the comfort that step following step gives me, the uncomplicated ease that the thought of putting one "foot" in front of another without mind for the step after, or step after the step after. This sequence is i think how we lead life, knowingly or not. Who would have thought this time last year that our lives would be being lived as they are now but step by step this is where we have come to. And the course that our steps take now, into the future, will determine the shape of our lives to come. It may seem like all is lost but each one of us has within us that butterfly in Kyoto & our being, our movement may alter the course of the world history whether that being is as an individual or a collective. We are maybe more in control than we really want to acknowledge.

This blog is me trying to get to grips with handing in the work i have made this term. I am using my blog today because i feel all at sea with this hand in. Until the covid19 virus i was on a trajectory to hand in physical documentation. And I had a mental trajectory of where i was going to take my work. There is nothing i can do about the change of circumstances, they are what they are, i/we will have to wait it out hoping that the people we love get through this and feeling bad for those who lose their lives and their bereaved families and hoping our minds and hearts can bear what is happening. We are supported, or not, by our governments and those who have control over our wellbeing. 
One of the bodies that has control over my wellbeing is my university. In order to finish this term i have to submit the portfolio of work that i would have given them as a physical body as an online catalogue with a description of how the work was made, why, what i learned, and what i was planning to do, but not necessarily including work i made after lockdown tho of course it is relevant to the work i was making before tho not the same. If i had made less work, worked less hard, this would be an easier task. As it is i put in the hours and built a good physical portfolio made to be seen and handled. 
I am glad that i only missed one of the timetabled sessions with tutors, it means that if they were paying attention they have seen my work on paper, not just as photographs. Photographs are a good but limited format, bad work can be made to look better and good work rarely looks as good in a photograph as it does in reality. Photography can of course be the medium an artist uses and that is another matter. I have been exploring print, using photographs, perhaps i should enjoy the circular journey that necessity has forced upon me but to date i am not, its annoying, frustrating and saddening and is forcing a long dull path on me that i have no choice but to follow if i want to pass this module. And heaven knows if i will pass because i'd worked my butt off during the term and was planning to do the reading and writing in this time which now i have to use to essentially re-do the work in a format that allows my tutors and their assessors to see what i have done. 
I think i am going mad with this submission. I don't know how many people have died from this virus so far 13,000 or 14,000 and still more every day to date i think in the uk alone. Learning outcomes feel like part of a world that is no longer fit for purpose, a world that will need a new score, a new way of recognising value that is not tick boxes and bean counting but built upon worth that is clear in the way that birdsong, butterflies, love and care are clearly worth something and badges, medals and political platforming and promises aren't. 
I guess this blog is an introduction. I am handing in these blogs as my reflective journal. God knows the blogs at the beginning of the term will probably seem as irrelevant as the marking system i'm struggling with. I know that i have no choice but to walk the designated road to submission on May 14th because if i don't all the days before will be erased from my work sheet and i will have to start again but if this blog is anything its an explanation for the next few blogs being a bit stiff. If you are reading this and are a regular reader you may want to skip the stiff pages. And if you are one of my tutors or an assessor and obliged to read the whole shebang i hope that it passes muster and that i don't repeat myself too often tho' i suspect that i will by accident because not having designed my hand in to be handed in in this way i am building with materials that were made to be shown in a different way.   

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.