I read the last lines of the previous post & i think what is this blogging thing i'm doing ? It's thoughts of a moment caught in time. I think back to when Jon died, or when i was struggling with the MA course i didn't finish, when i threw up on the page all the feelings i couldn't contain. There is a strong case for doing this in private in a notebook that will likely never be read even by me, but, then also, sometimes i'll flip back to look at a post from another time, this blog goes back nearly a decade now, and it acts as witness. 

Yesterday i spoke to my godmother about how my mother had invited her over to have lunch & meet an archbishop from Africa who was a friend of my mother's aunt. She said my mother was late getting the meal ready so my godmother & the archbishop were left sitting in the garden, he peeling potatoes & she shelling peas. It conjures up a gorgeous vignette now, in part because i know the garden & my mother & godmother, but life didn't feel gorgeous when i was growing up because it was my normal & other people's normal seemed to be way more entrancing, now i look back and can see how each one of us lives a life that is a bit like novel we just don't know it at the time. 

My seminal relationship was with Jon, no man had touched me the way he did, the relationship was in a league of its own, but there were men in my life before him, what made him the one i go back to in my mind, what makes him the one i take with me wherever i go. I think its about feeling, perhaps how we started, perhaps the timing of our days together, perhaps it was when i opened my eyes for the first time, perhaps it was when i said "yes" and embraced my own life whole heartedly. God only knows but he changed my life. 

He changed my life but now in hindsight i see that all the time my life has been changing, chapters within it act like stepping stones across a river, friendships & happenings belonging to yesteryear held in a golden light, bike rides around the villages around where i grew up, my babies, & people & places that are part of the picture then no longer, or else constants that i revisit or who stand beside me as i travel this life. 

At the moment my mum is ill in hospital, that's where i began this series of blog posts about myself & my family's history. These past few weeks have drawn a new path in my mind the bus ride from Norwich to Dereham, the walk to the hospital from Dereham market place, the room & the ward that mum has been in, the faces of the nurses, the occupational therapist, the discharge nurse, their faces & also their bearing, the way they interact, and while she was in the ward, the women she was sharing space with. Even the woman i was booking appointments with to see mum gave me a part of herself as we spoke, her dog barking in the background. We leave & collect traces depending on character, some are witness but leave without being seen, others notice nothing but spread themselves all over wherever they've been, most of us fall between these extremes. 

Who we are is political. How long our presence lasts after we've died depends on those who carry us with them. Our children are carriers. Maybe our children's children are carriers. Good friends & lovers may also hold us. Bad friends & lovers may also hold us. Maybe that is why they say don't hold a grudge. I do hold grudges, it is a fault in me, it is a fault in me that causes me suffering because instead of letting go i hold on to a bad feeling. But how do I let go of a blow without losing the knowledge that blow gave me ?

For instance, a mark in my story is finding my oldest sister in the arms of my then partner, the father of our daughter & the child in my womb. It was June, we were staying at my other sister's for her daughter's second birthday, my own daughter had turned two in March. We had pitched a tent in their garden as had others. We had left the cats outside for the night at our home but brought my dog. We must have arrived mid to late afternoon i think & when my daughter, Jessamy, got tired i took her into the tent to lay her down & she and i fell asleep together. Much later i woke in the small hours, i could hear two voices quite close by in the garden, & the sounds of a party ongoing inside my sister's cottage. The voices close by were those of my partner & my oldest sister, he was begging her for sex she was prevaricating, simpering & giggling & saying no but not in a way that felt like no. I unzipped the tent door & got out of our tent. I walked over to where they were lying in each others arms. I stood over their heads for a few minutes listening & watching before saying "i could have stamped on your heads while you've been lying there". Writing that i can see that is a brutish thing to say. My sister leapt up to standing like an a volt of electricity had passed through her body, my partner, rolled over, i think he swore. I walked away, my sister followed saying "you really need to do something about your relationship", i remember giving her a look & saying something like "well you're helping" ... my other sister came out & a row that i can't recall ensued. It was a nightmare night. And unbeknown to us then our little cat Percy at home with his mother & our other cat had been run over & killed, that weekend was a bad weekend. After the row i must have slept, gone back to the tent, but i only remember waking up when no one else was a wake & standing in the garden which was wet with summer dew, the scent of  the honeysuckle that sprawled over everything filled the air, and in the distance sheep called their lambs, in this romantic idyll i was trying to make sense of the night before & piece together my life. Maybe what happened was just a little thing, maybe i could have shaken it off, but the aftermath of an event, great or small, determines the direction of play in the future, and i didn't i grasped it to me. It hurt. 

Correct me if i am wrong after WW1 the germans were forced to pay vast reparations that left them bankrupt which gave passage to the events leading up to WW2. I use that gross example because its easier to see the effect of decisions on a massive scale than it is when their measure is smaller. In personal relationships the dynamics are generally subtler, a failure to apologise, a lack of contrition, how other people respond or react. Once again i bring up a more public furore, the Number 10 Covid lockdown parties for instance, the Number 10 parties shouldn't have happened, when it was discovered they happened those guilty lied & tried to evade justice, those who gave or attended those parties endeavoured to "alright" them, to make them a "nothing to see here" matter, these responses have made them worse. So it is with my sister & I, she has to this date, never said sorry & acts in a manner that implies innate superiority & so the wound festers. 

But what if now i peel the bandages off the wound, give it light, give it air, say this happened it was wrong, but it was a long time ago, my life is not that moment, & tho it changed the course of my life change is part & parcel of life. My older children's father & I were not going to ever make a long happy marriage, we were unsuited partners, maybe it brought our separation to sooner end but an ending was inevitable. I've been thinking recently about how that night felt to my sister. She seemed to me to get off scot free whilst i was punished but maybe that let off has meant the wrong committed is more tightly bound to her than if familial pressure had forced her to meet it head on. Like not cleaning shit off your shoes.  

Anyway maybe my writing out how I met that moment is me letting the light in, giving ancient feelings of shock, betrayal, sadness, anger, pain, license to fly. I wonder what feelings my sister might carry from that night, shame maybe, fear, anger at being caught, desire to deflect, wrong, i can only guess, maybe she has no feelings about it. And who am i today to call foul now, i have got plenty wrong myself, who in the course of a life doesn't. So endeth my sermon.  

ASU2. SNU. And here it is the end of this term. The last hand-in blog post. I feel sad because i don't know if what i have done is enough and after i submitted i realised i'd missed things out, the Pecha Kucha presentation for instance and its frustrating and i hope that links to here and my website will be enough but i'm anxious because i didn't submit folders of images and word documents, but it is now in the hands of my assessors, and my horrible lack of certainty in my ability to express myself as i want to express myself is overwhelming. A part of me likes that my submission includes opening one folder and then another to find the work within but i don't know if my tutors will feel like that or if it will draw a black mark. Whatever the result now of my submission i can only hope that the little ship sails and reaches port. And if she doesn't, if what i have done is not good enough i will have to try again. I had forgotten how painful the constant testing of education is. It is what i wanted but now i find it very difficult. Maybe it is too honest of me to say that in blog post that will be read by examiners. But maybe it connects to the themes of my projects this term, the awful stripped down nature of both of them demanding i lay everything bare, not a demand from outside but from within, to expose, reveal, let be seen that which is normally unseen. Why did i go there ? why did i do that ? it may be that having done that, and by necessity not just in the safety of studio space but also now online, i regret being so open. And if i had written what i have written on a word document would i have written it the same or is the nature of writing a public document also part of the process. Does it bring me closer to christ's very public death ? what a daft thing to say, or think, but maybe it does, so much of what hurts, what makes us vulnerable is kept out of sight, hidden, disguised, a part of this terms work has been to step out of the shadows and this too is what is happening here, now in this moment with a sickness that is terrifying, under a government that doesn't care, the good and the bad is now shown up. And there needs to be conscious reflection perhaps, a preparedness to see what we don't want to see. But after we have seen, what then ? 
My sadness today is perhaps also exhaustion, day after day of writing and writing, a term of working my butt off, weeks of re-orientating myself, to a new social climate and a new ask from my course, the same for everyone, and for each one of us something that will have thrown up its own problems. Still it is done. I will only post Covid19 Diaries for now on my blog until i am graded pass or fail. The Covid19 entries are one of the ways i found to make sense of the oddness of now, and my blog is where i put them so i know where to find them for later. They feel simpler and smaller, and i find them more comforting than all of the words i have been typing this past month. So i sign off and close this part of the story with this blog post hoping i have given enough. 

SNU. Back to the nitty gritty and practical. Because my photographs were provoking deep and difficult emotions and i was struggling to keep my mind steady i decided to take a side step to making moulds out of objects. Remembering how to make plaster moulds was part of the brief i had set myself anyway and i wanted to find a way to make a mould of a paint tube so that i could compare the end product with the 3d printed painted tube and i'd hoped to make a slush wax paint tube that could be a bronze in the end. I also wanted to find out what kind of object worked in a silicone mould and then how the materials that could be cast in the moulds acted within the moulds. Similarly with plaster moulds. Also i was aware that i needed to press on with work for my ASU2 module but that my path to the work i wanted to make for that required me to build up a body of knowledge in preparation. That body formed part of my SNU practice. 
So to start i took in pebbles, shells, a square stone (that i had/have several ideas for), a paint tube (not my granny's cool LINO ink one), a single doll's shoe (red, with cinderella written small on the the heel-sole as part of the design), and a red aeroplane from a stencil kit that i had as a child. The links to my childhood are obvious with the latter two objects but they also link to flight, and foot prints, and walking in somebody else's shoes ergo empathy, sympathy and compassion, and fairy tales, and journeys, and work i have made previously. 
Work i have made previously also got picked as a thread that connected my SNU to ASU2. My creative process is a kind of mapping of ideas, a piece of work that comes out of the map acts as way marker and may be returned to as whim or pull moves me. My creative story threads are rarely completed they just get to a place where a stop can be taken. 
It was part of my wanting to know what the 3d print could and couldn't do that led me to take in two models i'd made at different, much earlier points in my life, to see if they could be printed. One i had made at school, at about age 13, it is two figures kneeling one with an arm around the other. It was just before i gave up art at school. There are points in our lives when we make decisions that lead our lives one way or another and there is no way of knowing how things would have gone if a different decision had been made. I gave this model to my granny for christmas that year, i was proud of it, its a grown child's art i could be embarrassed about now but it said something i needed to say. My grandparents had it in their sitting room for years and it gave me a boost to see it when we visited  Later after both my grandparents had died and their house was cleared i went up into their loft space for one last time. There on a window sill in the otherwise empty room was my model. I picked it up and took it home. It would have been rubble when the new owners knocked the house down to make space for their new home. The other model was a madonna, a mother and child, made in my early twenties when i was a young single mum. It is part of a set of three models, Gabriel, Joseph, and Mary with baby Jesus. It got knocked off the piano and broke in half at some point but you know what you value by whether you keep and or fix it when it gets broken. Again the broken things links ASU2 and SNU but at this point the theme is just emerging so it may become clearer later in the write up. 
The two 3d models came out well from the printer but because i love to see the process i had asked if the scaffolding and base could be left rather than removed. This was because print size means more or less scaffolding and the shape of a thing dictates the need for scaffolding. I found this fascinating because the scaffolding changed the objects. Also because the models were made from figures the scaffolding seemed to relate to social fabric, support systems, the way the earth holds us, how much we ask of the earth. It is also part of a build up of the invisible framework of knowledge that is what my SNU project has been about building. With the printmaking what makes a good image using ready made images to help my eyes learn to discern, why 3d how do i build a thing that rests steady on a surface, height is a factor, also the reach from the centre as much as the reach from our own centre, physical, emotional or mental, changes our balance and may create a need to reach out for help or support. 
At this point i went back to the counsellor i knew from my BA because sometimes leaning in towards safety can save a lot of trouble. I knew i was struggling but also that with the right support i would be able to define what part of my struggle belonged to me and what did not, to see my errors but also to let others carry their errors. This is more related to my ASU2 theme but all work is part of the movement that forms the sequence. Perhaps i am thinking too much for a short MA module but for me the emotional back story is an important part of the making process.
Starting the SNU module i was working with two threads,  perhaps i could say they were coming in at 90 degrees, right angles; North travelling South to the centre, printmaking, image-making, work in 2d, and East travelling West again coming to centre, my life story with Jon as a part of it guiding the thread but not dictating its line. The ASU2 and the SNU mould making and 3d work could perhaps be South going North and The Stations of the Cross, or any story that isn't mine, West to East. I don't really know if i am making myself clear with this flat compass graphic but my point is that all the work is tied together, coming to me or out of me but not as a linear torch beam but more as a round or sphere. 
If this is a research write up maybe that is probably too baggy an idea to put forward. But how does a person whose work is driven both by feeling and making write a research report without putting the felt process in as well as the manufacture ? Later my tutor pointed me towards phenomenology and i looked up a little about this but got stopped in my tracks by the virus which broke my ability to focus on anything mentally demanding for weeks. It is something to come back to as my ability to concentrate returns. 
The next posts will be pictures of the silicon moulds and the objects and the 3d printed objects.      

SNU2. The reason i might have lost the thread is because i am writing up a bit of time in which there was a lot going on and i was mentally and physically exhausted and felt overwhelmed,  vulnerable, strung out and cranky. There were a lot of different tasks and deadlines going on simultaneously. Submissions for proposals for 3 exhibitions each with a different deadline and brief. And the deadline for the Creative Odyssey postcard auction. The UEA/NUA collaborative project presentation deadline. The deadline for making work to be invested for the next bronze pour. The MA symposium taking a day out from workshop time. Applying to help with a printmaking workshop for The Pilgrimage of the Animals event organised by XR and St Peter Mancroft with local print maker Maria Pavledis. Meeting with Maria to discuss the workshop and what she needed me to do as her helper. There was also an artists meeting for the sculpture trail. And through that a further meeting with another artist who gave me a link to a residency which in fact i did not apply for because covid19 made travel plans a little unpredictable. 
And i was feeling hemmed in because when i meltdown i need to retreat but all that was happening was asking me to push out. And i was dealing with Jon grief and unresolved child's grief for my grandpa and wanting to get in touch with my father to ask when my grandpa died but not being able to because my oldest sister was in the country and when she is in the country my family prefer me to stay out of the way and not make contact which added to the grief i was feeling about Jon because when i met him he'd been my home, my happy, my soft space, away from my difficult family. 
There's a book called "Talking of Love on the Edge of a Precipice" which i read some years back that spoke of resilience being born out of feeling loved. I wonder if that is why i hold the love affair i had with Jon so close to me. I felt loved in his arms, and his love gave me the courage to believe in myself, believe i was ok, not rotten, ugly, useless, horrible, but what i wanted to be, someone worthy of love. My anger towards his family stems in part from the way they refused to acknowledge our love affair as anything of worth when it was of huge worth to me, and maybe of worth to him too. 
One of the things that was also bugging me was the issue of some letters of mine that he'd apparently kept which his ex-wife had told me about about two years before. I'd assumed they were a couple of postcards and maybe a birthday card that i'd sent him after our break up when we were close but not lovers. Cards he'd stuck on his fridge maybe. After a session about copyright law in the symposium i was thinking about how i wanted my words to Jon even if they were likely to be disappointingly flat to be in my hands and not the seemingly hostile hands of his ex-wife. A part of me thought "let it go, it doesn't matter" but another voice kept saying "you need those letters". In the end the "you need those letters" won over and i sent an email to nudge the ex-wife into sending them not really daring to hope she still had them, but chancing my arm anyway. Our email exchange was a bloody fight but she sent the letters to me.
What i hadn't expected was a package nearly a kilo in weight containing, it seems, all the letters and cards i sent him when we were together and a couple of notebooks; a holiday diary we'd made together, and one with poems and pictures and things that belonged to us and my thoughts collected together for him at the beginning of our affair. The stuff was so personal it seemed mad that she'd kept it for so long. It was devastating to receive. But also amazing. It made me feel not-crazy for loving him and believing he loved me too because surely he'd not have kept all that stuff and taken it with him if he didn't care. It made me want to swear because damn fool i loved him and would have followed him to the ends of the earth if he'd asked. It made me feel better about making work about him. Not silly but honest. 
This post is an explanation, i guess, of the emotional landscape in which the SNU work was growing. I think that everything the maker-creator is thinking and feeling when they are making-creating becomes part of whatever is made/created so giving this much space to my heart-work feels appropriate if somewhat exposing.  
  

ASU2. I feel with this blog now a bit how i did months ago when i was at this stage of the term, my head spinning and like i have too many balls up in the air. I was aware that i had done very little for my ASU2 project. Remember, The Stations of the Cross. I'd been thinking the story, walking it through in my mind, the last days, Jesus' in the desert, Jesus' ride into Jerusalem, Jesus at the temple, the last supper, Mary Magdalen washing his feet, the conflict within his inner circle, the shared meal, the feeling of foreboding, Jesus talking about betrayal, "one of you shall betray me tonight", "one of you shall deny me before the cock crows three times", the blessing "eat, drink, this is my body which i give unto you, this is my blood". Who knows if he actually said those things but this is the story that has been passed down through the ages. 
And then Jesus and his disciples leave to go to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray to contemplate or maybe just to hang out, a group of twelve men after supper taking a walk on a warm evening or night, was it warm ? or was there a chill or a breeze ? maybe there was tension in the air, did they feel Judas' absence ? did they care that he was absent ? Was he the fall guy, the mate that got pranked and teased ? Was he fed up with it ? Was he jealous ? Jealous of Jesus ? Jealous of the other disciples ? Jealous of Mary ? Was he a bad tempered lout ? or too stiff for the group ? or too sensitive ? what made him give Jesus to the men of the temple ? what drove him to do that ? his suicide after suggests he regretted it ? was it an impulse ? a fuck you ? a cry for help ? a please see me ? his name has gone down as the name of a betrayer but maybe he too was destined for the role he plays in the story, maybe his life led to his end as inevitably as Jesus' life is led him to his. 
Jesus went with three of his friend to the mount of olives. I guess they were the favoured few, the inner circle. I imagine him looking out across Jerusalem, the sounds of city at night, animals, insects, and the small lights of windows, fires, the smells in the air. I feel him to be tired and sad, worn out with being idolised, by crowds and even his friends, i feel like he is thinking that the show is over. I don't know if he knows he is going to be crucified. Maybe he thinks he will get a hard beating and that afterwards he'll take his girl home and let go of his boyhood. Or maybe the atmosphere is so weighted its hard to ignore the feeling of impending doom, the dark politics that require a sacrifice, a scapegoat, an example to be made, rebel and you'll suffer, see, see how this man you all thought was great can be taken down, can be shamed, can be broken, can be killed if we like. 
At last as dawn is breaking Judas comes with the temple guards. He greets Jesus with a kiss. The kiss is the sign. This is the one. How does that kiss feel ? is there a moment of love between the two ? a warmth from that contact that strikes like a knife ? the guards move forward to arrest Jesus, one of his friends, Simon Peter ? steps forward and strikes the guards ear with a sword or a knife, protecting his master, the leader of the gang. Jesus remonstrates. He knows now that some rough justice is to be handed to him. Does he know that fighting is pointless ? Does he seek to spare others ? Why doesn't he fight ? Why does he yield to punishment ? Does he feel he deserves punishment ? What is his back story ? What is he thinking. The guards take him away. Peter denies him three times before the cock crows, realising only on the third crow that it was he his friend spoke of. Or was the story made up after. Stories are fluid at their beginning, it is only later that certain parts become set, the bones of a myth. 
And I am thinking about this part of the story of Jesus and i'm thinking that i want to make fourteen, or maybe fifteen if i include the resurrection, prints each depicting a station. I am thinking that i want to learn how to do drypoint on a copper plate and also how to make hard ground plate. These are pretty much new to me processes, i have done a little drypoint a good decade ago on aluminium and plastic but nothing really since, hard ground i have never tried. 
I am feeling exhausted and my nerves are rattling particularly because of the collaborative project so i ask to be excused from a taught session because i know i need to drop down a gear, i cannot take in other people's seed ideas and i cannot let mine out without losing it. I should not have asked. I should have just taken. I thought i was being polite. I regret trying. I stop trying. I hate everyone because all i wanted was a moment to breathe and because i asked i have less moments. It is resolved now. covid19 makes before covid19 feel like years ago, another life, but i write it because it was part of the process. 
I took the time tho i was told not to. And let myself scratch into a small copper plate front and back and an aluminium scrap too. Not good work. Resting scribbles.
The following day I took two scrap copper plates of the same size and worked on the back of one in drypoint with Jesus' face showing as Judas comes to him and worked into hard ground on the other with Judas' face as he approaches Jesus. Then after the hard ground was etched and cleaned i printed from them, one print each, and wrote on them to show what i liked and what i didn't, what was a typical drypoint mark and so on. The following week i worked into the plates again rubbing out parts and making further marks. I did not have time to write on them. I had planned to keep working into them. But there is never enough time. I printed on two types of paper the second time to see how that changed the prints. The prints are not good work, they are working work, learning work. I like how they look with the writing.     

SNU. Working with photographs was becoming a little intense. Feelings i had not anticipated had surfaced, and feelings i had thought i would be working with were turning out to be more raw and open than i'd expected. In truth i'd hoped the exercise would be a walk in the park, a sunny day in the garden, a trip along a country road, it began in that spirit but had taken me into dark places. 
I decided to side step into working with objects in the 3d workshops. I had four metal origami flowers that had been poured at the beginning of the term that were sample pieces, they were me trying recall how to make paper pieces for burn out, and how the different metals offered in the workshops worked  and handled, with a mind to needing this knowledge for my masters project in term three. The feathers i'd spent a morning putting on cups with sprue and risers had not been successful but these were good enough to use as learning props. 
I also wanted to find a way to make a copy of a tube of lino printing ink that had come out of my granny's art studio bag when she died. The graphics were cool so i didn't want to burn it out or ruin it with plaster or silicon so i asked Steve the technician if it could be printed on the 3d printer. I had asked the term before if  a couple of wire horses might be reproduced on this machine but they were too small and slight so i also had a yen to know what could and couldn't be 3d printed, again with a view to holding this knowledge for my masters project work should i need it. 
Steve took the paint tube, photographed it and put the photographs into the computer, confirmed that it was viable and so it was printed. Success. And following that success i took in a ceramic bull that had been part of my childhood, an ornament that belonged to the same period as the CMYK screen prints. All the time when working my mind is making these connections, seemingly unrelated things have lines drawn between them that outsiders can't see. The lines are live wires. They burn. The burn intensity depending on the level of attention given or the strength of the connection. The bull was photographed and processed by Steve as before. One of the interesting things about the 3d printer is that it doesn't just replicate, it is a modelling tool in itself and also things being replicated can be sized up and down. The plastic comes in various colours but the paint tube and bull by chance were printed in red. 

SNU. One of the photographs in my small selection was a kodak print from 1972, the colours in it were so lovely it seemed a shame to lose them. I was still thinking about making screens from the seagull photographs mentioned earlier but wasn't quite sure what to do with them and Jess the print workshop technician suggested doing a CMYK screen print using the kodak photograph. This would allow me to learn how to separate the layers and then reprint them and it would teach me colour layering which was something i wanted to know more about, to get better at. 
The first task was to scan the photo and put it into photoshop then divide the picture into four layers of colour C (Cyan) M (Magenta) Y (Yellow) and K (Black). I don't know why Black is called K. Having done this, decisions needed to be made about filters and dpi dots per inch, shape of dots per inch and so much more. I was just learning so went on advice for round dots at 300dpi. I used two filters half tone and diffusion dither to see if the prints from the two filters would be different. They were. I'm not sure how clear that will be in photographs but there is a difference on the actual prints. The difference is maybe more obvious on the sheets used to make the screens. 
Using this process i made two sets of prints CMYK half tone & CMYK diffusion dither over the course of two afternoon/evening sessions in the screen printing studio. Approximately 5-6 hours each. It allowed me to embed the registration process into my body. I also learned how to mix inks that were translucent enough to allow other colours to be seen through. Sonia said that the black needed to be no more than a smoke to add detail and to make it very light. The half tone black prints were rather lovely i thought, ghostly and quite different from the diffusion dither which were more solid. 
I also discovered how weird it is to print pictures of myself over and over again. Feelings aroused were a distaste for what felt quite narcissistic, a deep vulnerability, also a blank objectivity, and an uncovering of a childhood grief for my grandpa who died the Autumn after the pictures were taken. I have referred to this in one of my previous blogs so i won't go over old ground but the deep and uncomfortable feelings i was dealing with made me hyper-sensitive and work wise i was pushing myself hard, too hard maybe, which led to exhaustion. Sometimes it is important to step back and breathe, note to self. 

Sunday morning April 5th 2020. i do not really know where i am. This life we are living now is like no life i've lived before. My old normal is in disarray. And my new normal is a most peculiar space. On Thursdays at 8pm we clap the NHS staff and other essential workers. People step out into the street after days of being sequestered and clap, some bang saucepans and holler. We hover about in our front gardens a bit awkwardly and say hello to people at mans length distance for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and then go back inside. I am not sure about the clapping. It makes me feel odd. I do it. I understand on some level. But also i don't know, i feel like its a thing that could either become something good or something dark, a way for people to obliviate the reality of what is going on. The clapping and hurrays don't feel like they compensate for the fact that staff in the NHS are going into this crisis without proper protective equipment or means to do the job but i worry that they might be used as cover for that fact. We are led by a government that seems to see old people and weak people as expendable. People who die with underlying conditions are somehow marked as acceptable deaths, they might have died anyway. A five year old died yesterday, but they had underlying conditions so that little boy or girl's death is brushed to one side as unusual and therefore not such a big deal. It is a big deal. Every death is a big deal. Even the deaths of those who are seemingly unloved. Death is an end. Death by numbers makes those ends seem more palatable, but the end of a life is a big deal. 
I am being political, boring on, i know, if anyone is reading this they will likely have stopped already. And as i will be handing in my blog as my reflective journal for my MA course my tutors may ask what does this have to do with your course ? The thing is that my work whether it is my work as an artist or my work as a shiatsu practitioner is born out of my life. It isn't something outside of myself, it is me immersed in the world i am living in. In safe normal circumstances i can take myself off into flights of fancy explore a story from inside that story, endeavour to live it, but we are not living in safe normal circumstances. Suddenly we are all possibly carrying a killer disease, we want to see our families but we don't want to because if we are carrying infection we don't want them to catch it from us. In the street eyes are cast down and if we see someone on the path before us we'll cross the road or step out into the road to maintain what we've been told is safe distance. Is it safe distance ? 
Our social intercourse is changing as result of the corona virus. People who are pushy or who get too close are threatening. It is changing the way we dress, i tie back my hair to go to the supermarket, might cover my face with a scarf if i'm in close proximity to others, i am sure that fashion designers will make beautiful masks for at least one season of haute couture, and at home with no one to see me i wear no make up, tho i still shave my legs. Funny the things that seem to matter. 
It is another of the strangenesses, as those whose work is not essential, or whose work can be done at home, find themselves closer to themselves than maybe they have been since they were very small, we are being stripped of pretence in this new life, who we are is exposed, what we need is revealed and it can be disconcerting. I find i am someone who needs to dissolve in order to reflect and assimilate my new circumstances, to become part of, to let go, to feel my way through the new world i'm inhabiting. My concentration is shot to pieces. My focus terrible. But i have managed to turn my compost heap and having sifted the end bin i have 6 big sacks of beautiful friable compost for potting, mulched two flower beds with the clinker and have four small sacks of twigs for fires or barbecue lighting. Nature is my medicine. The flowers, the birds, the over-half moon milky white in a bright blue sky yesterday afternoon, the sunlight streaming through the trees when i opened the back door to let the cat in in the morning, the robin just inches away from me grub gathering. I notice how much i miss walking in the countryside, i envy my country friends their country walks. 
Again what does this have to do with reflective journalling ? does it need to have anything to do with reflective journalling ? what the hell is reflective journalling if it is not this ? I guess this sojourn in isolation is also giving me time to step back from thinking like a student. That thought process is never quite natural because there are so many holes to squeeze through. In ordinary times it is, i guess, a game. Starting point, finishing point. I began my MA with snakes and ladders as my manifesto. I have just slipped down a snake. The new requirements needed to pass the modules i'm doing at the moment feel hard, feel like a different course. The university has no other way of reviewing our work and we have no choice but to submit what we can but it is going to be difficult to show the mass of work i've produced well and with my current lack of focus i am struggling to find a way through the tick box maze. I hope that i will find a way to hit the level needed to pass. I feel sad about not handing in a physical portfolio, its a small sadness on the scale of things but still a sadness i want to acknowledge. 
An because I came to my MA wanting to learn physical skills I have had to decide that i cannot do my final term online. Its been a hard decision to make. It was my first response, and then i wondered if maybe i could, and then i wondered if that was what i really wanted, and in the end i have had to make a choice. Life is full of choices, some are more marked than others, some we do not realise will make a massive difference until later when we look back and know that that moment changed the course of our lives, or someone else's and therefore ours too because our actions do not stand in isolation. We are part of a greater whole. I think it this that this virus is teaching me and maybe that is why i am needing to step back from university at the moment because i have a teacher that is asking me to learn in ways that are more imperative than school. i hope to return to school in the future but my now is asking me to meet it untethered. 

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.  

And breathe. It has felt like a long week. I already had that "could it be Friday please" feeling on Tuesday morning and got little done that day although i did have a meeting with one of the MA student-curators and discovered inking and wiping my plate blind, i think i blogged about this just after but its worth a second mention as i've been doing this more and it makes a lot of sense to meet the plate like that. Sight is just one of the senses by which we know the world but is perhaps the one people rely on most heavily and would be most conscious of losing. One of the students in my SNU group is basing her MA work on this and listening to her talk about her project development is fascinating. It is coincidence that Jess suggested inking and wiping blind but its nice to meet someone else's enquiry with my own body knowing. 

Today is Saturday, i plan to go over my this weeks work in this blog, and to fill in my bibliography page so i can take DVDs and books back to the libraries they come from, and to try to scrape my home into a shape that allows me to move forward next week. Tomorrow i have a meeting with the women from the UEA business school with whom i am giving a presentation next week on how people feel about  homeless people and homelessness. This collaboration was set up last term and i think we all went in cold and not really understanding what we were letting ourselves in for, but maybe that is normal and how one learns is by doing, and having done it, next time i find myself in a position similar, i'll have more to give because i have this as some experience. 

Back to creative work, noting down doings tho' they may be no more than crumbs on the table. Monday began with a doctor's appointment following up the one i had last Monday at the hospital. I think these have probably thrown me a little. I'm putting off an operation and conversations about the need for it slightly knock me. In the afternoon i finished the plate that is called the Spain Years but some of it is not wiping properly which means i really need to give it some focus to work out why and i've not had the head for it this week. Is it the plate or how i am wiping it that is the error. Jess gave me some easy wipe to add to the ink and it has a nice feel as it comes out of the tube so i think that has helped and the blind inking/wiping too will hopefully allow me to build into my body a sense of how a plate feels when it is ready to print, there are so many variables, paper, temperature, press, my own energy levels, the more i learn the more i realise that printmaking is not easy street art even if it made from a plate that is made from a photograph, hell even there there are variables i had not considered. There is no way i am going to learn all the variables in the six months i have left of my course, its a life's work. I wish i'd begun this earlier in my life. 

On Wednesday i was in the 3d studio to fill the moulds i'd made a week or so ago with epoxy resin. I am learning about surfaces because i had expected the resin to be see through but Jim and James explained that if the surface of the thing i have made a mould of is not smooth the silicon mould will pick up the objects skin and therefore the resin will not be glass smooth as i had expected. I was disappointed for a moment but now its something to work with and also something to test. I think my nerd self has been released this term  and i am getting very excited about sampling which is part of my textiles practice so its natural for it to become part of my fine art process too i guess. Is my fine art practice separate from my textiles practice ? I don't think so. 
I also made some new moulds on Wednesday morning to repeat the learning from before and because having done it once there were other things i wanted to try. One of the things i am making a mould of is a doll's shoe that is needing a two part mould and walls of clay not circular walls. Everyday i am learning new things and i think its easy to forget how exhausting it is to be constantly learning, trying to take in and assimilate what is going on, and simultaneously exploring like an octopus the ideas that are arising from the new learning and the ideas that are feeding the new learning. 

I think this is why i had to excuse myself from one of the taught sessions this week. Instead that day i scratched into the back and front of a small copper plate Jess gave me and an aluminium one too making crappy prints and not minding. And in the afternoon finishing my metal things from last term and unleashing my new moulds from their walls. And going home a little earlier which meant walking home in light instead of darkness, not much earlier but it is Spring and the days are lengthening. Eyes meeting light makes a difference. 

On Friday after Thursday's drypoint tryout and having also made ready a hard ground plate. I made a couple of awful prints using drypoint and hard ground to see the difference. I haven't had a chance to look at the results properly i know they are awful work but sometimes i have to make awful work to get to better work and tho it may take me months before i make something i'm pleased with at least i am now beginning to explore these two new ways of making marks. 

It is making marks that i have come to uni to explore and so tho' i know i will growl at the prints i've made because they are ugly on Monday morning i will also be pleased with myself for starting out and hopefully be able to see the marks i like within the mass of the print and remember how i made them and will try to remember how i made them and to repeat them as soon as possible before i forget.

This blog may be very boring but i needed to get it written so i can let go of the week past and give my next week a new page.  

NB.. i also want to note that this week on the night between Monday and Tuesday i dreamed that a snake came out from under the skin of my left forearm, reared up to look at me as it was emerging before disappearing. It was dark and disturbing dream. I think that maybe one of the reasons I am immersing myself in process is because the stations of the cross is a dark story and allowing myself to imagine how it felt to be the man who was Jesus Christ and how it felt to be those who cared about him, both lovers and haters, is not comfortable. Process is my shield. In much the same way my SNU module is allowing me to meet my feelings and memories, some of these lovely but some are less good and working with these is not so easy. I don't know why i have chosen to hold these two balls of dark matter in my hands this term but i have and so i am very conscious of giving myself room to back off if i need to in order to maintain my mental stability.  

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. 

Oh hello blog, i may have neglected you as a way to get words out of me, as a way to understand how  the world feels to me. There are lots of ways to communicate and the how and the with who makes a difference. My notebooks are private, my blog obviously isn't. Emails may or may not be. Conversations are as private as the participants allow.
Before Jon died in 2017 we wrote emails to each other for about two years, back and forth conversations most days, often inconsequential chit chat, sometimes deeper stuff. When he died i missed his voice on the other end, the response, the return. I carried on writing emails for months, occasionally still i will email tho' i know he won't answer. But emailing dead-Jon feels unprivate, it's not me talking to him, it's me talking to an empty space, or a space that is Jon in my head, and i don't know if other people occupy that empty space, if i send him an email does it get seen by people who are not him the never-will-receive intended receiver. I guess we can never know these things. 
Privacy is something held within. People are more or less private it's a personal choice. As soon as a word is uttered or written to another it ceases to be private. Though there are people who hold our words private, counsellors, therapists and if we are lucky a few close friends we can trust with our secrets. 
Women who have been pregnant will know the super-secret wonder of a child forming in our wombs in the weeks before we tell anyone just in case the baby doesn't stick. I am lucky i have not had a child i needed to lose, or lost a child before it could live, how it feels to live with those feelings i will never know. There are feelings that are hard to express, that cannot be given voice, or which are terribly hard to voice. Those feelings become secrets.
Secrets can be good, can be great, but not always, some secrets are terrible. Holding feelings in can feel like safety but always holding is difficult and bad feelings held in and not allowed expression can become dreadful, unbearable. 
We are living in a strange political climate at the moment and some of the big frontsmen appear to be terribly damaged to the point of psychosis. When deep emotional wounds are left to fester within they may find outlet in cruel language and acts.  Or else terrible unfathomable depression. I know from my own bad self that mostly it is driven by things that cause me pain, feeling worthless, feeling rejected, feeling wrong. 
What is a bad self ? Why would i think part of myself is bad ? Is my bad self worse for being witnessed or worse for being shoved away, forced into submission and given no release, no breath, no light. When Jon died i was insane with grief, books and blogs say it's not insanity but it felt like insanity, insanity caused by grief but definitely not straight, not common place everyday normal. I think tho that maybe being insane with grief when someone you love deeply dies is an appropriate response so maybe that's why the books and blogs etc say it isn't insane. They also, all of them, state clearly that burying grief will not help, that each of us must live it as we need. 
I felt at the time that Jon's family would have liked me to grieve less, not for my sake, but theirs. Go away, be neat and tidy and out of the way, they brushed me away like rubbish and still that hurts and i don't know quite what to do with that hurt as over the past year and a half i have slowly recovered my sensibilities and begun to occupy my now and point my gaze to what next instead of what was or what could, or might, have been. 
Because what was still occupies space in me, and what is connects to what was, and what will be meets the was in the is. My lived experience with Jon was intense and marked me so of course it is still part of my now but i know that it is also done, that he is dead and who he was with me lives only in me. That won't be how it is for everyone grieving i think because often grief is shared with others who loved and cared for the deceased. But still each relationship is unique and i guess that's why mourning is such a lonely journey. 
For me it has been a kind of mapping process. A connecting of memories, places, moments, books, music .... and feelings. Feelings i think are the most personal of all our memories, I might see a mimosa tree for instance and it will take me back to the place we stayed in Italy where there were several flowering but as I fly back to that time i am at once again in the feeling of that holiday. I am in my now seeing a mimosa tree, but i am also in my past with Jon, on the platform of the deserted station, finding a boar's skull, looking over a bridge at the rubbish clogging the river, seeing Naples far in the distance from our bedroom window, exploring the roads and pathways around the village we were staying close by to, and so on. I am also in the future knowing that what is done is done and cannot be undone, that flights of fancy, what ifs, are strolls within my imagination and will never be reality but that my path keeps going. 
In that moment when i see a mimosa tree (other memory joggers are available) time meets time. And time meeting time is a place. A place in me. A cave within a labyrinth of caves. 
Ever since i was a child i've been a walker. There are lots of types of walker and i think maybe the way a person walks maybe matches their thought process. I'm a wanderer, maybe a roamer, i'm not a hiker, i'm mostly a solitary walker, there isn't a right way or wrong way to walk but different types of walker need different types of journey fellows if they choose to walk in company. 
When i was a child i used to roam the paths and roads and lanes around our home. We lived next to some water meadows and close by was a clay-pit where fishermen would sit in the gloomy shadows surrounded by midges in summer, once a pike stared up out of the water, it's head the head of a monster, still remembered, another memory that sits within my labyrinth of caves along with the gorgeous gloopy threads of toadspawn and the light on the water and the mud gap in the hedge that was how to get to the pool.  
I loved walking with Jon. Right from the beginning of our relationship it was something we shared. He took me to the paths at the back of his housing estate and the housing estate where his mother lived. We wandered together from word go. In many ways our wanderings were like the wanderings of two children. Two children roaming free in a beautiful garden world, our own garden of Eden.  Innocent and carefree we stopped to look at bugs and flowers, to listen to birds, got lost together and found our way out of being lost together. We learned to read maps together. I learned how to draw a map inside my body by treading paths, linking places together until i could draw them in my head. This is a practise i continued to do after Jon and I broke up and which i have found is a sanctuary process since he died. 
I apologise for going on about Jon, he was someone i loved, he wasn't perfect, and i could have grieved less if i had loved him less, as maybe i should have done, i would have grieved less but love is what it is, it's a feeling given free-ly not a creative accountancy game where you hope to get more than you give, tho i think maybe well balanced books make for easier relationships. 
When i was doing the sculpture trail in 2017 (blogs about this are from around about this time of the year in 2017) the area around the trail was unfamiliar. My friend David and I had a little explore and some of the places around the trail we'd visited before because he had family roots in that area and so we'd looked at Heckingham church and Hales church and walked around Loddon a little. My commute to the trail is longish but lovely. I catch a bus from Norwich to the road that leads up to and past Hales Church and i walk from there to the site, the walk takes about 40 minutes, i often see deer and hare and buzzards, some of it is grassy paths some of it is quiet roads, in good weather it's gorgeous. In 2017 i was my sculpture so my day was that, it was an odd enlightening experience, a chance to know how it felt to be seen being. It's all in previous blogs so i won't go on except to say that every time i walked to the trail i passed a crossroads. I came from one direction and took the turn to the right but the roads straight on and left called to me. Always i planned to go back to explore them and it is this that i've done as part of my research for this years trail piece.
Over the course of the past year i've been exploring the roads and ways around the trail site, building a new network of experienced wandering around my historical self. The first walk i took 4 deer crossed the road once, twice, three times, four times, i felt my knees buckle and my self crumble it was a moment i would have shared with Jon and weirdly at the moment i broke i felt his arms around me and his voice saying "it's alright, i'm here, i'm here"  i don't care if that seems mad it was my experience and it's mapped on that road and so i know that even tho he is gone forever as a body the feeling of him is always there if and as and when he is needed/wanted and maybe sometimes when he isn't wanted. 
My piece for the sculpture trail is giving me head issues at the moment because it isn't pretty. And it isn't clever. And maybe anyone could do what i am doing. In fact, yes, anyone could do what I'm doing.  I asked for a cave space within the shrubs at the end of the garden and have been gifted a beautiful space. I am wrapping the network of branches around the space, the space that is the cave, the inside of the cave. I want the branches to feel like the walls of a cave. I want them to feel like chalk lines marking out the paths that lead to the cave. 
Just after Jon and I split up in 2013 after my degree had finished and he had left for Gozo i went on a strange walking holiday in the Dordogne with a group of people i didn't know well. I'd been told about the trip by a woman whose work i'd admired in the degree show, i'd got in touch with her, we'd met for a cup of tea, we talked about walking, she told me about the trip, i got in touch with the man who was leading the trip, someone had bailed so there was one space in the minibus which i decided to take. It was a trip to walk and look at Lascaux amongst other caves with paintings and carvings and I'd wanted to see Lascaux for some years so it was sensible to go and i needed to pick myself up and get on with life after the shock of being dumped just when i thought Jon and I would be adventuring together. 
The trip to the caves was a beginning and ending, beginnings and endings belong together, sometimes they overlap and sometimes their meeting is marked by a sliver of thin air. Jon and I emailed semi-courteously for a while pretending to be civilised until my yoga teacher lent me the "Fuck It" book  and i decided that whilst he was quite within his rights to leave me neither he or his horrible family could tell me what to feel and if i still loved him, goddamn it (or fuck it) i was going to let myself love him. I knew i was supposed to behave, to accept rejection politely, to let him go without making a fuss but i decided to let my wild grow instead because it felt honest, because it felt good and i grew out my box, was unruly and thorny, gained mass and flowered and i'm glad i did. 
Oh, i must have needed to get that out.
I am talking about caves. I am talking about visiting caves and caves inside of me and the inside of the tree cave that i've been given to draw the map of the territory i've been walking this past year, this past two years, ten years, life. Inside my cave are my memories, my memories of Jon and the part of our lives we spent together, also my memories of other people, places, times, moments. Because inside of each of us i think is a cave, at least one cave, in which time and space and passage of time and presence all meet together in a place that is called Still. 

Oh I want to shout and roar and stamp my feet, to shake my arse in the face of my enemies and kick them with my hind hooves. But no i won't i'll politely write a blog that says "i'm angry" and even that might draw pursed lips and reproving tuts from the people i most want to shout and roar at if they happened to read it which thankfully they won't. 
Anger is one those emotions we are supposed to suppress. Or if it must be given vent then let it be vented upon a chosen scapegoat. Heaven help us if the anger we feel is at those who deem themselves superior because they have a strong hold on their feelings. Why would having a strong hold on your feelings be a good thing. Maybe those who have a strong hold on their feelings are actually just people whose heart beat is a dreary plod, whose emotional range is slight. There is nothing wrong with dreary plod but why do those people censor those whose hearts race and stop, and jump and skip. Why is it that those people, too often pillars of the community, hold such store by the flattening of feeling. 
I can already feel myself self-censoring, ready to write some stuffed up tedious blog about feelings and how the middle road is best in the long run. Ack, whatever. And well yes, maybe, maybe we do all do that conform and give way, but should we ? Is that the right way or is it fear that stops us, binds us to that course, stops us from being the whole of ourselves, makes us more at ease with safe and dull than edge and light. 
Societal rules condemn us to behaving well, moderately, even when others are not. We commend people for coping in the face of adversity but why should we cope well, why shouldn't we crumple and fold, why shouldn't we walk away from commitments, why shouldn't we rage when we've been hurt or put upon or made to feel bad ? 
Each one of us is making those choices all the time. Stay within the perimeters given to us by our social group or defy the boundaries and risk being made an outcast. 
Manners. Manners are part of this code of conduct. Manners cost nothing. Manners smooth the way. Manners can smooth the way. But manners can also be a treacherous maze, one way leading to social acceptability and/or advancement and the other to dismissal and contempt. It's a game of politics whether you know it or not. 
Admitting to frustration feels quite exposing. Frustration isn't a pretty emotion. And rage is frankly scary. It needs to be scary, it's a last resort. I'm not really raging I'm just fed up but i think i may need to let loose some of that fed up some way, some how. I'm not really raging yet but the fed up needs to find a way out. I'm hoping i can turn it into something useful or beautiful.