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

The problem with not getting it together to write my reflective journal/blog as a good habit is that weeks go by and i haven't made a record of what i've done (most important for uni), what i think about what i've done (also important for uni), and what motivated me to do what i did (possibly less important for uni but important for me). So then i have to consciously re-run the days/weeks not recorded and surely some stuff gets missed out. The missing out of some stuff may be a good thing and i think when things are going too fast, or are overwhelming in a way that means i can't verbalise my being and doing, i can only hold my process and hope that i will remember enough, remember what is most important. 
Important, important, important. I wonder if the same happens on other courses but one of the things i have thought over the past few weeks is that it is very difficult to know sometimes if, or if not, you have lost perspective and become a self important wanker. Excuse the language. What i mean is that in arts degrees it's very easy to become very obsessed with yourself and what you do. I've noticed myself doing this, me-me-me thing and other people too. Talk to pretty much any of the full time MA students and they all talk of exhaustion, stress, deadlines, anxiety. Third year students coming up to their final hand in and graduation are even more wired. I remember living that thread, the end of year show was critical tho' looking back it feels like much ado about not so much. But there, you work three, four or five years, depending on how you built up your portfolio before starting your degree, and the need to make the energy those three, four, five years took worth expending becomes a high pitched whine. A mosquito that won't give up. If you knew then what you know after, which is that life goes on, you'd be a bit less fraught but it's hard to hold on to that. It is holding onto that that stops you being a wanker. 
Those are this weeks observations and they stem from me being in a filthy mood for the past week. I think i was pretty cross at the end of last week but this week my patience is so stretched it snaps at the least inconvenience, being even halfway nice has been a struggle and some people have caught my sharp side. Some people have deserved it but not everyone.  
Anyway all that said i'll try to jot down the course of the past weeks in work. For some time i have been sitting (not literally) on my CMYK plates of myself as a teenager, my brief bit of adult life before i became a mother. This is a funny stage of life, there is a breaking free, but also a not knowing how to be other than how your parents raised you. I'd been looking at the plates i'd made of this girl woman and calling her "horrible girl" because she has a face on her, sulky and dark. I do remember the moment the photo was taken, i was very hungover and totally fed up with the two blokes i was living with never clearing up.  But the more i looked at her, the more sympathy i felt for her (remember she is me but she is also just an image i am working with). I thought about how i needed to find my way. I thought about where my "fuck you" attitude stemmed from. Oddly this week with my fed-up-ed-ness i felt enough love for this younger part of my self to re-integrate the person she was, her mosh-pit elbows, her daring dress sense, her wilfulness and longing for risk. I was making the CMYK prints with a view to putting them in one of the MA curator's shows but the work didn't fit with the vibe of the show and i didn't fit with the vibe of the show. This was mutually agreed with the curator but there is an awkwardness that is not yet resolved. It is uncomfortable being told you are not wanted and do not fit, even if you agree that you do not fit. The course brief, i think, for the curators is to hold an exhibition in an unusual space and so they have chosen various venues. My not fitting into my curator's venue has made me think about where i do fit. I think this is LO11. It has made me think about how i would mount a show if i was putting it on myself and not relying on a curator to find and make the space. Where draws me ? and what would i put in ? I'm giving this thought, and more thought.
But reeling back to the beginning of the week after my last blog. If you've read it you'll know i had hit a pretty low ebb. I went in to uni on the Monday with my head down, feeling very sad and like i didn't belong. Was too wobbly to work in the 3d studios so retreated to the print rooms to finish the various photo etched plates i'd begun the week before. On the Tuesday things got worse, i'd gone in to make a plaster mould and my anxiety levels were so high i was in floods of tears and panic-y when the plaster leaked out from the mould. One of the technicians suggested i let myself go home and i took his advice and it was the right thing to do. On the Wednesday i was cheered by a really interesting lecture by two of last years MA students, one of whom, said "go with your gut" which was what i needed to hear. And a helpful chat with my SNU tutor. On Thursday we had a guest artist Melissa Pierce Murphy for our ASU seminar who also spoke of following your gut, nice to have it re-iterated. I loved her work and how it met other practices, dance and science, The workshop she led after her presentation with magnets and drawing and shards of polished steel was food for my hungry soul. Friday i think passed without too much friction and a feeling of starting on work for my ASU module helped me feel less shaky too. It is hard to balance the two modules, one always seems to dominate the agenda. However they are drawing together as the weeks go by and hopefully i am building a body of work that will meet the criteria i need to fulfil to pass.
Criteria and learning outcomes are frustrating. I know why they exist. In my head i know that they are useful and help us to draw focus but they are hard to make sense of and sometimes education can feel joy sapping. It makes me think "Of Mice and Men". If i remember rightly there are two brothers who are walking to a farm to find work. One is simple but strong and the other clever. The simple one has a mouse in his pocket but he squeezes the life out of it, later he breaks a puppy and a girl i think. It's a long time since i read the book so i may not have got the story all right but this is the way education can feel sometimes. The student is the mouse in the pocket of the big man.
After making a two part mould and realising that what i wanted to do wasn't going to work i then had to make a three part mould the following week. I managed a little bit better with this one because having made moulds the week things like mixing up plaster felt more familiar. After the moulds were made and wax cast the wax casts had to be set up on cups with sprues and risers ready for investing last Friday and the pour which is happening this Friday coming. Uni has lots of deadlines, the deadline for investing, the deadline for the Pecha Kucha presentation which is next Wednesday. All the time there's a feeling of needing to get this done, that done and not enough hours to make it happen and home is crazy, not a room tidy enough to be called comfortable and all the time more art (i guess it is art) pouring in and books from more than one library calling to be read. Not enough time, not enough time. 
There has to be enough time. One of the ways not to be a self important wanker is to remember that it is only art, that it is not life or death. It is hard to remember this tho because the desire to make something good or better is the thing that keeps me going. But being a horrible person isn't going to make my work better it's just going to make me and the people around me either miserable or cross. Yes keep going, keep trying, push to the limit but know the limit. And maybe hold back a little from the limit so there is a little gas in reserve for closer to the deadlines. 
The work that i was working on for the exhibition i am not anymore going to be part of has come out beautifully. It's exciting to know now how to print with more than one colour using multiple plates. This term i have used photographs mostly and it feels a bit of a cheat but has also got me looking at photographs and image making and learning basic print skills. It has been helpful because i have several pictures to work from and each of them is different and tells a different story and learning how to story tell with images is part of what i have come back to education for so that is a mission being achieved i guess. 
Enough with the blog/reflective journal i fear i have said too little and not enough but it's words down and they will lead to the next set of words like a stairway cut into a mountain path. There is more to say but the need to put together my Pecha Kucha is making a noise in the background so if there is more to say i'll have to say it another time.