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.  

I had not realised it had been so long since i blogged. I see from my posts page that i had an aborted attempt in late January but it stayed as a draft and won't get published. But it's not for lack of thought just lack of clarity of thought. And that may seem laughable as my blogs are usually just a meandering ramble through the inner workings of my mind. 
I have been wondering if that is good enough. I have been wondering if airing my thoughts as if they are of consequence is ok. I have also been conscious that words are one thing, and words are part of my work process, but that words are not my medium i am not a writer or poet, i play with words i do not work with them, maybe i will one day but at the moment my voice in writing has the timbre and crack of a young boy on the edge of adolescence. I have been thinking i should put more pictures in my blog, make it more about my work as an artist. But then where does my work as an artist start and stop. Vocational professions are not the same as sensible jobs that pay the bills. A vocation is something undeniable, whatever you do it calls you back. 
Many years ago i remember having a shiatsu tutorial while i was training. It was a moment when i met one of my edges and as i was walking home i remember thinking "oh no, i have a vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner" and then thinking "damn, now all i'll be able to drink is water, and i'll have to be  more perfect than i want to be" i did not want to be that person, i ran away, stopped training for a few years, refused the vocation. But then my body brought me back, my elbows ached so i went for a shiatsu treatment which inspired me to go back to my shiatsu books and complete my training and then my elbows were fine again. It sounds a bit mystical but i find life follows a truer path if i accept my body as my guide. 
Recently i have been thinking about karma. Now although i have practised yoga for about thirty years and read about other cultures the culture i stem from is white British christian. That's fine. It feels and sounds a bit heavier and more solid and unbending than i want to feel but that's my roots and because of those roots my relationship to the idea of karma can be a bit crime and punishment, eye for an eye, simplistic. My experience of karma is more subtle. I am sure i am not alone amongst the people i know to hope that karma will catch out the people who i feel have wronged me, or, who i feel are wrong per say (people who kill or maim animals, people who preach malevolence and so on) but damn that karma button it doesn't seem to work like that. And i think maybe it doesn't work like that because karma is not so caught up in the instant and my simple animal being is. 
Of course if someone metaphorically bites me i want to bite back but that is reaction not response. If i pause and think around a thing there is almost always a path that brought me and that other into conflict. The conflict may not even be about me, or them. 
The evening i heard that Jon had died my son gave me a book, i was still in innocence having been away and not picked up the email informing me of his death. The book sat on my shelves for over a year, books are like that, they are patient messengers. The book is called Frog by Mo Yan and there's a line it that caught me sharp "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" those questions seem to relate to karma and the trace we leave behind. 
Now about that vocation to be a shiatsu practitioner, it turns out that i am fine with being a person who mostly "only drinks water" and as regards being perfect that was always an impossible task because believing myself perfect would be the imperfection, perfect is not possible although sometimes for a thin slip of a moment it can feel as if perfection is a thing that we hold in our hands only to know that holding it too often breaks the moment and there's no going back. 
Because there is no going back. "Can blood on one's hands never be washed clean ? Can a soul entangled in guilt  never be free ?" what do you think ? I think that each of us leaves a trail, a tale, although seemingly we might start anew all that we left behind us is there in our wake. 
When i met Jon and fell in love, i took him as a blank page. But that was stupid. He said he was an alcoholic, had been to prison, had slept with his wife's best friend, Auntie S, and so on and so on, but in that blissful whirr that is head over heels in love i let myself believe that that was his past. But our pasts are never our pasts. Our present being may ameliorate the wrongs we have done another but they don't undo the wrong. And everyone gets things wrong. 
I remember asking Jon what he did with his daughter when she visited and he said "i couldn't even look after myself let alone a child so she has never visited" talking about the time between his time in prison and the time i knew him. He told me another time about breaking his parole and staying in a hotel and then in the woods before he was caught and it was in those heady weeks when we were getting to know each other and his sinful ways were not an issue because i had a small bucket of sin of my own. But i think now that, of course, that was his tail, his trail, his tale, the story/stories he told me were new to me, but were also lived by those who knew him while they were happening and were likely not good memories. 
What am i getting at ? Karma. Our lives are full of mistakes and the expectation that others will forgive or get over our mistakes is unreasonable, when we wrong another we violate their line. The knack is to try not to do that but life is constant compromise. If I make a mistake that mistake passes into the history of the world. There are many worlds, great and small, and each of our actions has a consequence within a world because not one of us lives in complete isolation. I think it's the consequences that are our karma. 
This is why i say that karma is more subtle than brutal desire for vengeance. Karma keeps going, it keeps going and going and going, it may not be you that reaps the dividend of your ill will or carelessness. See how for instance it is not the generation that has polluted that will bear the brunt of climate change but the generations that are being born now, that it is the children who are speaking out because those who are old have failed to respond with common sense to a real threat to existence.
That is a great example. It happens at lesser scale too. Our family lines are made up of the ancestors who bore us. Our mother's womb and the squit that our fathers invested in our mothers is our birthplace. We are the product of that womb, that squit. They are our inheritance, and more precious than gold, or land, is who we are, what we give to the world in our being. A child conceived and carried to term is witness to the connection it's parents made and bears the karma of that interaction. It comes into the world as a product of that union, carries the essence of it's parent's and their parent's and their parent's quality as it's non-negotiable life spark. 
Oh what ? Am i being preach-y ? I think i am. I think i am saying "be love" "be your best" because being anything other than that will ripple out into the wider world and that wider world will surely be sweeter for the love and the best of you than it will if give it your bad. 
I write, as always, as I think, the punctuation is lousy, please accept apologies, and whether this blog is my good or my bad i can't tell it is only me. Maybe now i need to sit on a rock for a little while and contemplate a little further before i throw more concrete words out into the ether.  

As August draws to a close i have to admit that i have failed to produce any visual work of worth for this months story. When i lucky-dipped The Hare and Tortoise just before going to bed on the 31st July i breathed a sigh of relief. The Seal Bride and The Handless Maiden had been harrowing myths to get into, stories of coercion and brutality, from which it was hard to milk positive meaning. I let myself relax with my new pick, no difficult emotions in that one i thought. 
I was right and wrong, i will expand on that later in the blog but August has not let me off the hook emotionally. It's been a month of tears. The passage through grief is an odd one, perhaps having harrowing stories to work with let me meet my sore heart in a faery-world, an un-real world, taking that away meant that i had nowhere to hide. I think too that as the anniversary of Jon's death gets closer it is hard to think of him being alive a year ago he was a walking, talking, living, breathing man, a state of being that seems so ordinary until it is no longer the current state. Alive, then dead. That's that. Apologies for my dreadful bluntness, it's how his death feels. 
I can't remember when it was that the great dry heat we had this summer broke, but now as we head towards September the temperature has surely dipped and the air is moist. Often August feels a bit dry and dirty, not so much this year, this summer has been exceptional, and so the years rhythm  is a bit off kilter. It is damper than usual i think, and gardens parched by the hot July have taken the rain, soaked it up and thrown up green as a response.  The swifts left, their leaving is for me the mark of summer's end. And other markers, most notably Buddlieia flowers and Rowan berries, also signal time passing. But i think it all happened earlier than normal and with less of a ta-da.  
I have been tidying my garden. In the heat tidying wasn't important, it was watering that was needed and watering my plants with my bath water felt nice. Gardening has thrown me back into missing Jon and my tears. I suspect that when someone loved dies missing them is a forever thing and there isn't a time when wanting to tell them about this, that, or the other, that wishing for just one more day with them, or even just a moment's eye contact, again is par for the course. Gardening takes me back to the many many days we spent in my garden, i feel him with me when i garden but of course he isn't really with me and it's that that makes me cry.
Jon's death is the first that has hit me hard. I have grieved for pets and mourned my grandparents but the grief was sadness rather than obliteration. It has made me a bit scared of death. Death is not a negotiator.  The long-drawn image of a skeleton in a black cloak with a scythe feels quite real now. Mortality is our given. Death will come to us and those around us too. This is not a choice. Tho' how we get there may, or may not be. It has been along those lines that i have been tracing the race between the hare and the tortoise. 
For those who don't know the story it is one of Aesop's fables. The hare and the tortoise are charged to race. The hare believes he has the race in the bag, he is fast and lean and takes off like the wind at the beginning, the tortoise is slow but steps out one foot in front of the other. No rush, no hurry for him. About half way along the race course the hare thinks to himself that he can take a rest and lays down under the shade of a tree. Tortoise keeps going, one foot in front of the other, step by step. At the halfway mark he sees the hare sleeping under the tree and pays no heed just keeps going, straight on towards the finish line. At some point the hare wakes from his sleep, maybe the sun is just going down and the cool rouses him, he gets up and stretches and sets off again, secure in his speed he's still sure that he'll win. But when he gets to the end tortoise has already won. The moral of the story is slow and steady wins the race. 
Perhaps because my mood has been a bit melancholy this month i've looked at the hare and the tortoise as two on a journey from birth to death. I've also mused about it as a pathway to enlightenment. Or for that matter any life path you might choose. Raw talent can take you only so far it is practise and determination, the thousand hours, the thousand thousand hours, that make the difference. Surely raw talent helps but there is no shirking the work. 
I suspect i may be about to get very heavy and less than my best now, forewarned is fore-armed. I'm thinking about how "mindfulness" has been sold over the past few years. As if there is a fast track to mindfulness, that you can do a course and then say "oh yes i did a mindfulness course" as if that then means you are mindful. Mindfulness is a state of being, it is about giving attention, it is who you are, how you live, not something done for a weekend and then tick you are mindful. The weekend course may wake up in a person a desire to be mindful, it may be the first step, but being mindful is an ongoing practise. In the same way my shiatsu practise is ongoing, i don't just practise shiatsu when i'm working with someone, it's all the time, every breath in, every breath out, same for yoga, or my work as an artist, i hesitate to say it but even poetry and dance are things i endeavour to make whole life practises rather than just things i do when i'm in a class or reading a book. 
I mention dance and poetry with shyness because I am not a dancer tho' i love to dance, and i am not a poet or writer, tho' i love to read and i write for myself. It is perhaps the tasks we take up that force us to meet our fallibility, our lack of talent, that represent the tortoise's path. There is no reason why anybody shouldn't write or dance just because they aren't good at it. And if the race to the end is really just life it's ok to go slow, maybe it's ok to go fast and sleep a little too because if the finish line is death then we are all going to get there in the end and how we get there is not someone else's choice to make. 
So be slow and steady or be fast and furious, fall asleep or plod along, try things if they make you happy. I think maybe the only wrong way to be is to sabotage another because if you give too much time to sabotaging another it's likely that, as wily coyote finds with road-runner, you will end up falling foul of your own schemes in the end.