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

I have hit sadness and an awful inertia.
The reality of lockdown is hitting home.
I am ok. 
But the blocks and new boundaries,
the lost time and space 
and wasted ways i was going to go, 
are depressing. 
I long to be somewhere else. 
I am ok. My family are ok. 
That makes me lucky. 
But i miss feeling free. 
I really miss feeling free
Am I alone ?

April 14th 2020 Covid19 Diaries

Easter Monday ... what is destiny ? some weeks back, when most British people (including myself and the government) were still being stupidly blasé about the covid19 virus thinking it happened to other people in other countries, my mum and i were talking about the Jesus thing and his being crucified and it not being a great way to go when she said "well, it was his destiny". Hmmm. Is destiny changeable ? Sometimes in life when things go wrong there seems to have been a horrible inevitability that has brought about the wrong. Sometimes its obvious, a chain of events shows how one decision after another led to the calamity. The same could be said when things go right. Here the foundations for good things were laid. The corner stones set in place with care and so on.
Its easy to look back and say "ah well, if only" but "if only" is no good at all if you fall victim to the wrongs of others. In England/Uk I'm thinking about the Grenfell Fire, I'm thinking about the thousands of Covid19 dead. What if the government had moved sooner ? What if the media had got behind the other man, not Johnson but Corbyn ? What made them make the decisions they did ? Why are we where we are ? And the thread of thought goes way back into an unfathomable eternity of which we are a small part, we as individuals within our own tiny lives, we as a nation, what is a nation ? we as a species, we as beings. Our being is the most important part i think. Being is our common ground. Strip away everything else and leave just the notion that we exist and we find ourselves in unity with all things, the living and the dead, the animate and inanimate, i'll spell it out, we, who consider ourselves lords of this earth, are one with all bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral. And in that grand mass of bodies i suspect that the animal bodies are least likely to survive an apocalypse. 
What has that to do with destiny ? Is destiny inevitable or can we change our stars ? When my mother said that Jesus was destined to be crucified because it was prophesied i baulked at the notion that anyone could be born to that fate. Looking at the story of Jesus as i have done over the past few months, i have thought about the trajectory that led him to be who he was. 
In life we meet good fortune and bad. It might seem like being born rich is good fortune but i look at the man we are supposed to call our prime minister and i see a great chubby lummox who has developed a joker's mask to cover his failings. I see a man whose father uses his son's position to platform his opinions. Was it the prime minister's destiny to play puppet-king for men whose ambition was blocked by their lack of charisma ? At what point was he trapped into the being he is now ? When did he begin to become the monster he is now ? Surely no child is born bad.
Being a parent is a hard job. I think of Mary holding her tiny baby, married off to whoever would have her it seems, after, god knows, a rape, i guess, of some sort. I think of this young mother holding the body of her son after he is taken down from the cross. Was his life mapped out not because it was prophesied to be as it was but because his start was difficult ?
When i was beginning to look at the story of Christ i kept finding images of Shamina Begum in the newspapers i was using underneath my plates as i wiped them in the print workshops. I am not saying that her situation was all that like the Virgin Mary's but she and her now dead child were treated without kindness or care. They were just two whose lives are/were considered expendable by the Uk Government, a young girl and her tiny child. Will we look back and say it was clear from the way that our government treated those two that later they would see us as expendable too. Should we complain  or realise that our complicity then has led to the dreadful debacle we are living through now ?
I'm yarning on. Not saying anything that anyone else with half a mind isn't saying or thinking or has said or thought already. Maybe i need to draw back to my project work, how does today's politics connect to my work. I started my MA with the hope that it would give me a year to explore how to tell a story, specifically how to visually represent a story. But stories move. A picture or statue only moves as far as the viewer will take it. 
For my SNU module i've been learning skills using photographs and objects that tell a story to me but how do i let a viewer know that story without giving it to them explicitly. And if i have a photograph of someone other than me i can tell the story from my perspective and i can guess at theirs but i won't know it bodily because each of us own only our own being i think. Jon's ex-wife talked about how if there was something they didn't want in Jon's possessions they might let me have it as a memento. I give her credit for naming the part of my project that is dealing with objects i cherish that recall a moment. I think that her use of language was meant to belittle me and i spit it out on to this blog page feeling still hurt and pissed off. But what made her speak in that way ? What causes a person to be who they are ? Back to destiny. 
In all our life, all the time choices are being made and we don't know the outcomes our choices will lead us to. And i think i have spoken about this before in this blog and most likely a number of times because i am fascinated by maps and the choices we make are markers on the maps of our lives. We stand at a crossroads, or divide in a path, and decide to go one way or another, and one way (or more) is "The Road Not Taken" as described by Robert Frost. 
As part of my Memento collection i have a red doll's shoe that belonged to my doll Matilda that i had as a child. A single red shoe with Cinderella in small capital letters on the back of the heel. I made a mould and have cast this shoe in wax, plaster and bronze tho none of the cast shoes have come out very well. I also was able to have printed 3d replicas of my Caterpillar boots that have walked many miles with me and these too are part of my Memento collection. Lastly i have two small 1940's silver party shoes that maybe belonged to my mother or aunt and were part of my childhood too. My hope for my SNU project was to do something with these but i haven't as yet. I speak of this set of shoes/boots because as i look through the passage of destiny, the judgement calls others have made, and i think that shoes represent our journey and how not knowing another's path to where they are makes it difficult to know why they make the decisions they do. 
Where am i going with this ? I'm wandering i think, and do i keep going or start afresh ? Where am I going ? I think i am trying to find my feet in this strange space we are living in. To validate letting this blog fly. When putting out work for exhibition or even submitting a proposal there is an amount of beavering away, background work, preparation but in the end you have let go, allow that which you've made or propose to make out to survive or fail as it's worth justifies. Is there a measure of destiny in this ? 
A thing born out of the best of us must surely have more chance of survival than that which comes from our worst. Perhaps that is where i am at at the moment and though this blog is perhaps a bit fluffy it is my way of putting one foot in front of another at a point in my life when i do not know how to move forward because moving forward seems to be a blocked path. I come back to my learning outcomes which i don't love but which may be helpful. I think i am being asked how my work fits into unusual contexts and it might seem like this, this virus situation, is the unusual context, but what if this is our new usual how does my work fit into contexts that go beyond the now common online exhibitions, how do i reach an audience outside of that space ? what am i trying to get seen/witnessed ? and who do i want to see/witness it ?     

Good Friday 2020

Today's walk ... a goldfinch, a song - don't worry, about a thing - coming, not too loud, out of the back & side of a large auto repair unit on the main road, old fashioned yellow roses in someone's front garden, a river view from a red bridge, blue sky and the sunshine warm 

Easter Saturday 2020

The person behind you coming in too close because they think you are not moving forward as they'd like or judge distance differently ... quietly we are breaking into tribes

Covid19 Diary

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. 

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

British Summer Time - Covid 19

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

March 29th 2020