MA-Ness Week 6 Acetates, Crits, Signing Up For Exciting Things and Nostalgia Bathing

Mmm Monday morning and a rather grey and bleak looking monday morning it is - perfect for taking colour photographs which would capture the lack of full blooded colour so much better than black and white ones would but instead I am sat inside writing this....

But that's okay as I have been taking quite a few pics recently - 3 rolls in Cleethorpes and tomorrow (all being well) I shall be making some cyanotypes - a good old fashioned victorian invention which cheers the cockles of my victorian loving heart. Even if they will be cyanotypes with a 21st century twist of photoshop to invert the images and photocopiers to copy onto acetate to create them but hey ho I'll take my 19th century kicks where I can find them - though I'll leave lack of antibiotics, consumption (of the disease as opposed to material kind) uncontrolled industrial expansion and lack of rights for women and workers behind thanks.

The eagle eyed amongst you may notice different handwriting on the post it note this week - that's because I was in the bath when I thought of those things and so asked my ever patient and supportive husband to write them down before I forgot. So I didn't forget who gave me the wonderful phrase 'bathing in nostalgia' I wrote down Kevin's name next to it. Bathing in nostalgia was how he described his process of going through old photographs of him and his siblings when they were little and uploading them to Facebook and they are glorious. Evocative and reminiscent of the wonderful bits of my childhood too - ice creams at the seaside and t-bar clarks sandals, stripey windbreakers (which I always lusted after but never got so we had to put up with even more sand in our sandwiches) and acrylic jumpers that gave you electric shocks. 

Ice Cream Parlour Cleethorpes Kodak Colour Plus Iso 200 7.2.15
 - and they charge 10p extra for red sauce aka monkey blood...but it was so cold and stuck in the bottle that the lady making it for me did earn that extra 10p squeezing it out.....

Though I'm sure ice cream wasn't as expensive in them days - and in turn they made me think of the sheer joy I felt when seeing an exhibition of Daniel Meadows photographs of living rooms in Salford at the Media Museum and for the first time in a gallery space I felt not only an appreciation of what I was looking at on an aesthetic level but also an emotional connection and recognition as they looked like the living rooms I was familiar with - they had ornaments in like the ones I had grown up with!!!!!! Martin Parrs retrospective also at the Media Museum some years ago had exactly the same effect on me - walking into the living room recreation with the soundtrack of South Pacific playing was just wonderful.

Anyway I've been trying to read and get to grips with some theoretical perspectives (so far aside from feminism which has been a given in my life since I was very little and I can remember arguing with the headteacher at my primary school about the unfairness and silliness of not letting girls do the same job as altar boys though in retrospect I am pleased I never was an altar boy) Roland Barthes is in the lead so far - partly because I find his translated works more immediately accessible than others I have tried but also primarily because he talks about his emotional response to things. And for me an emotional response to my work is what I want and what I can most relate to - though any kind of response is welcome if I'm being entirely honest as to not be noticed at all would be worse than being disliked or dismissed I think and what I want when I go into a gallery space of any kind is to have an emotional response to the work on show...but again any kind of response even one of revulsion is better than none....

But my love of all things oldy worldy and bygones is according to a Baudrillardian interpretation of things (or rather what it says in Introducing Baudrillard by Horrocks and Jevtic Icon Books 1999 as my approach at the moment is to start with an Introduction and see if it seems like it's going to appeal to me) is according to page 29  ' a desperate narcissitic attempt to to regress to childhood and to find Mother (origins) and Father (authenticity)'. And having household pets is a sign of 'failure of human relationships and narcissim' and wristwatches 'absorb anguish of death'. 

Mmm even if he's right on this basis he's not the theorist for me - as having undergone and still undergoing the pain of bereavement I can only wish that wrist watches did absorb the anguish the death as in my experience so far they definitely don't. And what appears to be his interpretation of womens role in society is not something I can agree with but I am enjoying other aspects of his work and interpretations of things so may well cherry pick some bits but this is a roundabout way of saying something has to resonate with me on an emotional level  for me to want to get to know it further. Hence the sentence on page 9 of Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes Vintage 2000 leapt out at me:
'that rather terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead'.

Which is both literally true as in a photograph captures a moment which is gone and can never be refound/recreated and as a morbid zombie film loving person a phrase like 'return of the dead' has me instantly sold. Which is not to say that I won't critically look at his work but it is looking good for me so far. Plus I've been given some suggestions of other people to read like Annette Kuhn, Patricia Holland and Valerie Walkerdine whose work I shall hunt out in the library later this week.

Oh so much reading and it feels like so little time to do it in - even though I do have an abundance of time compared to most as I do not have to go out to work as all my work is done in the home and can be fitted in comparatively easily round other things as the admin work that I do for my husbands business does not require regular 9-5 hours and housework can be fitted in as and when (3 loads of washing have been done in the time it's taken me to put this post together) but I am still struggling to get back into habit of gym classes.....and with a few things on this week and a presentation to create and practice for Friday I'm feeling a bit 'argh so much to do this morning' but it's now 10.40 am and I have made good progress with this post,  and replied to some emails and been less distracted by social media as I have started using my husbands kindle to look at farcebook and social email first thing in the morning so that when I start working on the main computer like I am now I can concentrate more on study type things as opposed to getting distracted by pictures of cute kittens and invites to events and pictures of other peoples breakfasts...

Though it is thanks to social media that I heard about the Arts Council for England briefing session on how to apply for grants at the Tetley last week which was very useful and provided an impromptu reunion of some of the Place and Memory Artists, and Mourning and Morbidity in Art at York University next month, it also reminded me re the opening of the Transistions exhibition at Inkwell at the moment which I went to the opening of on Friday night. Some gorgeous thought provoking work on show there - go see it if you can but it was an old school paper flyer in the foyer of Trinity Church on Boar Lane which told me of the very interesting lunchtime lectures by Leeds Civic Trust about the history of Leeds.

What else? watched The Black Cat Ulmer E 1934 Universal 1934 USA yesterday afternoon with a fellow horror loving chum. And it is a sumptuous film to watch - the art deco sets are gorgeous, its direct mentioning of the mass slaughter and horror of the First World War (poignantly referred to as *the* war as at that point thankfully there had only been one world war) and its cinematic signposting, the acting is somewhat mannered to our 21st century eyes but if you want a monochrome feast for your eyes and a creepy thought provoking film then you could do much worse than watch this.

Friday saw us split into different groups and do a socratic crit - I took advantage of this by doing two versions of the same images of dead and dying flowers in wintertime at Temple Newsam gardens  - one in its original colour and one post processed to black and white and with a difference in borders - though all the borders are a nod to victorian mourning traditions. It was very useful and I have some really good ideas for developing them further (note to self save all petals from every bunch of flowers bought or given from now on)  but I did also have a massive pang of angsty doubt re my work as I felt it looked somewhat unprofessional and unfinished compared to the other work on show plus my lack of technical photography knowledge is preying somewhat on my mind and it was a mix of both giving myself a talking too and talking to a fellow MA-er who is a photography graduate that made me remember and reinforce that these are WORK IN PROGRESS and not the finished items and the actual photographs which form their core I am really pleased with and as ever it's not so much the technology that you use (though that is important too) but the eye with which you take the picture that is most important.

Which in turn makes me think of this quote from Elliot Irwin which I have pinned to my noticeboard which I am going to try and make a habit of reading every day and making my mantra (especially as my other mantra of 'everything looks better in black and white' is possibly undergoing some qualified re-evaluation....I know, I thought hell would freeze over first but what would be the point of doing a course like this if all I did was redo things in the same way I have been doing? plus I can confidently state that NOTHING will ever change my mind about my preference for black and white films) but here it is:

Photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in the in an ordinary place. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with how you see them.

I'm not very good at getting my hands dirty - literally, I've never been one for playing in mud or fingerpainting but I have been enjoying the little bits of painting I did last week and have got my hands dirty in another way by using *whispers* photoshop as til now I have resolutely avoided using it out of my belief that it is horrifyingly complicated compared to the very basic and free with operating system that I have used up til now and that it is often used to polish turds and if I have to do more than crop/adjust balance/contrast then I haven't taken a good enough image in the first place and I need to go and retake the photo if possible. 

I do appreciate the use of photoshop for creating new images composed of other images or using it to restore old damaged photographs but otherwise mmmm it seems to me kind of cheating (though that is not a fair or realistic thing to say about it) but it is very definitely part of the ever increasing homogenisation of facial features software like Portrait Professional which frankly make me flinch and feel anxious though of course I would want anything to be used on any pictures of myself so that the image portrayed looks as good as the one I imagine and vainly hope that I actually resemble...

Thanks to an uncomfortable mix of vanity and insecurity I really don't like having my photograph taken and so any and every opportunity to make me look as good as possible I would grasp at with both hands - though I would prefer if it was done primarily with sympathetic lighting and soft focus.....another reason Barthes resonated so closely for me - his description of how he feels on seeing images of himself rang many bells for me....however as I studiously avoid having my picture taken this is somewhat of a moot contradictory point.

So contradictions is/are something else I am thinking about.....and this and many other things are things which my personal tutor, fellow MA-ers, husband and photography chums are helping me get to grips with....slowly but surely......and I'd best crack on with this presentation or else I'll be umming and ahhing and that won't do.  

MA-Ness Week 4 - Slippery Slopes and Painkiller Hazes....

This is this weeks post it note which like last weeks makes some kind of sense but not completely but that is no surprise as last week I was in the midst of dental woe (an abcess which led to tooth removal) and on v strong painkillers indeed and in fact today is the first day I've not had to take any painkillers in well over a week. RESULT!!!!!

However such was my state of pain, soreness, painkiller out of it -ness and last but not least swollenfaceness that I missed last Friday's workshops at college which is a shame as looking at the notes the tutor has put on the college website - it looked like I missed an interesting and thought provoking discussion....oh well I hope to catch up with it all properly soon.

Anyways - here's to my post it note scribbles....

This is a public as opposed to friends only private type blog (though is anything really private on the internet? no - not really) and I started it many moons ago before the reality of college attendance was even a pipe dream. My first post was back in July 2012 and in it I said I wanted to talk about 'photography, my collection of kitsch items, knitting and stuff like that' and that's how it was until I decided to use it as my research journal to hand in for college - though I also have a paper sort of one too and some of the feedback I got from my assignments was to talk about the ideas I have art-work-wise and to show them on here - something which I haven't literally done so far - partly out of a no doubt misplaced fear of being copied - yet I happily post photographs I have taken both on twitter and on farcebook (deliberate sp) without a 'copyright' notice/name superimposed on them and I should really a) learn how to do that and b) get into the habit of doing it. 

And also because I've not been doing so much 'doing' but more 'thinking and reading' - the latest book I'm ploughing through is Death,Grief and Poverty In Britain 1870-1914 by J M Strange which is a very interesting book - especially as it is looking at the more working class approaches to mourning in victorian and edwardian Britain and interestingly she draws on literature (among many other sources) - namely a work from 1897 called The Nether World by George Gissing to evidence her arguments. I doubt this approach would have been approved by my history tutors back in my undergraduate days. A creative work is not the same as a piece of legislation or electoral registers but does this a) make it any less valuable or reliable as a resource? After all newspaper and diary accounts are often used as evidence to support arguments or even to show timelines and aren't these just as subject to author bias as 'creative' work? Mmm lots of food for thought there....not least the often blanket assertions by historians and social commentators that really get my goat - like if anyone was to look at the newspapers of September 1997 when they were dominated by saturation coverage of the death of Diana Spencer and phrases like a 'nation was in mourning' are bandied about - er me and a lot of my friends are part of this nation and we definitely weren't in mourning but hey ho.....I'm going off at a tangent but one which I keep thinking about.....  

So in the meantime I'm also still thinking about the best way/place for me to show/talk about the work I'm working on....maybe I should set up a new blog and just not publish it and use that as a record. Or maybe record it entirely in a paper notebook instead - or maybe a mix of the two but however I do it, I'd best get on and do some as this term is all about the handing in of work either completed or in progress so I really must get on and do some.....as opposed to just writing and thinking about it.

And speaking of actual creative work - aside from trips to the dentist I left the house for what felt like the first time in ages on Saturday to both pick up some books from the local council library (the Rev Richard Coles autobiography which I am v much enjoying and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd which is the next Buns and Roses WI Book Club choice) and to pick up the film I'd left in for developing at the ever helpful and reasonably priced Photo Shop on North Lane. I'd used Kodak Colour Plus ISO 200 and I am v pleased with the results - though I am not going to show them here yet as a) they need a little bit of editing and by that I mean a bit of cropping, and I might convert one or two to monochrome and b) I'm going to get them printed out and see what they would look like as a narrative photo book....

I might also use the new graphics tablet which my husband bought last week - I've had a little go of it and my initial thoughts are 'ooh the possibilities' along with 'really am going to have to get to grips with powerpoint' as that has more options available in it than my usual microsoft viewer or paint, and also 'christ almighty, it's really fecking fiddly' as you don't look at where your pen is going on the paper like I normally do when drawing but where the cursor and pen are on the image on the screen so in some ways it feels like I'm drawing blind as I'm not looking where I normally look when drawing....I think it's going to take some getting used to. But it's very exciting....

I did manage to put together a presentation though last week - and with my new found trick of taking a screenshot of the slide once I'd put it together and then copy and pasting that image it is a) easier to email as it is a fraction of the size and b) it doesn't matter what fonts they have at the other end either - result!! This is for a Cultural Heritage Show and Tell event  (details here ) and I need to practice it a couple of times before I need to deliver it but it is a mark of how much I have progressed as if you'd told me even 12 months ago that I would VOLUNTEER to stand in front of people and speak I'd have laughed in your face and thought you were rambling. Which is just as well as I think we have a couple of presentations to do at college-wise this term - am feeling a bit out of the loop college-wise as I've missed two weeks this term due to illness so I have emailed my tutors to make sure I'm back up to speed - especially with what needs handing in when.

Although this term is 'doing' in terms of handing in - workshop wise it is much more about theoretical perspectives which I am still trying to get to much better grips with - I really must read Barthes Camera Lucida properly as opposed to just skimming through it and I also have Baudrillard's Consumer Society to plough through and Danesi's Of Cigarettes. High Heels and Other interesting Things and whilst those are interesting books they just don't grab me in the way that Death Grief and Poverty does.... note to self - quit procrastinating and get down to some serious study....

I've been collected phrases which I find inspiring - either as springboards to ideas or potential titles or just because they make me smile, I handed them in along with this blog and I think 'dated confines' which is ion the middle of my post it note must be another one to add to the list as it doesn't make sense otherwise.

Which brings me round to the last two points on my 'blog post it note' that I want to write about. Namely what to do with human remains and what is the purpose of a memorial? I have been offered human remains by two of my chums - or rather part of their remains in the event of their death to use in my artwork as I see fit. This is both an incredible honour, a logistical conumdrum as in which medical school can help me with this and also in all likelihood an unrealised semi pipe dream as a) I don't want them to die and b) I might be too squeamish to do this.

I did ask the dentist for the bits of my broken tooth though - he looked at me funny but said 'yes of course, it's your tooth' and put them in a little blue envelope with a picture of a tooth fairy on it so am guessing they were designed for children as opposed to morbid adults. I've a vague idea to make them or rather have the bits made into jewellery but I will need to clean them first as they are still somewhat gory and they make my stomach go funny each time I look at them - though I suspect that is somewhat of a pavlovian response as they make me think of the really rather unpleasant procedure I went through for them to end in the little blue envelope and I was never a big fan of the dentist anyway.

Don't worry - I wouldn't show you the bits of tooth - not til I've cleaned them up at least....

Plus I have been offered these remains freely - not through a deal with coroners to use 'unclaimed' bodies from morgues so I have no moral qualms about using them - my qualms are can I do them artistic justice and how squeamish am I really? And how much stamina and cash do I have for fulfilling the legal requirements of the Human Tissue Authority?  As you need a licence to display human remains and they're not cheap - though you don't need a licence to show photographs of human remains....mmm legal loopholes to work my way through and round...

But what do you do with remains? I have the cremated remains of my beloved first cat who I adopted from the RSPCA when she was just 3 months old and she was my constant companion for 17 years. She died  6 and a half years ago. Her cremated remains aka 'cremains'  (or rather what we think are her cremated remains as I have not opened the beautiful wooden box that came back from the vets to verify this) now 'live' in the cupboard above the stairs where she used to demand to be given a shoulder lift to along with one of her favourite catnip mice but I don't know what I'll do with them if/when we move house. Does having actual remains (in this case feline) stop you from moving on grief-wise? I don't feel I need them now yet equally I couldn't imagine parting with them but when she died I did want them very much indeed or rather I wanted her back, still alive and purring but as that wasn't possible I made do with her cremains instead. Now however I take comfort in my memories and photographs of her - and a little video I took of her asleep and she was making little sing song snoring noises.

Also apparently there is a new process for dealing with human remains which involves your remains being put in a chamber which then fills with chemicals which dissolve the flesh and bone and the resultant sludge is chemically inert and can be flushed away - am not sure how I feel about this approach -  although on paper it seems the 'cleanest' and most final - but I think I'm still liking cremation best but am not sure why.

Which in turn leads me to think about stone memorials and what do they mean? and what are their function? I ask this partly with a victorian funeral monument afficiando head on - I adore them to look at in all their angelly over the top mawkish emotional expensive symbolic wonderfulness but even if they are all of those things they are also physical manifestations of love, regard and affection and the stonemasons art.  A marker of a persons life to hold onto when they physically have gone and all you are left with are the memories and possibly photographs and maybe some of their possessions and in this day and age their digital trace and a heart turning reminder from social networks when their name and face pops up....

As ever - so much food for thought.....