MA-Ness Term 2 Week 6 - Anniversary-ness, Motivation, Art-Speak and Inspiration

Cameras used this week - including crap kids digital with added security of black insulation tape over battery compartment, bit of torn notebook and coaster with seahorse design from the Midland Hotel In Morecambe 

View from Midland Hotel dining room over breakfast on crap kids digital - you can just about see the building on the end of the Stone Jetty which was the railway terminus for the line which took you to get the ferry to Ireland or Scotland in the 1850's..which lead to me wondering how many women had come over on the ferry from Ireland to look for work/service in the Victorian era and how much homesickness and heartache there was - and how much excitement at starting a new life...

Pic of Midland Hotel in Morecambe taken on crap kids digital (I love the lo-mo blur and right hand side lens distortion, it is its own other worldly filter) earlier this week - me and my husband got engaged here in 2008 just after it reopened after its refurbishment after falling in love with it when we saw it in a very sad and decrepit state in 2001. It seemed appropriate somehow to spend our 7th wedding anniversary here amidst its restored art deco splendour - plus Morecambe also has Brucciano Ice Cream Parlour with beautiful wooden art deco pannelling and the best Knickerbocker Glories outside of Pacittos in Scarborough. Fact. It also has a terrifyingly cramped secondhand bookshop and  bits of old fairground rides - tatty, sad but also very beautiful too but it is somewhat sad and scarey that the public toilets on the front each have a sharps disposal bin - admirable in terms of minimising harm but sad that it is needed in the first place.

The eagle eyed regular readers of this blog will also notice that the words aren't many and not written on a post it note either but a folded over bit of torn out notebook paper, that's because I've been in Morecambe and so far away from my desk and post it notes and so notebook had to suffice. This is also why this is being written up on a Thursday as opposed to my usual Monday - as Monday I was braving strong winds, heavy squally showers trampsing about the sea front taking pictures (also fitted in a trip to a cemetery but alas it wasn't Victorian like the lady in tourist information said it was but Edwardian and it was really interesting in places not least because it has a plot devoted to workers from the Cinematograph Industry ) before heading back to the hotel for a lovely hot bath in a bath so big I could almost have done lengths in it (except I can't really swim) and then lovely fish and chips in the Midland Rotunda Bar whilst listening to the building hum in the strong wind - the Midland is semi circular so it kind of sets up its own resonance in the wind - I thought it would stop me from getting to sleep but it was actually quite comforting (plus gin makes me sleepy too..and I'd had quite a bit in a celebratory way.) The rain was also lashing against the windows and watching the waves crash up and down the beach and see quite how terrifyingly quick the tide comes in reminded us both of the sad story of the cockle pickers who drowned in 2004.

So what have I been up to apart from picture taking at the seaside and basking in full on beautifully restored 1930's art deco splendour and imagining I was one of the minor non murdered characters in an Agatha Christie - you know the ladies who have silk pyjamas, an allowance and beautifully painted red lips and nails. Well laughing when my husband pointed out that I looked rather more like a Crowleyite loving bright young thing (technically 1920's but hey ho - I don't mind a bit of historical inaccuracy in the cause of paying me a compliment) due to the fact that I was wearing a necklace made of red plastic skulls...so lots of picture taking, lots of imagining, bit more reading of Silent As The Grave by Deanna Raybourn (a murder mystery set in the victorian period which is very enjoyable period detail accurate hokum) and mulling over the feedback on work in progress from a silent crit last Friday and an email from a chum in which he said ' You're a historian. Proper. You may not like it, but it's plain for all to see. Your use of primary source material always gave you away'.  This is making me think am I an artist, a historian or a writer or some kind of hybrid of all three. Though this feeds into my 'jill of all trades, mistress of none' fear....though my tutor did point out that my writing - either about my work on my blog or for academic papers is just as much a part of my practice as my visual image making....

The feedback from the silent crit was very useful and also very edifying, I showed images I'd taken of St George's Field (no surprise there then eh? ) in the recent snow. I'd been experimenting with printing them in colour and in black and white on my usual favourite medium - lovely, translucent, cheap tracing paper and then superimposing them one of top of the other but slightly out of sync with each other so there is a slight tremor in the image. I think it makes it look quite sinister. I put them up against the window as it is such a useful and free lightbox. As it was a silent crit I couldn't explain what they were about until the others in the group had finished discussing them but I did put up a label 'Time Slippage, Work In Progress'.  One person said the words 'gothic and reminiscent of Wilkie Collins' - high praise indeed to my Victorian era gothic fiction obsessed ears. Other words used were' quiet and atmospheric'. ' slightly underexposed but that adds to the atmosphere of them'.

I hope to refine the images further by chopping off the borders and layering them one upon the other - either with a gap between each sheet with the colour versions at the back and the black and white ones at the front, or by layering them out of sync but directly on top of one another or in direct opposition to one another and taking a picture of the resultant image on a light table and so making a new image altogether - this looked especially sinister with the broken angel. It really motivated me to want to make more out of them.

Motivation was something I've been sorely lacking in today though - I sat down at the computer to write this about 11am this morning but it's took me til late afternoon to get properly started on it. I have done a lot of filling and planned my diary a bit though and sent some emails so it's not entirely been clicking refresh on Farcebook (deliberate misspelling) but I could have done a bit less of that and more of this instead....ho hum. At least I'm doing it now - plus I'll need to be a bit more organised next week as it's the deadline for calls for papers for a couple of academic conferences I'm interested in. I think I'm putting down my lack of motivation down to being back amongst my comparatively really tatty sadly no original features left cluttered late 1940's semi after the glamour and splendour of the Noel Coward patronised Midland and to being somewhat in awe of Katrina Palmer after being at her Uncoupling performance at the Henry Moore Institute last night.  I really enjoyed the piece and I adore her Necropolitan Line which makes me smile - especially at the line 'a handful of lingering goths'. I hope to use similar lightbox lighting for my images. It's an immersive piece - using lighting, physical objests, images, soundtrack - verbal and musical and I'm slightly in awe of it. Plus I had a slight wobble as she is also working on St George's Field but then I realised that shouldn't really be a cause for concern on my part as our approaches and resultant work though similar in some ways are different in more.

Mmm as ever lots of food for thought there. Also providing food for thought are the exhibitions I went to at the South Square Gallery in Thornton last week. You can see what's on here  - I especially enjoyed Madeleine Piri's cyanotypes and liquid photo emulsion images of life in a russian village - the potatoes look so real and vibrant that you feel you could pick them put of the picture (she is also the lady who taught me how to cyanotype) and Mariel Borst Pauwels transferred images on wood and paintings. Both had a thematic consistency - a phrase I used when discussing which of my images to take in for the silent crit with my husband. He suggested some images which weren't part of the St George's Field sequence and I said 'but there's no thematic consistency' than paused and howled 'shoot me now '- I'm being slowly but surely subsumed into using and speak 'artspeak'....which is a mix of both 'argh' and 'yay' on my part.

Other things which are making me think are end of year show - had my first look at the space (Studio 24) on Mabgate last week and bits of it would be perfect for the burial plot sized hangings I'm hoping to make and I also wondered about its history and what was made there. I know a little of the history of the area - well specifically the Quarry Hill disinternment case of the early 1840's and it was nice to be able to tell the gallery owners what Mab means and the unfounded but persistent rumours of tunnels between Leeds Parish Church and Mabgate so the priests could visit the Mabs (it's slang for prostitute) without being seen en route by their parishioners.  I like it as a space but am concerned about how our work is going to look together in that space as we all have very practices and approaches but maybe some thematic continuity will become apparent as the time comes nearer....

 So that's where I've been and where I'm at...off to go and eat some food now and think about stuff some more over dinner.




  

MA-Ness Term 2 Week 4 - Revelations, UV Resistant Gloss, Return of Letter, Phd-Ness, Cyanotype Solution Painting and Lots of thinking and some light reading....

Slightly more on this weeks post it note - indictative of a slightly busier week too....but can't show you anymore pics as am still working through all the ones I took the fortnight before - deciding which ones to print and which ones to use to make cyanotypes of...and speaking of cyanotypes spent a good chunk of today mixing up the ready made solutions of sodium ferricyanide and ammonium citrate in deinonised water into a one part to one part solution....

Had a busy day today - been painting cyanotype solution onto different coloured paper - red, light grey and dark grey and and dipping lacey pieces of material into the solution, wringing them out and then letting them dry. I learnt that paper takes much less time to dry than material and the heavily embroidered bits of lace don't absorb the solution the same as the unembroidered bits...

Really looking forward to using them and got an idea of which images I want to try and develop on them too - one will hopefully be the angel I took a colour photograph of in the graveyard at Cleethorpes and the other will be of the shrouded female face atop a gravestone in Chapel Allerton.

No prizes for guessing that it would be images from graveyards...but as yet none from St George's Fields but there will be once I've finished sorting through the latest lot of pics I took there - well chuffed with some of the 120 ones I took - not least because they were taken on a fully manual camera and I always feel more of accomplished photographer when I've used a fully manual camera and made it do what I want it too - other than deciding on the viewpoint and releasing the shutter that is. I used the readings from the point and shoot pocket digital camera to set the exposure/shutter speed and they all came out okay. HUZZAH!!

I am still using the crap kids digital camera though - took another lot in St George's Fields in the sunshine on Friday and am well chuffed with some of them. It's such a fun camera to use. Plus it is also very light to carry and fits in my pocket no problem plus since my addition of black insulation tape over the battery compartment the chances of unintentionally deleting the images on it are minimised...though I do have to keep an eye on battery levels as it loses them if the batteries run out too.

Sadly though the letter I sent to the coffin manufacturers to ask if they had any lining scraps I could have for printing on has been returned 'addressee gone away' so I'll have to try other funeral business acquaintances to see if I can find any coffin offcuts that way....

I went to a lecture at the Henry Moore Institute last week - it was given by Tom McCarthy who is one of the founders of the fabulously named International Necronautical Society who have a manifesto that you can read here and which looks right up my street so to speak - or should that be right up my avenues of graves?...anyways I understood some of it and some of it went right over my head (I updated my to do list during those bits) but I also got some good suggestions for my ever expanding reading list including some Joseph Conrad but I also overheard a remark that is making me think re doing a phd.

A chap in the audience asked another chap how he was getting on with his practice led phd, chap replied he was struggling with the writing side of it and original chap said he wondered if this fashion for practice led phds 'is creating a generation of artists who can write better than they can practice'....more food for thought there. I think my deciding factor as to whether or not I decide to go for it phd-wise is the dissertation results which are due on Friday...if that goes okay then I think I'll start researching options seriously. Plus I had an idea re researching the kind of labour used in photographic studios when they were at their hey day in the victorian period....

The lecture was in response to Katrina Palmer's very wonderful Necropolitan Line installation which I have completely fallen in love with ('we are sorry for being sorry') and have looked at the some of the information accompanying it on the Henry Moore Institute website - including a video which looks at some of the ideas behind it - and some of the phrases which struck me enough to write them down on my post it note were:
art exceeds language (yes it can, but sometimes it also needs language to explain it/title it/help it a bit...imo)
sculpture is subject to gravity and revealed in light - beautiful phrasing and description of sculpture
it's the spaces between words which makes language work - yep - love this phrase too.

I also spent some time last week catching up with the lady who taught me Human Remains Analysis at Leeds Discovery Centre (in theory I can reassemble skeletons, determine their sex, age and possible cause of death - in practice I got very giddy because I was holding a real human skull, real human bones...) It was aces to see her and to discuss the possibilities of our working together in the future on some projects.

Projects which hopefully would make people look anew at their landscape and the kind of role it had in people's lives in the past...Places where there is evidence of human habitation and use back to the bronze age and the seemingly spiritual use of that landscape for honouring/housing the dead of those societies. I was also intrigued again by the use of water/reflective surfaces/superstitions about them in death rituals. I have done some research already about this - will have to dig it out and re-familiarize myself with it, am especially intrigued with the practice of breaking objects in this world before throwing them in the water - presumably to either stop them being used in this world so they only be used in the next...not sure about this interpretation though as it does sound a bit unproveable hippy supposition to me.


What else - well I've invested in some UV Resistant Gloss Spray - going to try it (outside or in a very well ventilated room at college)on some of the lumen and anthotype prints I have done and see if it fixes the issue of being able to show them as without any kind of uv resistance they'll completely fade...though this of course means potentially sacrificing some of the work I've already made. Will have to pick a piece carefully....

Yesterday I finally got my arse in gear to go to the Revelations Exhibition at the Media Museum in Bradford. WOW!! What a wonderful show, if you haven't been and can get there then you must for it is fabulous. Have completely fallen in love with work of Gyorgy Kepes (Ghost from 1962 is just wonderful) Berenice Abbott - she believed that science needed the voice of the artist to lend 'the warm human quality of the imagination to its austere and stern discipline'. Plus some of the phraseology used was just gorgeous:
John William Draper's Solar Spectrum from 1842 is labelled with 'time occupied in exposure', 'accidental mercury', plus some of the older prints had the tiniest precise brown (though presumably faded from black)ink handwriting on. Very fine nibs must have been the order of the day then - I love a big chunky nib, be it on a biro or on a fountain pen. I use fountain pen in my physical diary.

The others things which caught my eye were 'helioautograph camera, the embossing of the velvet cases containing daguerreotypes, 'chickens scared by a torpedo' - which can't have been much fun for the chickens but which made my husband really laugh, the work of Lazlo Monoly-Nagy, 'conventions of a single point perspective', Carl Struwe's work which looked like charcoal drawings til you got close and realised there was no visible texture on the surface like there would be with charcoal but they were in fact huge photographs of tiny things under magnification - his image of the chlorophyll chain in algae looked like some of the mourning jewellery popular in victorian times made out of hair. I also particularly loved the stark desolation of Clare Strand's 'The Betterment Room'

I also looked a bit more at how work is displayed and how it reminded me in some ways of my church experience as a youth - ie an almost silent reverent space, I also found myself reading the writing on the wall before looking at the pieces and going round things in a more orderly fashion as opposed to bull in a sweetshop fashion at whatever catches my eye first. Not sure if this is me maturing, whether thoughts of curation are on my mind as we start making preparations for the end of year show or just a well put together show.

Going to the museum reminded me how much I love 'the materiality of photographic processes' - digital is all well and good but there is something about a physical end product and a physical product other than a memory card and a camera to put images on the memory card which just makes my heart sing.

Other things which make my heart sing - graveyards, vinyl records, valve radios, typewriters, skulls, my husband, cats, really cheap and nasty roman catholic iconographic souvenirs, most museums....

Also learnt a bit more about the history of photography as a process, the impact dry plate technology had on photo taking, just how toxic daguerreotype potentially were (mercury vapour anyone?) and also looked at a photograph of a studio production line in Scotland where all the workers looked like women in mournig dress - further investigation needed there.

This week is going to consist of more boxercise classes hopefully as exercise is making me feel better and more energised, catching up with chums not seen in a while, and re-familiarizing myself with black and white photographic print making as it's been a while since I've done that and I'm missing the magic of watching the image appear in the chemical wash....I'm also hoping to make a bit more of an inroad into my unread books pile as well as a bit more of the 'trashy' novel I'm reading for fun - Silent In The Grave by Deanna Rayburn set in London in 1886, it's the tale of widowed Lady Julia Grey and her quest with Nicholas Brisbane to discover if her husband was murdered and who killed him. I'm about a quarter of the way through and it's great fun so far...    

MA-Ness Term 2 Week 3 Newness, Oldness, Deadness, Happiness and That Kind Of Thing...

Just one image this week - and it's quite a full post it note as it has been a busy week in which I have taken LOTS of photographs but as they were almost all on film (1 colour 120, 1 b+w 120 - both of St George's Fields, 3 x 35mm colour and 1 x 36 35mm colour  most of St George's Fields but also of a little graveyard somewhere in the outer reaches of Huddersfield.
The reason for this excessive use of colour is partly the cost - as am still using up the last of the AGFA ISO 200 colour film I got from the poundshop and one roll of ISO 800 colour film - forget the make but think it might have been Fuji film but also because somewhat ironically colour film better captures the greyness of the wintertime....

I'm typing this from or should that be on the new computer and whilst I am not a fan of what appears to be todays fad for built in obsolescence in devices nor of externally enforced change - it is a joy to be using a machine that does not take 15 minutes to warm up, freeze every half hour or so and so necessitate persistent pressing of control/alt/delete buttons and despairing cries of 'just fucking work' from me plus it can more easily cope with all the images I need to copy/paste, move from folder to folder, edit and transmute into new images. Massive thanks as ever to my lovely supportive husband who bought it, faced the hideousness of a retail park to pick it up and then set it up and installed all the software on it. I did make him lots of cups of tea and brought him whisky as a thank you whilst he was wrestling with it though. 

Best of all though after much searching I found the installation disc for my crap kids digital camera. It remains one of my favourite cameras to use and this means I'll still be able to use it and retrieve and print the pictures from it. When I bought it last summer I put the installation disc in a safe place which meant of course that when I needed it again I couldn't remember where the safe place was...

But much hunting on workroom bookcase shelves found it - I had tried just plugging it in via its USB cable into the laptop but with no joy as although it recognised there was a device attached, it couldn't access the pictures on it, and the same thing happened with the college Macs. Though I had been promised they'd be able to work it as Macs don't need drivers apparently....computers remain a frustrating, necessary and rewarding part of my day to day life though and I'd be lost without them and like I said it is very lovely indeed to be using one that (so far anyway) is working very well indeed.

So now I'll be able to get on with the photo sorting that I need to do, need to start putting things together into a portfolio and working out best ways to show them, am still loving having them digitally printed onto tracing paper as I love the translucency and they look *so* good when help up against the light (which reminds me I really must sort out either making a light box or sourcing some anyway) plus an A4 tracing paper print is only 10p and so almost cheap as chips*

And fingers crossed amongst the 6 rolls I'm awaiting getting back there will be some 'money shots' worth printing and getting blown up big - especially on the 120 films. Along with graveyard shots I also took some shots from the train - I went to Huddersfield by train last week to catch up with an ex fellow ma-er and to look round the little cemetery near to her house. It was cold and damp but well worth the journey as it was lovely to catch up with her and see the work she is working on at the moment as well as having a look around a new to me cemetery plus it was excellent to be at the station at standard commuting times and be reminded of how lucky I am not to have to do that on a regular basis.

I went to another kind of station this weekend - the one installed at the Henry Moore Institute by Katrina Palmer and called the Necropolitan Line. I thought it was wonderful - quirky, funny, thought provoking, engaging, stimulating and it made me quite envious too. I'd love to realise work on that kind of scale but that is a goal to work towards. I shall go again during the day when hopefully I'll be able to sit on the platform and listen to the announcements uninterrupted and fully absorb all its wonderfulness. I also feel both inspired and comforted by the work as well as a little envious in a way.

Last week I wrote  I have written to a firm of coffin makers this week to ask if they have any scraps of coffin lining material leftover that I could use to experiment printing on. When I told my Mum this she asked the perfectly reasonable question 'Why?' though I would have preferred it if she hadn't asked it in such a disgusted and incredulous way. I explained that as my work deals with death, and is often of cemeteries then it seems an entirely reasonable if not logical thing to do. I don't think she was convinced and still thinks me 'morbid'. Which my lovely old school Little Oxford Dictionary (1978 edition) defines as: 'adjective-not natural and healthy; indicative etc of disease'.

Mmm - she might have a point but then again she might not and this in turn makes me think of the quote at the top of my post it note from an old prayer card I saw in Kirkstall Museum Archive asking people to pray for the canonisation of Sister Marie Celine who apparently 'died in the odour of sanctity' and was sanctified in September 2007.  I'm completely intrigued by the phrase 'odour of sanctity' and cannot help but wonder what that smells like....

I also wonder what the bread made by the bakers trying to emulate the methods used by Victorian bakers smells like. I've only made bread with yeast a couple of times - I'm too impatient to have to let things rise, prove, knock them back and then rise again but I often make soda bread as that is a bit more straightforward. I've really enjoyed the programme and learnt quite a lot about the different ways of breadmaking and the role (pun unintended) of baking in a society as it industrialises and expands. The number of calories calculated as needed by manual workers to complete their tasks in those days is staggering and the bulk of them came from bread. It's also been fascinating to see the making of the different types of bread, the origin of the fashion for white bread and the dreadful additives used to help make those loaves as cheaply and as whitely as possible. It's very easy to be sniffy and appalled by the lack of trading standards and health and safety legislation years ago but as one of the presenters pointed out - corners will always be at risk of cutting if the primary factor in its production is cheapness of cost....horsemeat lasagne anyone?

Got lots on this week too so hopefully next weeks post it note will be just as full and there may even be more pictures too.....




*it might be twice as expensive though - it's roundabout £2 for a bag of chips these days and you probably get about 60 chips or more...either way it is lots cheaper than printing on more traditional photographic paper.


  

MA-Ness Year 2 Week 1 Re-enrolment, Victorian Fabulousness, Cyanotyping, Clumsiness+Forgetfulness, Post It Notes and Joyce Carol Oates

Book marks made out of 120 film backing paper and leftover sticky back plastic

end results of yesterdays cyanotyping drying above the litter trays used for bleach baths and washes
 top row far left and second row from bottom also had additional post development dip in bleach solution  and top row right I forgot to put the negative the right way round - doh!! and the coffin shaped one should have had an image of a dancing skeleton on it but it didn't work - as all the others did I suspect it was because a mix of not being in strong sunshine for long enough and the acetate negative not being contrasty enough/clamped tight enough to paper under the glass.
The images are (starting top left hand side)
reflection of branches in Birmingham Cathedral in digital camera lens taken on crap kids digital camera
dancing skeletons that worked
back to front skeletons warning that death to will come to you the viewer - both images taken from images in textbook but can't remember which one...
pylon near nature reserve in Castleford (aka Cas Vegas) taken on crap kids digital camera
close up of grave details Scarborough Cemetery - taken on b+w 35mm film
as above
coffin shape that sadly didn't work...in terms of taking an image but at least it works as a coffin shape
steps near Scarborough Art Gallery taken on 35mm b+w film
close up on angel on grave in Scarborough Cemetery taken on 35mm b+w film.
All need trimming and framing.

experiments with trying to extract colour from geranium leaves - wetting watercolour paper both sides and clamping leaves in plastic wallet beneath piles of partially read and unread books, so far getting best results with dying semi dried up geranium leaves, fresh ones don't seem to work but do leave an interesting stain which I have (hopefully) preserved by coating with gloss medium. Difficult to do without further dislodging petals - need to work on both technique and maybe get better brushes or use a sponge.

So these are some of the results of what I've been up to this week, there are also some 36 b+w film pics from the tour of Beckett Street Cemetery (part of the Heritage Weekend) which I scanned in yesterday. After my ever lovely and supportive husband did his Breaking Bad impression in the garage and developed them for me in return for tea. Though this was after I had to re-dry them as in my clumsiness and difficulty to reach them down from the shower rail I dropped them in the cyanotype washing bath (a repurposed litter tray) ARGH!! And I am hoping to get the best of them printed this week on tracing paper. I am still absolutely loving the translucency and cheapness of tracing paper - I also need to see if it is available in widths of 1.06 metres so I can realise my plan to print images the same size as the burial plots that were available at St George's Fields....

I'm glad I made the most of the sunshine yesterday and got so many done - though I am also cheered by the news that the darkroom at college now has a UV bed specifically for developing cyanotypes in a comparative blink of an eye (about 3 minutes) as opposed to 30-60-90 minutes. But the luddite part of me likes the time and awkwardness involved in developing them in sunlight in various points around the house and washing them in the bath. Plus whilst I'm waiting for them to develop I can do things like the washing up or make the dinner.

Though the back ache I get from bending over the bath awkwardly to wash them out is a pain  - at least it's more easily reachable in terms of height in the darkroom and I might be able to better see what I am doing in the darkroom when putting the acetate negatives on top of the cyanotype solution painted paper, as opposed to somewhat flailing about in the near darkness of my workroom with the curtains closed....If we had the money I'd have the garage rebuilt to house a proper little darkroom.

I was a bit rusty and distracted yesterday though I think - hence my getting something backwards, dropping stuff and most of all forgetting that I could tone them as well as bleach them. But by the time I remembered I wasn't in the mood for making tea and then letting it go cold. But it was a massive relief when some images did appear and I'm pleased with most of them but especially chuffed with the pylon taken on the crap kids digital camera and the reflection of trees in a lens. I want to use both of those negative acetates again and this time tone them with tea too.

My other massive mistake yesterday was forgetting that I had taken the b+w film out of the canon slr I got for a fiver from the charity shop and had it developed. I had then reloaded it with poundshop Agfa Colour as I had thought about going to take more pics at St Matthews Cemetery in Chapel Allerton  - when you load this camera it winds the film on so you count down from 24 or 36 and it tells you how many you have left - as opposed to all the other film cameras I have which don't wind it on other than to the first frame and tell you how many you have taken so far. At least I haven't lost/fogged any pictures already taken but I may have fogged the film for any future pictures I might take on it. DOUBLE DOH!!!

It goes against the grain for me to just throw stuff away  (hence my using backing paper and leftover sticky back plastic to make bookmarks) so I am tempted to take some pics on it and see how they come out - pics I could easily recreate that is rather than unrepeatable/unrecreateable ones. Plus I realised as soon as I opened it and it was late last night in electric light in the living room and I didn't have either the 'big light' or my craft light on - I was trying to plan my days for this week so thought I was getting it out ready to drop off to be developed and I closed it as soon as I realised. But equally it was only a pound (it came from the poundshop) and it wasn't special film so I don't know...think I will use it and see what I can get from it - you never know it might end up being one of those happy accidents I'm so fond of.

The other thing I noticed yesterday though was not being to find anything - even though I knew it was there or I'd just put it down - the usual suspects that went missing even though they were there were sellotape (I'd put the dispenser back in it's usual place but backwards so I couldn't see the tape in the gloom) and scissors. I'm sure scissors have a will of their own - I have 3 pairs in my workroom - one pair is one of my all time prize possessions LEFTHANDED FABRIC SCISSORS which I bought over 20 years ago and are labelled with a note that says 'DON'T USE THESE ON PAIN OF DEATH OR WORSE' and a black ribbon so that they can't be confused with the other two pairs - my husband knows they are never to be used on paper or anything other than fabric. They were expensive and are wonderful and would be one of the things I would consider fighting flames for to rescue should we ever have a fire. The other two are just inexpensive ambidextrous stationery scissors and both are in the pen pot where they normally live...but both kept disappearing yesterday - note to self when using scissors put them back in the pot as opposed to just putting them down as I'll be picking them up again in a minute as that isn't a timesaver as I then can't find the bloody things....

Friday was re-enrolment in person and it was exciting to see all the new faces (a couple of whom I already know) signing up - they have the next couple of weeks as induction before lectures proper start again - some of which I may revisit. And it was a massive relief that the struggles I had logging in to the online part of the enrolment system had worked and my details were correct. It took 5 goes to get into the system - and that was after I had emailed them to reset my password from 12 months ago...but it's done now - hurrah!!

Plus it was also lovely to see my fellow ma-ers too and catch up with what they've been doing over the summer and plan a bit for the next few months like where to have our final show and doing our own crits. Hopefully we'll get back what we handed in for assessment in August back so I can show physical items rather than this blog. Plus we found out that we all passed - hurrah but I'm still very keen to know my mark seeing as I am a) a girly swot and b) am enjoying jumping academic hoops and c) am thinking of doing a practice led phd and high marks may make that process easier.

What hasn't been easy has been my reading the last couple of weeks - well some of it was easier than others and some of it was pleasure but some of it was and is very painful indeed. The easiest and most pleasurable in terms of feeding my obsession with all things victorian (well not all things - not keen on rickets, workhouse system though am beginning to wonder if it was in some ways preferable than current benefit sanctions in at least you got some food and some physical shelter, lack of antibiotics, lack of effective accessible contraception, position of women in society, disenfranchisement of a huge swathe of society, living conditions, imperialism, jingoism, colonialism ....) was the book Jeremy Paxman wrote (or rather had big chunks of written for him) to accompany his series from a while back - The Victorians: Britain Through The Paintings Of The Age (BBC Books 2009) which is an interesting overview of the period as well as a collection of some of the most wonderful paintings.  It is thanks to a painting by Charles Wynne Nichols that I saw in Scarborough Art Gallery and promptly feel in love with - and which you can see here along with others by him that I started reading Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon.(Oxford University Press edition from 1987 but it was originally published in installments in Robin Goodfellow magazine in 1861)  I also persuaded WI Book Club to read it too and I am absolutely loving it  - the writing is exquisite plus it is written both in and of it's time and by a woman. 

Plus I have used the chapter titles as titles for some of my pieces of work - including the image I submitted through Curator Space for consideration to be included in the 'Imaginary Museum, Mapping Memory' piece. And I am slowly getting into the habit of writing page numbers down as I make quotes and using post it notes to mark places when there has been something especially quoteworthy.

The other book that has been pleasantly difficult but wonderful too has been The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates published by Fourth Estate in 2013 - it's long, has many characters, an overall narrator that stresses their qualities as a historian but then tells the story from different points of view of the characters involved and in different ways of telling - some are as an apparent observer, some are said to be journals or letters. But it is also utterly entrancing and disturbing - like many of her works - Zombie made me reach for pictures of kittens every few pages just to restore my equilibrium. The Accursed is set in Princeton in 1905-6 and centres on the curse visited upon the Slade and Wilson family. But there were some passages that absolutely stood out for me:
   

from page 132

Though it is the rare historian who will speak candidly of such matters, all of us who are engaged in the rendering of the past – by way of amassing, selection, and distillation of a multitude of pertinent facts – are commonly beset by two dilemmas: the phenomenon of simultaneity of event and the phenomenon of the authenticity of evidence.

from page 180 Postscript: The Historians Dilemma
‘perhaps it is the historians dilemma: we can record, we can assemble facts meticulousy and faithfully, but only to a degree can we interpret. And we cannot create.’  

And from page 669 in the Acknowledgements section
The truths of Fiction reside in metaphor, but metaphor here is  generated by History.
But the most difficult book I'm reading at the moment is Art and Death by Chris Townsend published by IB Taurus in 2008. Difficult because of it's dense text, presumed familiarity with philosophical concepts and works by Derrida, Barthes, Foucault and words that I do not know and so have given me RSI as I have had to continually reach for the dictionary.  But I can now add the following to my vocabulary:
sedulous = persevering. diligent

meretricious (which I thought meant something to do with lying) but in fact means showily attractive or flashy 

ludic = playful

aporia = irresolvable internal contradiction eg a liar declares all liars are liars...

prosopopeia = figure of speech in which an abstract thing is personified

Frankly it made my brain bleed - both in a good and a bad way and has given me much thought for my own work and an analysis of others too. Plus it feeds nicely into what I want to do my dissertation on - namely the use of language around/in/about art. I've got a rough plan which I hope to go through and flesh out a bit with my tutor this week.

Along with dissertation (in which I need to learn to cite things in the correct Harvard academic fashion) plus I also need to work on the work I want to include in the Out Of The Shadows exhibition that is going to be part of the Love Arts Festival which opens in October plus I also need to work on the paper I'm going to present as part of the What Lies Beneath conference too.

So as ever - lots to do so I'd best crack on with it...so where is the dictionary and my notebook?...