MA-Ness Year 2 Term 1 Week 2 Flowers, Tea Toning, Reading, John Waters and Successful Academic Hoop Jumping.

this weeks post it notes - as you can see lots going on

Cyanotypes in progress - taking advantage of the strong sunshine in the bathroom
pic on the left is of rubbings from a grave in St George's Field, pic on right is a still from Becketts Park Cemetery

washing, bleaching, tea-toning, washing in action - there are lots of uses for litter trays that don't involve cats bottoms
(these are brand new litter trays bought especially for tea toning)

experimenting with arresting decay of petals using gloss medium as a preservative - painted these a few days ago and they seem to be holding up okay so far...

It's been a very busy week and it was crowned by finding out on Friday that I had been successful in my academic hoop jumping so far as I got a distinction for the last module I handed in and a distinction for the first year overall. To say I am pleased is somewhat of an understatement - not least because it confirms that I am on the right path for jumping those academic hoops but also because it makes the possibility of further study as in a phd a more realistic prospect. Plus my self confidence work-wise can be shakey - especially when looking at other peoples and imposter syndrome rears its ugly head so this is a very welcome confidence boost too.

My giddiness and relief was celebrated by going to watch Henning Wehn at City Varieties who was very funny (I was unsuccessful in my quest for tickets to the John Waters Q+A at the BFI or else I would have been there being all fan girly) and this was followed by much fizz (too much in fact and I spent most of yesterday somewhat regretting my previous nights enthusiasm for said fizz) and a rewatching of one of my favourite Hammer films - Dracula AD 1972 which is wonderfully bad and whose soundtrack I can often be found listening to.

So along with drinking my bodyweight in fizz what else was I up to last week? as you can see from the pics above I was taking advantage of the strong sunshine and developing some cyanotypes which I then toned in tea (thought I'd used yorkshire tea but realised afterwards it was trose own label decaf - must use yorkshire next time and more teabags - this was 4 in a big teapot and next time I think I'll use 5) after a few seconds (up to 30) in a bleach solution (1 tablespoon washing soda crystals to a litre of water). I am fairly pleased with the results though sadly one picture tore as I was washing it. I was a bit surprised as this was on watercolour paper and the one I did on lined notebook paper lasted better though I didn't wash that one for as long just in case.

I left these in the sunshine for over an hour which I think on reflection was far too long - think 45 minutes would have been more than enough (but I struggle with the fear that they won't be developed enough...)  but I'm pleased with the tone they've taken on with the tea. One MA colleague asked if one was a drawing as it looks like one. I usually colour photocopy them too and I am happier with the colour photocopies than with the originals. Will have to re-read Benjamin's Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction to see what he has to say about such matters as IIRC his piece was more about the value of pieces as opposed to aesthetic changes but I have read lots since I read it so it's all gone a bit hazy and muddled in my mind....

Anyway the colour photocopies look to me like pictures you find in old text books, I won't put pictures of them on here as I'm reluctant to put pictures of the finished items without watermarks but equally watermarks change the look of the piece in a way I don't like so mmm, will have a to find a way round that one. It's not a problem handing it in to be marked though (which is the primary purpose of this blog - it's my research journal to hand in) so I think I'll just do that...as well as add re-read of WB to my to do list.

I've been doing lots of reading this week too - as well as watching photobooks being skimmed through on Vimeo. It's not very satisfactory as you can't really see in good clear close up definition but it's good enough to give you a feel for the piece and what it encompasses - in this way I've watched/skimread/seen Tulsa by Larry Clark and The Ballad of Sexual Dependency by Nan Goldin as both works were mentioned in Art and Death by Chris Townsend which I finished and took back to the library on Friday. Hurrah - along with a wonderful book called Red which features some of the eerie, unsettling, beautifully moving work by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (what a fabulous name for a start!!) and another book called Death which was actually the catalogue from the exhibition of the same name held at the Media Museum in 1995*. You can see a copy of it here.

All were thought provoking and inspiring and have given me much food for thought and other artists work to look at and explore. They have also given me a sense of 'argh, there is so much I want to read and comparatively little time in which to do it'....especially as my priorities must be over the next few weeks:
exhibition Out Of The Shadows
paper for What Lies Beneath Conference
Dissertation

Though I have made a start for all of theabove - the latter two are more started than the first one though which is something I hope to remedy this week. I also want to keep up the balance I've had so far of healthier eating/exercise and time off so I am trying to plan my use of time better - getting reading sorted for journeys so that travelling time (I cannot drive and so either walk to places or use public transport) can also be utilised. I've got an article entitled 'International Art English' by Alix Rule and David Levine bookmarked for a train journey this week - which one of the librarians suggested might be of use to me when he overheard me talking about my dissertation topic to one of the other librarians.  I've found the library staff at the college to be unfailingly helpful - either with book suggestions, helping me learn how to copy onto acetate and fixing the copier when it jams on me which thankfully hasn't happened for a while...or with getting hold of books for me. The latest being Secure The Shadow by Jaye Ruby. My rule re books are if it's around a tenner on Amazon I'll buy it - anymore than this and I'll get it from the library and then if it is worth buying saving up for it. Secure The Shadow is around £200 a copy so a library copy will do just fine.

I also need to start narrowing down exactly what projects I'm going to work on as I am still a bit kid in a sweetshop and I need to decide which ones I should (no pun intended) focus on. I am enjoying my experimentations with flowers though. I am using gloss medium in an attempt to stop them decaying and it's kind of working so far - but what I am more pleased with are the glossed decayed remains of petals I have photocopied using a black and white copier and which now look like pencil line drawings.

John Waters has been a recurring theme this week (as ever) as I listened to a Q+A session he did with Jeff Koons (which you can see here) at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles in 2014 whilst waiting for my cyanotypes to develop. It was Jeff Koons comment that 'art happens inside the viewer' that reminded me that however much you try to guide a particular reaction in a viewer of your work it is absolutely ultimately up to the viewer. This also chimes in with John Waters seeming view that it is other people who ascribe the accolade 'artist' rather than yourself. I also listened to the interview he did with Graham Norton on Radio 2 yesterday (which you can hear here) in which he revealed that he has a cameo in the new Alvin and the Chipmunks movie which I am going to have to go and see as a result.  Plus one of my lovely fellow MA-ers got to see  his show in London and brought me back one of the promotional posters which features him as he see himself if he had gone in for botox, surgical facelifts and use of 'improbable brown' hairdye. I shall have to find a space to put it on the wall.
   
Plus both interviews also highlighted for me one of the aspects of artwork that I struggle with - namely my gut reaction either when viewing or making a piece of work and the post viewing/post making intellectualisation of it. My gut reaction happens first - on a very basic level 'do I like this enough to look at it for longer/more closely' and then the intellectualisation happens and I struggle with that as it's that with its jargon that I think can put people off looking at work or wanting to take part. Mmm I need to think this through a bit more...which is just as well as that's what my dissertation is going to be looking at.

Aside from cyanotyping I've not taken many pictures this week - though I did take some on my crap kids digital camera on the way home including one of Leeds Town Hall which I am very chuffed with - partly because the building has a soft spot in my heart as not only is it a fine example of victorian civic architecture but also where me and my husband got married. I am loving the lomo-ness of the camera and its limitations and my husband also really likes the pic as the way the colour has come out makes it look like an old postcard. I'm especially pleased about this as I adore old postcards - especially ones from the fifties, sixties and seventies with their slightly overdone optimistic febrile colourtones.

Something else I have been doing a lot this week is learning new words and phrases - or rather writing them down once I have looked them up in the hope that this way their definition will stick and here's some of my favourites from the last week:

aspersorium - medieval term for container of holy water
ontological - concerned with metaphysics and nature of being
prolepsis - answering questions in rhetorical speech or a representation of something before it has happened eg he was a dead man when he entered the room
aposiopesis - short break for effect 
caesura - point of natural pause
mise en abyme - literally placed in an abyss but used to describe repeating reflections between two mirrors
preterite - past tense
sedulous - persevering, diligent
aporia - irresolvable internal contradictions eg a liar declares all liars are liars

to name but a few...

No wonder it has felt like my brain has been bleeding this week...and it can only get more intense....


* I know I need to get into the habit of Harvard Referencing and I do when I write my bibliography when handing stuff in but I've yet to find a way to make it seem less clunky in this blog....which again makes me think who am I writing it for and why am I writing it - if it is for research journal purposes then why do I wish to make it less clunky as it is only going to be read by academics and they're used to clunky..or is it because I'd also like it to be read by non academics too and I would hence my reluctance for what I see as clunkiness...

MA-Ness Term 3 Week 9 Show, Talking, Drinks Tokens and Tat.

this weeks post it note - again not so full as others but this flanked by some gloriously tacky fridge magnets brought all the way from the home of Dracula himself - Transylvania............

A lovely chum of mine has just come back from a Dracula Society trip to Transylvania and along with some other goodies - a prayer card featuring St George,some holy perfume and a mug featuring a lady with not very much on and a blood splattered knife between her teeth she brought me back these gems. Both featuring an image of Vlad the Impaler - they are gloriously badly executed and whilst ostensibly the same differ in the way the vines and the grapes, his imperial headgear and his blood ravaged lips have been painted. I like also how both have come from the same mould but thanks to the different placing of the magnet on the back of each one they look as if he is facing in different directions. Utterly wonderful and I look forward to placing them on the fridge later.

Otherwise this last week has been overshadowed by lurgy (again!!) and I am bored of coughing and aching and feeling so under the weather plus my heart is still breaking and broken from the death of my beloved Lucia. She would often keep me company in the work room - either sunbathing on the windowledge behind the computer monitor or in her favourite cardboard box which she used to squeeze into (it's sides are bowed) on the landing just outside. Mapp has spent some time in all of Lucia's spaces apart from this one - I hope she takes over this one too at some point.

So although my heart isn't really in it 100 percent I have made myself carry on doing things and there's been time when I've been able to be distracted enough by what I've been doing to put heartache aside for a bit or like on Thursday night when it was the delightfully dark musings and stories of David Sedaris read by the author himself which provided much welcome distraction and laughter. I doubt there are many people who could describe having a benign tumour removed and wanting to feed it to a snapper turtle with a growth on its head and part of its foot missing with such wit and warmth. He was very wonderful indeed and if you haven't read anything by him then you must and if you can go see him give a reading then you must do that too. He's also not a fan of people taking pictures of anything and everything on mobile phones and had signs up saying no photos please at his book signing table and as far as I could tell people abided by his request.

His use of words is exquisite - scalpel like in their exactness and words are something that I keep coming back to time and time again as part of my studies which both amuses and bemuses me seeing as as my work is mostly in a visual format as in I take photographs and then make the resultant images into cyanotypes or try copying them onto canvas using pva glue - without much success so far but I suspect that is refinement of technique/materials needed as opposed to the actual technique itself not working as the image did transfer - just not  as well as I would have liked...

And now the formatting of this blog is going skewiff again - part of the reason I use blogger (aside from it being free) is because compared to wordpress I find it easy to use but it can be a right ball-ache sometimes when it comes to formatting, it doesn't always insert pictures where you ask/tell it to so then you find yourself moving text around and it then centres the text when you actually want it justified to the left and no amount of highlighting the text and clicking that alignment makes it align that text but it does for the text after the picture......and then the 4th time of telling it to do it it does.....oh FFS - why can't things just work first time when you tell them to?

This kind of technology fail - either of the person attempting to use it or on the technology itself drives me witless. It happened last week at college when I tried to log out after doing some printing - it wouldn't let me and I had to go and disturb the computer chaps in their lair to get it to let me to log out (force quit apparently) and yesterday my lovely fridge magnet donating chum and I had similar issues trying to get the chromecast thingy to work as she had bought a copy of the Skull (1965, F Francis, Amicus UK) for us to watch online and it took us ages to get it to work - made me realise why I prefer having a physical in your hands product as opposed to a streamed ethereal electrons malarkey.

As I've said before you know where you are with physical stuff and it's often much easier to spot the reason why it's not working....anyway we did get it to work on the laptop at least - it juddered so much when 'cast' to the television that we gave up watching it on there as it was making us feel sick. And it was worth it - both Mr Lee (RIP) and Mr Cushing gave very fine performances and the story though unlikely was at least true to its own logic and I really enjoyed it.

So got sidetracked there - was talking about words and their part in art - in what is usually perceived as a visual medium and whilst I do write a bit and have performed semi autobiographical monologues at Headingley Literature Festival I think of myself primarily as a visual as opposed to word artist but so much of art is reliant upon words - either on the words used to describe it, the application you make to get the chance of being in an exhibition, the grant application, the publicity.....plus a fellow artist talked on Saturday about artists statements and asked the question 'are they an insight or a barrier?' which is something I think about a lot - my immediate reaction on reading some artists statements is often one of bewilderment or on occasion ' oh ffs get over yourself' but it's a treat when I read one that I can understand and offers insight too. She also talked about looking at artists sketchbooks too and how insightful that can be - she'd just bought one of Frieda Kahlo's and I'm still plowing my way through the Derek Jarman one I bought at the Whitworth - it really is wonderful and if you get chance to peek at an artists sketchbook then you should....

Plus all this is feeding into the ideas I've got for my dissertation which is due in December which might sound like a long time off but it isn't really and the sooner I get started on it the sooner it'll be in a draft version and I can begin to refine and polish it...this course is about academic hoop jumping after all and I want to jump those hoops as well as I can. John Waters and his comments about art being an elitist club and having to learn the language to take part is one I keep thinking of. That plus his wonderful speech on being given an honorary doctorate which if you haven't seen you must for it is wonderful - warm, inspiring and witty - and you can see it here.

The other article I read this week which also made me think about the accessibility of art is Stewart Lee's interview from last June with Julian Cope - and you can read it in full (should you wish to) here but the bit that stood out for me was the section in which he says of his book 'It's demanding but great art is demanding' and I can certainly see his point.......but.....still not sure.....

I had a tutorial last week , and I showed my tutor some of the pieces I've been working on for the past few weeks and as ever my tutor gave me some useful feedback and ideas on how to develop them - I'd been very pleased with the 'happy accident' when putting away some acetate copies away on top of the original images and making images from that but I hadn't developed it further - but I have now by layering acetates and photocopies on top of one another and so creating new images and then layering that new one upon the existing acetates and copies - so that an image of two cross topped memorials from Undercliffe Cemetery has now become a multi crossed image with 5 layers of crosses - it would make a lovely pattern for fabric (an idea from a chum commenting on an image I posted on Farcebook of me stood next to my work in the windows as part of the MA end of year work in progress show) and I can't wait to make it into an acetate and then make a cyanotype with it......

.....the process also reminded me of a film about WG Sebald (called Patience After Sebald) which I half watched a while ago in which someone described his process of creating his distinctive b+w prints was take the pictures on colour 35mm film, get them developed at Snappy Snaps, then photocopy them in b+w and keep photocopying the photocopies til they have the right level of murkiness. The images I've made aren't murky - well I don't think they are but I am really liking them and they are made from multiple photocopies...

The other thing which I thought about a lot this week was a meme which went round Farcebook from PetaPixel in which it showed 3 different image formats 120 film, 35 mm film and an sd card with the tag 12 exposures 6 are awesome, 36 exposures 6 are awesome hundreds of exposures 6 good results and it made me nod and go 'yep' - me and my husband refer to this as 'the money shot' and there is a good definition of it here - we use it in its non pornographic definition and it's true - amongst the many pictures we take - there is usually (hopefully!!) a few that stand out and so are referred to as 'the money shot'. My current money shots are mostly coming from the pictures I took in St Mary's Churchyard in Whitby, Cleethorpes Cemetery, St George's Field and Undercliffe Cemetery...can you guess what they all have in common? 

Curation and curating are also words and actions playing on my mind - there's a school of thought that says they have been so overused as to become meaningless and I'm not sure what my thoughts are on it as yet but the interview I read with Richard Boon (manager of the Buzzcocks and a librarian) in which his response to the question: 

'As a librarian you are a custodian of words. There’s a lot of misuse of language in the media. One that irks me is ‘Curator. ‘What do you think?'
was 

'It is a hugely misused word. It should have an academic context and imply knowledge, expertise in a given field. My daughter is assistant curator of a collection at the Science Museum; some hipster with a beard in Shoreditch is NOT curating a coffee bar, he’s selling coffee. Do you curate your oranges in a supermarket in the green grocer display? No! It’s really sloppy use.' and I can't help but agree....you can read the rest of his interview here

I don't know where the phrase 'surviving memorials' on the post it note comes from or to what it refers exactly though it does make me think of an Ausonius quote I have used - namely that 'death comes even to stone monuments and the names upon them'.

So onto the main events of last week - the end of year show opening and giving a talk on Photography and Victorian Death Customs to Darling Roses WI. I'd finished putting up my work last week so only had to do a couple of finishing touches - eg putting away a ladder, putting the empty drinks can I'd left on the windowledge in the recycling and that kind of thing. It was good to see the MA room and ante room filled with work and I've never seen the college so full with people looking at stuff - it was far too hot and far too crowded at times and I am looking forward to going back in and having a proper look at some of the things that caught my eye on Friday night, I did manage to have more than one glass of wine too thanks to chums of mine not wanting to use their drinks tokens and it was lovely to see lots of my chums making their way to the college and down the corridor to see some of my work and massive thanks to all those who came - learning points for next time are: try not to have lurgy...and know that tracing paper attached to windows with double sided tape in sunshine warps slightly so that what was absolutely flush to the window edges when you left it the previous week will look a teeny bit saggy in places when you come back to it.....still A2 tracing paper and a free lightbox ie window are a good way to guage what things will look like if you have them blown them up to burial plot size instead.......plus it is lovely when people tell you how much they like your work.....

The other thing which took up a lot of my time last week was preparing for the talk I gave to Darling Roses WI group on Saturday morning at St Johns Church Hall - a lovely slightly musty smelling hall next to St Johns Church which fittingly enough has some very lovely victorian gravestones and they listened very attentively to my talking about cyanotypes, the meanings behind some of the symbols used on gravestones, the social etiquette of mourning, the history of cemeteries in Leeds and focusing in particular on the history of St George's Fields and a bit about the bodysnatching scandals in Leeds and the Anatomy Act of 1832 and the shame that is the laying flat of the subscription graves in St George's Fields to be used as lining for pathways....I was struggling a bit - lurgy-wise and my voice was very croaky but it held out and I got lovely feedback and have been asked back and asked by another WI group to talk too so it's all good.

Well I think that's enough for now - got lots to do this week and here's hoping this lurgy will let up and let me do them....
and I really must sort out the white balance on the digital camera - those walls are actually white....but here is a pic of me in front of my work in progress called Mourning.