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 Interregnum Year 1 to Year 2 Not Quite Going On A Summer Holiday..

the last couple of weeks post it notes 

experimenting with geranium flowers and wet water colour paper

It seems somewhat strange sitting down to write this after my self imposed hiatus (post portfolio hand in and prior to college restarting shortly) and it feels like it is a lot longer than 3 weeks since I last sat down and wrote one of these blog posts. It did feel a bit strange on each of those Mondays not to be sat at the computer writing up what I'd been up to, think this coupled with today being a Thursday is going to confuse me for days yet...  but a bank holiday usually has that effect on me anyway.

Anyway as you can see from the post it notes - I've still been making notes on the post it notes and I have been taking photographs too and yesterday I did an experiment with a dried up geranium head and damp watercolour paper to see if I could extract the colour from it and make a kind of drawing. It's definitely made a mark but it's not quite as vivid as I would have liked - so will try it again with a more lively geranium head and see if that makes a difference. I also did a lumen print that I'm a bit happier with - especially as when I covered it post development with an A4 sheet of white paper I didn't quite then place it between two books so part of it got a second light exposure with a very sharp edge - so hope to experiment with that kind of secondary exposure further.

So I haven't been doing a lot of doing - I made a conscious decision to do feck all college-wise for a few days and so instead I have been pottering about shops and doing a bit of tidying, a lot of watching Murder She Wrote, Law and Order and Columbo and a lot of lying on the sofa reading The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates which is a beautifully grim and unsettling tale set in and around Princeton in 1905-6 when a 'curse' descends on prominent society members - it is wonderful stuff and she is easily my favourite living author.  

However sitting down to write this has for some reason been really quite hard - so much so that the phrase 'reluctance to sit at desk' is written twice on this post it note - not entirely sure why as it's not like I don't enjoy the work I'm doing but I think it's partly because I don't feel like I've had a summer holiday as such though to be fair my husband and I aren't really traditional summer holiday type people. Even when on holiday I'm a fiend for museums, seeing something new, finding out stuff about where I am - I can fritter away time on the tinternet pressing refresh on Twitter and the like each day but I find it very difficult to lie on a lounger next to a pool - in fact I can't really think of when I've done that. Even when I've been on a more traditional type of summer holiday I'm far more likely to be found at a table with a book albeit with a glass of something tasty in my hand. Am drinking fizzy water at the moment - it might be 'better' for me healthwise but it's nowhere near as much fun.

But I do need to look again at how much time I'm spending on artwork - as it did become all encompassing last term to the detriment of my health as I pretty much stopped going to the gym and slipped back into less healthy  habits as I relied more on convenience food and take aways. Not good - so I hope to maintain a better balance of work/relaxation time this year, as the feeling of reluctance to sit at desk is I think in part compounded by fears I'll not get the balance right again and I have been doing a bit more exercise recently and feel better for it.

I did go on a Hammer Horror and Peter Cushing pilgrimage with a friend though - we went to Whitstable where we saw Cushing's water colour set in the museum, a couple of his very beautiful watercolour paintings in the pub (converted from a cinema) named after him, his house, the view named after him and we chatted to the lady who sold him his slippers - all this via the Mossman Collection of Carriages which is held at the Discovery Centre in Luton  which features a lot of the carriages featured in many of our favourite horror films - namely the hearse used in Dracula and the carriage used in Brides of Dracula plus I got to sit in a carriage used in the filming of the Wicked Lady which made me very giddy indeed.

But I have been doing a lot of thinking whilst I have consciously not been doing any 'doing' and I have been to a couple of events which have been enlightening, fun and productive - namely the secret Bettakultcha Arts Event on 25.8.15 - held amidst the cosy charms of Wharf Chambers and the first day of the British Association of Victorian Studies Conference at Leeds Trinity University.  Plus I got news that I have had my abstract accepted for a paper at the Gothic Studies Conference - What Lies Beneath in October in Manchester. That made me go 'yay' and then 'eek...got to do it now'.

But I have been doing quite a lot of thinking - and this will shortly become planning as I have 4 big things to think about work-wise over the next few weeks - namely the paper (which I need to write and sort the images for) for What Lies Beneath, my work for the show Out of the Shadows which is part of the Love Arts Festival and will be at the St Johns Church near the Grand Theatre from October 9th til 21st 2015, my research journal hand in in December - that should be fairly easy as it consists of this blog and am sure I can get back easily into a habit of writing it regularly...as that saves so much headless chicken running around at the last minute...and last but not least dissertation. 

The dissertation is giving me much thought as I think I've decided on my subject for it (the language used around art and a gut versus an emotional response) but fitting it into the format rules I've been given is going to be somewhat of a challenge as I will have to get to grips with academic conventions as well as marshalling my arguments. Plus it can't just be printed out at the last minute - it has to be printed by the university printing service. As I have a loathing of running round like a headless chicken at the last minute I want to have it ready in plenty of time for hand in so any problems with it I can hopefully more easily resolve...

So a couple of the things that have stayed with me from the Bettalkultcha Event have been after the presentations had finished were chatting with Carlotta Goulden Allum  who works with this charity and she told me of the Koestler Trust which shows works by offenders but not necessarily with a description of their offence. This in turn made me think I would feel uncomfortable knowingly looking at the work of someone convicted of sexual offences (regardless of the merits of the work in and of itself) but I wouldn't necessarily feel the same discomfort whilst looking at the work of someone convicted of murder or manslaughter. Are these misplaced and unreasonable discomforts on my part? Aren't all crimes against the person equally abhorrent? Shouldn't work be looked at regardless of the other actions the artist may have done or can it only be looked at and truly appreciated with the knowledge of what else the artist may have done? Don't think I have the answers to those questions though or rather I haven't got an absolute answer to any of them.

The Victorian Studies Conference was very good as I got to meet and chat victorian-ness with similarly obsessed with victorian death culture folk as well as explore possible supervisor opportunities should I decide/be able to do a Phd. I also got to purchase the most wonderful piece of victoriana - namely a copy of The Lady's Newspaper and Pictorial Times published on Saturday March 28th 1857. It includes an overview of amusements, London and Paris fashions, foreign and colonial intelligence, embroidery patterns, parliamentary reports and travel but best of all adverts.
Adverts for all manner of things - hair dye, latest model at Tussauds - Monseigneur Sibour Archbishop of Paris who was assassinated in St Etienne Du Mont and who you can find out about here, dressing cases, gravy in a moment, hair destroyer, stamped and traced muslin, seamless parasols, holloways pills, framptons pill of health....not that much difference in essence from the back pages of womens magazines today - though of course todays would include botox, plastic surgery and so called psychic hotlines....

I also watched most of the BBC series POP which featured programmes about individual pop artists,their inspirations and interviews with some who are still around. Sad that there weren't more women pop artists covered but at least there were some featured - and I'm not sure if that's because there weren't that many women pop artists or just the programme makers not considering them for the programme. I've also enjoyed seeing the media coverage of Dismaland and the Dismaland website makes me chuckle too - you can see it  here. I wish I could go see it for myself but don't think I'll be able to manage it before it finishes. Plus it's many a year (almost 20) since I've been to Weston Super Mare and it would be nice to see it again.

The other film I saw which I loved and found most inspiring was Iris - the film about interior designer and fashion collector and fabulous wearer of said fashion Iris Apfel. If you get chance to go see it, then do.

Well I think that's about it for now - though of course recent news events are on my mind too. The refugee crisis has been going on for a long time now but it seems it is the power of an image of a dead child lying face down on the beach that seems to be creating more of a positive political response than there has been. You can only hope that the people fleeing horrors in their home country ultimately end up safe and secure and able to call somewhere else home. On the news this morning the image was being compared to the equally powerful photograph of Kim Phuc taken by Nick Ut in June 1972 (it pictures her running naked along the road after being severely burnt) and this makes me ask all kinds of questions - the attribution to the image on the Guardian website is Reuters (they also name the child as Aylan Kurdi) - did the photographer take it simply to document events? or was it with the hope that it would raise awareness and so hopefully create more action that previous images of the refugee crisis haven't so far? Were they right to take that picture? was it right that it should be shown? is it invasive and prurient? what about the turkish police officer pictured carrying Aylan's body? what about Aylan's remaining family? what about the police officers family? Again I have no answers just questions and of course sadness that a) a situation like this exists in the first place and b) it takes a photograph like this to get some more remedial action on the part of the governments involved.