MA-Ness Week 11 - Procrastination, Busyness, History, Films, Crocuses, Soil Harvesting, Mark Making, Printing, Open Days....

A much more jam packed post it note this week - flanked by soil harvested from St George's Fields which I intend to add water to so that I can make a staining wash for cyanotypes I make featuring images from St George's Field, and harvested fallen (I must stress this - I would not and do not take petals that are still attached to the plants) crocus petals which make excellent stainings for the background of images too.  Plus a pen I found on the pavement whilst walking in the rain to a meeting about a forthcoming exhibition in Potternewton - there was nobody about to ask if they had dropped it so I decided to keep it and use it instead - it hadn't been used at that point as it had not been sharpened to a usable point.

Part of the reason I am doing this on Thursday instead of my customary Monday is partly because I've been really busy, I could have done it yesterday afternoon but I just couldn't seem to settle to it and it has been a battle today to make myself sit down and concentrate on it. And partly because I've been a bit distracted, not sure why - think it's partly because I'm worried about health of loved ones and possibly because it's sunny and I could be outside having a walk in the fresh air but I must get back into swing of doing this. Not least because it is a good thing to hand in as part of my portfolio but also because it is the best way of clarifying my thoughts about what I'm doing, why, where I want to take it and what I want to do next.

So onwards....one of the notes I made on my post it note was Hitchcock. I am a huge fan of Hitchcock films - watching Psycho at an impressionable age has a lot to answer for. I am immensely grateful sometimes that a television from Rediffusion or Rumbelows on a 50p meter was one of my babysitters - I longed for rain as that meant I could sit inside watching lovely old films on BBC2 of an afternoon instead of outside. Sunshine meant fresh air and getting outside - my Nana wouldn't let you waste good dry weather sitting inside watching the television.

I am also a huge fan of North by Northwest, Rear Window, Rope (possibly my favourite of the colour Hitchcocks) The Lady Vanishes, The 39 Steps, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934 version as it has both John Gielgud and Peter Lorre), Rebecca, Lifeboat, Saboteur,  Shadow Of A Doubt and also the early silent films - The Lodger is especially haunting and The Ring and Downhill are also v good indeed. Part of our honeymoon was spent in the Film Museum in Berlin which at the time had a Hitchcock exhibition which was AMAZING.

Anyway am getting slightly off topic which is I am really looking forward to seeing the new Hitchcock/Truffaut film but also I watched a Talking Pictures recently which featured interviews with Hitchcock himself and some of the stuff he said in it really struck a chord with me. He said that the early sound pictures were more like photographs of people talking and that in theory you should be able to turn the sound off and a film should still work and tell the story in a purely visual way... It's the succession of images which create emotion and you must always avoid cliche.

I'm not sure I always avoid the cliche - skulls, graveyards, gravestones being the staple motifs in a lot of gothic culture - in fact I actively embrace it though hopefully I embrace it in an engaging and refreshing way - and even if I don't, well I am having fun doing so and that really is the main thing. Plus goth cliche has a readymade goth audience too.

As ever I had a thought provoking and constructive tutorial last week - partly looking at potential phd opportunities and how best to approach taking that next academic step. I attended an open day at Huddersfield Uni last week - what an energetic campus, there was a real buzz of energy about the place and even though architecturally it is a bit too modern toytowny for my old world tastes - you have to walk through fantastic full on height of might of empire Victorian architecture to get there so I reckon I would cope if I enrolled there. One downside though - they do not have an old school darkroom but they do have marvellous digital facilities. Hmmm. Decisions, decisions but I still have lots to think about and decide on before I make a final decision about where to apply and what to do.

But also looking at what is my practice - as it's not just the creation of images but also the research into the history behind the things I'm interested in and which inspire me in the way I make images and what I make/take images of. A process that is a mix of straightforward photograph taking, mostly using film cameras rather than digital ones, but also includes cyanotyping and with the harvesting of crocuses (fallen ones I must stress) mark making on paper using their colour - I am enjoying using them, though they are extremely delicate for my ham fisted fingers but they create a stain on the paper like which is a pleasing shade of mauve and so akin to the shades deemed appropriate in victorian half mourning.

I intend to cover the papers I've stained with their petal carcasses with copies of images I've made printed on acetate so you'll be able to see the transferred colour coming through underneath. I've also put some of the crocus leaves on a piece of canvas and covered it with gloss medium but either I need to wait longer for the crocus to dry or it does just leach colour as the gloss started to absorb some of the colour and go from clear to a kind of v pale purpley colour. Something to work on methinks.

Practice-wise - writing this blog has definitely become part of it, what started out initially as a form of research journal to hand in has become a place in which I can share bits of my research, clarify my thoughts and approach and monitor my progress. Progress which I really need to get started on organising as I have a lot of different commitments coming up and I really need to sit and plan my time around the various deadlines so I don't miss anything but also can (hopefully) do the work at a reasonable pace instead of rushing round like a headless chicken trying to get it finished.

Postgraduate me is at a complete opposite to undergraduate me in this respect. Undergraduate me was all about the last minute. I hate last minute now - or rather last minute is now about the actual last stuff as opposed to stuff which could and should have been done before then...That's not to say I don't still rush about like a headless chicken or forget stuff but it's much less often and so on the whole things run a lot more smoothly.....unlike yesterday when I got the time of a meeting wrong - but this in turn led to a quick perusal in a charity shop which led to the happy and fortuitous purchase of a 3 cd set of 75 hits of the 1940's and a copy of Servants - a Downstairs View of Twentieth Century Britain by Lucy Letherbridge...and as the chum I was meeting was also late it wasn't the end of the world.

May is an especially busy time for me as I have a couple of conference commitments with a paper to deliver at one and a mini show to put up at another,a walk and talk to deliver, and a conference to attend just an attendee. So for the time being researching and presenting academic papers is also part of my practice too - something that it's just as well I enjoy if I do decide to go down the phd route after all. Public speaking is something I've got much less nervous at doing now - it's still scarey but nowhere near as scarey as it used to be plus I usually make time to practise so I'm not just winging it. I'd rather not wing anything if I can help it - I'd find it far too stressful, I am a mix of admiration and incomprehension at those who do though.

The other lovely thing about Huddersfield last week (aside from a very exciting buzz at the university and lovely architecture and really lovely approachable staff) was  the bonus haul of goodies I got from the charity shops, I also had a lovely chat with the lady on duty in one of the shops (I forget which one) who I overheard talking about Jane Eyre with the previous customer - I told her there was an excellent adaptation on R4 and said if you liked that then you'd love Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. R4 and R4 Extra (my staple listening though currently I have Swing Easy by Frank Sinatra on at the moment - I adore Frank and it has one of my all time fave songs which John Waters uses on his soundtrack for Pecker - though that version is by Billy Williams) are full of victorian era fiction at the moment - there was also a wonderful adaptation of Who Killed Zebedee by Wilkie Collins and my appetite for all things victorian era shows no sign of diminishing anytime soon.

Just as well really - though I did also read a modern fiction book this weekend and it was one of those wonderful books that completely absorb you and that you want to tell everyone about - it was The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer (2014 Borough Press) and what a beautifully written heart rending, sad but gorgeous book. It is narrated by Matthew whose brother Simon dies when they were both young - that's no spoiler by the way as that is stated explicitly at the beginning, though how and how it affects Matthew and his family is only revealed throughout the book. It's about loss, mental illness, family relationships, the relationship between creativity and health and I urge every one of you reading this to read it if you haven't already. When I bought it in the charity shop the lady on the till said she'd just read it and I would need tissues and she was right.

And aside from the sadness of the story itself it also includes these bits which I'm going to quote because they really resonated for me:

'Mental illness turns people inwards. That's what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb cease to exist'. p277

...'See if the memories you have are the ones you expect. Or if they are fragments, dislocated moments, a small here, a feeling there. The unlikeliest conversations and places. We don't choose what we keep - not at that age. Not ever really.' p281

...This is how we piece together our past. We do it like a jigsaw puzzle, where there are missing pieces. But so long as we have enough of the pieces, we can know what belongs in the gaps'. p 281

Memory and tradition are something I'm often thinking about - partly because I am so interested in the past and how it continues to have an impact on the present but also how it becomes distorted and confused and half forgotten and half remembered. I am interested in memory in the way people use and share memories of dead loved ones but also in the way traditions and memories become communal.

With it being St Patricks Day and the hundredth anniversary of the Easter Rising memory, tradition and commemoration have all been in the media as topics. Start The Week on R4 was devoted to it on Monday and David Reiff talked very interestingly about how traditions are not so much about the past itself but more about the presents rewriting of the past and how history is really a collective memory that is constantly being rewritten to suit different purposes of the present. I wonder how it suits our purposes as a society to think of the Victorian era as particularly mirthless and prim...

I spent the early part of this week at the two college campuses - spent the morning at Vernon St in the darkroom mixing cyanotype solution and painting different sized and coloured paper - trying pink, yellow as well as my usual grey and red this time to see what kind of a colour effect it gives and I was chatting about techniques and how traditional black and white photo printing doesn't make my heart sing at all. The ability of something to make my heart sing is the measure by which I decide how much I want to do something.

I can do it but I find it very difficult and frustrating as it involves a lot of counting and being precise - I like being as precise as you can be with words but not with numbers and processes. Part of the reason I love cyanotyping and anthotyping so much is that you don't have to be very precise (solution making aside and that is a comparatively simple weighing and then measuring against a mark on a jug really) at all and that it is quite a forgiving process.But my dislike of this makes me feel a bit of a dunce and incompetent but it was suggested that it's because traditional black and white photo printing is a technical process and I am an experimental as opposed to technical person - which makes me feel much better about my technical shortcomings. I think I'd get more proficient if we had a darkroom at home but we don't at the moment and aren't likely to for a long while yet. If I was at home I could put the radio on and talk myself through the process and not worry about being overheard or interrupted.

The afternoon was spent in the digital print room and as I'd been poorly and so had to cancel my previous appointment I had two months worth of printing to do - so 140 prints in total - not all on tracing paper, some on fleshy type paper which I'm really chuffed with. The paper has a texture that's a bit skinlike when you hold it up to the light. But I need to get some more plastic punched pockets before I can sort them out into folders - there are some of our trip to Morecambe, some of my experiments with overlaid images on a light table, some taken with fish eye lens, some taken a refracting fly like eye lens in front of the camera, some of objects taken in my mini studio and all 140 of them need sorting....that can be a job for next week I think.

As I'm writing this on a Thursday afternoon - it's really the best part of two weeks worth of college-ness....and as yet the post it note for next week is completely blank so I'd best stop wittering there or else I'll have disrupted my schedule for next week as well...and here's to poorliness being much diminished. 

MA-Ness Term 2 Week 7 - Cyanotyping Rescue, Dissecting a Heart, Making Stuff Out of Cast Offs Prevarication and Words....

this weeks post it note - along with papers I'm trying to work on but am actually putting off looking at, the most magnificent gift of an old coverless book from one of my fellow MA-ers who rescued it from a skip, some paint, and a bookmark made out of some acetate leftover with some skeleton stickers and my photocopying experiments using multiple copies of acetate negatives overlaid and reinverted on the photocopier.

overdone cyanotype in the wash - think I left it in the sun too long, got distracted with my time keeping...

and in the wash again after a rescue with a bit of a soak in a bleach solution, not brilliant but slightly better as in you can at least see some of the image on it - an image of the subscription graves down the side of the chapel at St George's Field 

lumen prints in progress resting on the towel rail in the bathroom as that gets the best sun first thing in the morning - using  very old Agfa Brovira paper both gloss and matte given to me by friends, not sure how old it is except it is at least 30, maybe even 40 years old. Those on the bigger pieces of matte paper worked better than those on the smaller gloss paper  

having fun at Thackray Medical Museum at their Anti Valentine's Event - I was living my wannabe Viktor Frankenstein fantasies by dissecting a sheeps heart, I could do this as a) it had already been taken from the sheeps body by a butcher b) I had gloves on c) it didn't smell and wasn't significantly decomposed d) it wasn't given to me with a face and e) I wasn't expected to kill it.  I have nothing but awe/admiration and a massive feeling of eeww and revulsion at the 18th and 19th century anatomists who did this without latex between them and their subject and without the benefit of refrigeration either, I also cannot cannot help but admire and feel revulsed by their ability to go against the perceived moral teaching of their age ie stealing bodies, preventing lawful burial, etc....
Photo taken by my ever supportive husband

end result of one of the lumens - need to try and fix it with uv resistant gloss spray and see if that works but as the spray is potentially toxic am going to keep it in the dark and wait until it is a little bit warmer and spray it outside, and in the meantime have scanned it and taken a digital photograph of it and boosted the levels digitally to get more of a contrast.

Lots of pictures in this weeks post - back to its usual Monday posting now anniversary related gallivanting has ended. As you can see from the above pics I've been up to heart dissecting for Valentines Day, lumen printing and cyanotyping over the last couple of days and it's somewhat ironic that this post is so full of pictures as what I'd actually been mostly thinking about last week was words.

Last Friday's seminar was given over entirely to words, and we were set tasks like writing about our work without using the words we usually use. For me this meant phrases like 'being inspired death culture in general and victorian death culture in particular were out as were practically descriptive phrases like 'analogue photographic processes' or 'gothic photographic artist'.

I found it quite difficult and my friends description of me as an historian is making me think even more about what it is I actually do and what it is I am most interested in - not just out of navel gazing reasons but also out of possible phd applications. Anyway what I came up with was:

Eclectic re-image-ing of years gone by, hoping to evoke in the reader/viewer a wish to accompany me on my journey ferreting out the stories of the past that run alongside the present.

Distortion, fading, fixing fading memories, writing up the contrast

Am I really a writer? I'm definitely a reader.

Feelings/Fears of not being taken seriously if I call myself a writer as well or am I actually a historian?

Re-enactments of personal/impersonal histories

Words spoken and forgotten, details lost/blurred but feelings remain extant.

Narrative

Are you sitting comfortably?    
Then I'll begin.


I found it really interesting to listen to other peoples descriptions of their work and quite scarey having to read what I'd written out after hearing the eloquence of the others in the seminar as well as very thought provoking to think about questions like 'who do you write for?' and 'do you show courtesy to your audience?'. I use this blog as my research journal so it is both a record of what I've been up to and so a document for assessment for the research journal assessment part of the course but I make it public so it is also a broadcast platform. A broadcast platform for me to in some ways brag about what I've been up to - eg heart dissection as well as to question/record what's going on coursewise and what I'm thinking about....am back to the navel gazing point except at least it is navel gazing with an end in sight (ie a Masters qualification) as opposed to just navel gazing...hopefully.

The conversation turned also to why we do the work we do in the first place and questions like - is it important if people like it or not, does it matter if it is understood, is it automatically a bad thing to be misunderstood or misrepresented? What happens in the space between the image maker and the receiver? And my first thoughts are - yes it is important if people like it partly from an ego stroking point of view, partly from a practical point of view as in people aren't likely to hand over cash/time for something they don't like or at the very least appreciate in some way, and I don't like being misunderstood or misrepresented....though in some ways you might never know if this is happening and in others it's all too evident but you might not be able to do anything about it.

Hmm as ever lots of food for thought - as were the opening exercises in which we had to write our signatures in different ways but only after swapping pens with the person next to us. I went from using a wooden pencil to using a rollerball type pen. Until I had to loan my pencil to the person sitting next to me I hadn't realised how much I was enjoying the feel of its wooden-ness as opposed to the plastic casing of the rollerball pen. We had to sign our names using the hand we don't normally write with - I am lefthanded and my righthanded signature wasn't so a signature as a squiggle seemingly made during an earthquake. It went very small and not making much of an indent on the page when I was trying to disappear and quite bold and flowery when I was trying to be a celebrity. I did suffer somewhat from 'blank page anxiety' - which is the same anxiety I feel when starting a new notebook or trying to decide which notebook to use for which purpose. Choosing a new diary/journal is something that always takes me an age - currently using one I bought from John Rylands Library which looks like an old fashioned library card, but I haven't written in it since December 30th 2015. It's on my list of things to do update though...and when I do write in it it will be in black ink - from one of those disposable fountain pens. I've written my diary using one of those for a long time now and whilst I don't like the throwaway nature of them I find they suit my lefthandedness best.

The eagle eyed amongst you might have noticed some of my reusing rather than just throwing away tendencies by my making of a bookmark using some leftover acetate from making a cyanotype negative and some stickers in the top image on this post.

Along with lots of thinking about words I'm also thinking a lot about opposites and how they can't exist without one another - negative/positive, absence/presence,permanence/impermanence and how it is the spaces and gaps between words that help them make sense, without them it would just be a constant stream of letters. 

What else? well chuffed with some of the film pics I took in Morecambe so now looking over them deciding which ones I want to print/get printed, happily playing on the photocopiers at college with overlaying negative copies, acetates and copies of copies and watching how images degrade and evolve, also having lots of fun looking at and re-watching films like the 1935 Hitchcock directed version of The 39 Steps, Young Frankenstein - the Putting On The Ritz dance scene with the Creature is one of my all times faves and snuggling up with Mapp who is being very snuggly at the moment and lovely company when you're watching such beautiful monochrome goodness.

I also spent a very chilly hour in the garage aka pop up meth lab yesterday afternoon developing some black and white 120 film I took on an Ensign Full Vue from the 1950's back when St George's Field was partially snow covered in January. There isn't much room so it's just as well that me and Mr Pops get on so well as we quite often had to swap places - I was mostly in charge of the thermometer and mixing the chemicals and getting them to the right temperature, pouring them in and agitating the tank, he was in charge of threading the film onto the spool (something I find fiendishly difficult unless I can begin to spool it in/on in the light - though I have managed it in the complete dark on occasion, I find that easier than sweating it out using a darkbag) and fetching a big water carrier. And it seems to have worked - as in there are very definitely images on the film and I just need to scan them in - which is my next task, not that I'm putting off working on my abstract submission....oh no....not that the thought of it being rejected or accepted is giving me pause....

 

 

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.