PhDNess Part 3 - Slightly Less At Sea-Ness Part 2, Taking Pictures, Doing, Thinking, Reading...

Ice Skulls - plan to experiment with using twice boiled water, de-ionised water in attempt to make clear-er skulls - then to try make them using food colouring or home made ink or bits of site detritus with aim of filming or photographing their melting  

Mapp unimpressed with my experiments and attempts to see how long it takes them to melt

attempts to transfer colour from leaves, flowers onto paper and felt with aim of making some kind of eco-prints 

this weeks notes - am loving my day of the dead notepad

Been a busy few days and going to be busy over the next few days too - hence my writing this on a Sunday - a time when I would normally be lying on the sofa watching reruns of lovely proper 70's Columbo ('just one more thing...') whilst sipping tea.

It's been a week of reading Grayson Perry's very marvellous 'Playing to the Gallery', mulling over the meaning of anniversaries, taking some medium format photos in St George's Field using my lovely Lubitel twin lens camera, listening to podcasts about Mary Elizabeth Braddon and finishing Aurora Floyd, looking up recipes for home made ink, researching eco print techniques, experimenting with making ice skulls using a silicon mould and thinking about Victorian light.

I find Grayson Perry's work wonderful and intriguing to look at, I really enjoyed his Reith Lectures (almost as much as I enjoyed Hilary Mantels) but until now I hadn't read anything by him - other than his and Alan Measles twitter feed. Playing To The Gallery (2014) is wonderful - accessible, thought provoking, funny, and a lovely mix of text and drawn image/cartoon. Wonderful stuff.

Anniversaries can be happy or sad occasions - one of the ways I'm thinking of developing my work is by looking at the dates on the tombstones I photograph, and then either make more work using it on the anniversary of that date or going back to it to make more work on the anniversary of that date. I need to do some more research into why/how the associations of wedding anniversaries like paper, iron etc came about, and why we celebrate big numbers in particular eg centenaries and the like. I suppose part of their appeal is the fact that they are a fixed feast in the midst of uncertainty.

I've been taking more pictures in St George's Field - this time using my lovely secondhand Lubitel twin lens camera - since I got bifocal glasses using cameras like this (with a viewfinder at the top of the camera rather than the back of it) has become easier as I just have to move my head to get the camera in focus and then the view as opposed to having to switch between two pairs of glasses, I have taken 8 pictures on the roll so far so there'll have to be a few more days of good weather for me to finish it - or I could take it out with a tripod if the light is low and long exposures were needed.

I don't have a smartphone (I have a PAYG phone that has a camera and a radio on it but nothing more fancy than that) so the world of apps and podcasts unless you can access them from a PC or a laptop are a bit of mystery to me. But whilst I was working and reading last week I caught up with a few by the Victorian Scribbler and the Bonnets At Dawn people and loved them. They were about Mary Elizabeth Braddon (I didn't know she was such a keen hunter but was pleased also to learn she loved strong tea and split her working week into 4 days writing - she wrote until her death in 1914 - she was a long lived Victorian and two days hunting - with presumably a day for church going) or books by her or about 19th century novelists in general and were good to have on in the background whilst I was working. Braddon remains one of my very favourite writers - she writes such rattling good yarns with strong female characters (to a point - one of my criticisms of her work is that they tend to fade away at the end of the novels) plus for me it is very interesting to read stories that were written and set in the 19th century as opposed to just set in them.

I took part in a read along of Aurora Floyd (1863) twitter based experiment organised by Courtney Floyd in which we read Aurora Floyd in monthly installments of 3 chapters - the same as when it was first published in Temple Bar Magazine. I found it very difficult to stop at the end of the alloted 3 chapters at first and made a note in my diary as to when I could read the next installment. But over the summer I kind of lost where we were up to and got distracted - with such a big gap (and various life events) I found I had to reread previous chapters as I had forgotten key plot details and then when I did get back into it again - I read it to the end. I'm not too much ahead of the curve as it would have ended next month as it has 36 chapters in total. Plus I wasn't the only participant who read ahead - one participant finished it in the summer, one in the spring almost as soon as we started it as he 'couldn't put it down'. It made me wonder if it was accompanied by a 'story so far' type introductory paragraph but apparently it wasn't so I'm guessing Victorians had better memories or kept previous copies of the magazine close so they could catch up if need be. 

I enjoyed it but as not as much as Lady Audley's Secret but am not sure how much of that is down to the story itself or the way I read it. I devoured Lady Audley's Secret over a few days and so it was a concentrated hit of Victorian loveliness (if you count a tale of bigamy, arson, attempted murder, the status of women as lovely that is) and so I found my experience of Aurora Floyd gappy in comparison - though the opening chapters are wonderfully gripping - it was very hard to put it down. Hmm as ever food for thought re method of consumption and what effect it has on the experience of the novel as opposed to the novel itself.

Sometimes while I'm working (the research and reading type of working - when I'm taking or making photographs then it's the ambient noise of wherever I am taking or making images) I put music on - but it has to be music without words or singing or else I get distracted and want to sing along. I can listen to people talking though - I find the sound of voices and sound radio quite comforting as it makes me feel less alone I think. Radio 4 was a habit I got into when I first left home but I have been listening to Radio 4 Extra recently as it is less depressing and stressful to listen to than Radio 4 with its regular news programmes. The news at the moment is just so unrelentingly grim that I don't want to listen to it anymore. I get my news from the internet these days instead - it's still painful but it's much less awful that way.

One of the things I've been experimenting with over the last few days is making skulls out of ice using a skull mould my ever lovely and supportive husband bought me off the tinternet - I've been inspired by the work of Carol Sowden and Mel Dewey who were on the year below me MA-wise. I'd like to take time lapse pictures of them melting and also to try putting things in the ice - either food colouring or home made ink (I've been looking up recipes) or fallen petals/leaves that I have collected. So far I've not had much luck making clear ice - the tinternet advises using cooled twice boiled water and I've gotten clearer ice that way but it's still bubbly. I've tried de-ionised water today to see if that makes a difference - I have no idea what de-ionised means but that along with the reading I've been doing about mordants (what a wonderful sounding word) and eco printing methods means that I might end up learning a bit more about what de-ionised means and other basic chemical stuff.

I'm still thinking about Victorian light - in terms of the methods that were available in the Victorian period, and what effect the kind of light available to you had on the way you saw and did things. I'm also thinking along the lines of how to light pieces of work using Victorian methods. As ever lots of food for thought and lots of experimenting to do...along with lots of reading. I am really going to have to start reading more theory that I do/have done so far......Foucault here I come.....but I am also looking forward to working on this with my tutor and hoping that she can provide some useful insights and pointers.

MA-Ness Term3 Week 6 Power of Words, Taking Pictures, Economy of Film, Undercliffe and Competitions....

this weeks post it note, a list and end of a roll of developed film I'll use as a bookmark

I'm writing this on the evening of Bank Holiday Monday as I don't want to leave it any longer plus as I had a really long lie in it still feels like early afternoon to me but this might be a slightly shorter post than usual or I might ramble on like I usually do - who knows....

The big capitals in pink on the post it note:

NARRATIVE

STORY TELLING

AGENCY

AUTHENTICITY 

are there because they are increasingly cropping up in discussions at college and whilst I am fairly sure I understand what they mean in an everyday way I'm not so sure I  fully understand them when they are used in an art related conversation so part of my work this week is to investigate them in that context and see if I can come to a better and more comfortable understanding of them. But the use of language around art in turn makes me think of the bit of the Alan Moore interview I saw the other week in which he talked about the relationship between words and magic and how words are also spells and also the conversation between John Waters and Bruce Haines in Art A Sex Book (|Thames and Hudson USA 2003) in which (my beloved) John Waters says:

'the art world is a secret club with a secret language. What business doesn't have a secret language?..People learn the language if they are interested enough....I like elitism: it's part of the fun of the contemporary artworld - having to learn enough so that you can come into the club and understand it'.

And whilst I understand and to a certain degree agree with this it also makes me slightly uncomfortable as I think it then makes art more inaccessible than it already is. My struggle with this is something that been ongoing since the start of the course (and as we come towards the end of the third term I'm increasingly thinking about what I have learnt and how my work has changed since I started the course back in September) and part of me is also thinking if that might be a good starting point for my dissertation...Other things I'm thinking about are the differences between film and digital - I LOVE my film cameras and to paraphrase Charlton Heston (though he was talking about something unpleasant) you will prise my film cameras out of my cold dead hands I love the faff and ritual of film - as well as the end result but I am increasingly using my lo-mo 3.2 mega pixel camera phone which can just about zoom in but not by very much and it doesn't have a flash or anything fancy on it at all. Unlike the camera on my husbands smart phone which is very fancy indeed and takes lovely pictures.

I am enjoying the phones lightness to carry as well as its image capturing limitations plus it is virtually free to use compared to my film camera (though in order to do a truly comparable comparison I'd have to work out how much it costs per charge and how much per transfer of images from its micro sd card to the main computer) but in terms of actual cash outlay the 93 (!!!!) pictures I took on my way home last week of patterns in the decay of the stonework which caught my eye were effectively free when the same amount of pictures taken on my beloved Minolta 7000 would have meant 2 rolls of 36 and a roll of 24 35mm films and the cost of their development...Mmm.....but the film pictures I did take of Undercliffe Cemetery do look so much lovelier - there's a depth to them that is preferable. Anyway it took me a long time to get a phone with a camera on it and I am beginning to love using it. 

I did some more cyanotype prep this week - and I got to watch the magical potentially poisonous solution being mixed too which was very exciting. One day I will have my own darkroom in which I'll be able to do the same but for now I will continue to enjoy the advantages of the college darkroom, anyway this week I prepped red, grey and cream paper and I hope the red paper in particular comes out a lovely purpley colour when exposed to sunlight. I am reading The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins at the moment and it is wonderful. Published in 1860 it was the first of the victorian sensation novels and there is brief mention of 'sun pictures' being made in it - the uncle wants all of his collection of drawings and coins taken. Part of me is wondering exactly what kind of sun pictures they were - were they cyanotypes? I shall have to research my photographic processes history to see what is most likely they would have been using...

I've still been struggling with energy levels though - think the lurgy I had took more out of me than I realised really as I was really flagging during the week - so much so I didn't go to see the Susan Sontag documentary at the Hyde Park and it takes a lot for me not to go to the pictures (especially at the Hyde Park as it is one of my all time favourite places to go) but I was just too tired plus I checked online and I can watch it there - I want to see it as part of me is hoping that if I see the documentary they'll be less for me to read of the pile of books next to my desk from the college library which I keep renewing but don't get any nearer to finishing and in some cases starting....

But aside from The Woman In White which I am absolutely loving I am also absolutely loving Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes which is just gorgeous - sad, thoughtful, thought provoking, just really wonderful writing and his descriptions of photographs and the memories they contain or rather fail to is still percolating through my brain - it makes me think of the way I look at old family photographs, photographs of times I have no direct experience or memory of, and in turn it then makes me think of how much people take photographs today - the constant clicking (albeit electronically) of shutters and what happens to those images? Because to me photograph doesn't just mean image - it means a physical format of some kind, a print. Do any of the images destined for Twitter or Facebook ever get printed out? Ever made into a physical thing that doesn't just sit on a timeline and server? 

I was also reminded this week of the potential differences between how I see my work and how others may see it - I took pictures on a pinhole camera (on 35mm film)  and showed the scanned negative of one of my results to a college professional. I'm not that keen on the picture (it's a 2 second exposure of Whitby Abbey) but she loved it and thought it was really good. Alas I did not take it on 26th April which was World Pinhole Camera Day so I didn't upload that one to the site but the one I took in the pub which you can see here which I did take on the Sunday. 

I have also entered one of my pics in the Museum of the Year Photography Exhibition - details here, I doubt very much I'll win as the pictures I took when I was at the wonderful Whitworth were more for my own personal research on my trusty lo-mo camera phone but you never know....

I used my big Fuji instant camera and my Minolta when I went to Undercliffe Cemetery on Wednesday for a tour and launch of the latest photographic book by Mark Davis - it was lovely pootling about the cemetery at night taking pictures in the twilight whilst hearing a bit about its history. I especially enjoyed using my instant camera:

    

This week is hopefully going to consist of energy levels starting to feel fully back to normal as well as lots of printing, a studio tour, a meeting about potential plans for Light Night and a pop up cinema. it's exciting having lots on and to think about but there is also part of me that feels a bit tired just looking at my diary for this week.....

MA-Ness Term 3 Week 5 Lurgy, Walking and Talking, Cathedrals and Scribbling Notes On Bits Of Paper

this weeks post it notes and extra bit of paper hurriedly scribbled on downstairs whilst watching telly

This last week feels like it has been a bit disjointed too and I feel like I've not got much done - this is partly thanks to the resurgence of lurgy though and when I check my diary and the notes I've made I realise that I did manage to do most though not all of the things I had scheduled - I had an interesting tutorial with my personal tutor, a good albeit brief meeting with my fellow MA-ers that I'm collaborating with on a project for the Love Arts Festival in October, a brief catch up with one of my mentors from the Place and Memory Project and you can read about her and her work here, a very wonderful evening listening to Stewart Lee who never fails to make me laugh - and the phrase 'sugary renaissance death mask'  will stay with me for some time....a walk and talk I researched and delivered for Buns and Roses WI and a really interesting day at college listening to Morgan Quaintance talking about his work.

So all in all not bad but sadly due to lurgy resurgence I missed a feminist conversation that I'd been very much looking forward to and a friends birthday barbecue that I'd also been looking forward to and a couple of WI meetings but I realised that I needed rest more and also that it wouldn't be fair to go somewhere and be sneezing over everyone and potentially passing on lurgy.

So rationally although I feel like I'm falling behind with stuff - I'm not in reality, it just feels like it. Hopefully this week which although is busy will end with me feeling like I'm more on top of stuff again and if I can keep ticking things off my to do list that's all to the good.

So after running round like a blue arsed fly for the last couple of weeks I completely rested this weekend and I spent it either dozing or watching Hitchcock wonderfulness on BBC2 - first up was a programme featuring clips of him talking about his work as well as critics analysing it and clips. He talked of how he was the cinema equivalent of a switchback railway operator which is a rollercoaster in todays modern parlance and how films were better in some ways in the silent days and how he preferred making films then but it always a balance of shock and tension - for instance if you show a bomb going off under a table in a meeting room full of people then it's a shock - but if you show the audience beforehand a picture of the bomb under the table with the timer ticking away then you have tension too.

I realised then that so many of his films have long purely visual sequences with hardly any dialogue - he described noise in films needing to be absolutely necessary and be part of the story as otherwise they are just a series of photographs with noise. Though of course the other marvellous thing about so many of Hitchcock's film are the wonderful scores by Bernard Hermann. The films shown were Rope - one of my favourites as I love both James Stewart and Farley Granger and just love the flirting between the James Stewart character and the housekeeper played so wonderfully by Edith Evanson. And that was followed by a programme about James Mason which sadly I nodded off through but I was awake enough to see him being calmly vicious in North By Northwest afterwards. I adore James Mason...his voice is just beyond wonderful.

I think Rope is possibly one of my favourite Hitchcock films - with Psycho and Strangers On A Train, The Lady Vanishes and the 39 Steps a very close second and of course Vertigo too and Rear Window and The Lodger....as you can probably tell I am a bit of a Hitchcock fan.....

The other programme I watched which made me think a lot was Grayson Perry's Dream House shown on Channel 4 last night - his homage to the fictional (but many parallels with his own life) Julie from Essex who was married twice, became a social worker and died when run over by a pizza delivery person on a moped.

 This was a mix of visual joy - the tiles and textual representations of Julie were wonderful as was the footage of Grayson working on them and his description of himself as a not very exact artist struggling with the fact that for this project he had to be exact as the 20,000 tiles had to fit together perfectly and also it was lovely to see a programme about an art project which didn't wrap itself up in jargon and so was easily accessible - his leading of women also called Julie on a tour round Essex before ending up at her Taj Mahal was both interesting and moving.

I was especially struck by the language he used to describe the work  eg temple, altar, ceremonial, bless - words you'd more usually find in a religious context. As someone who was brought up in a strict catholic setting but who now no longer believes or observes (and hasn't done for the bulk of my life) I'm always struck by how prominent religion still is in my thoughts - even if that is more its absence in my everyday life. And when I hear language more usually associated with religion it stands out for me. I'm currently working on some pictures featuring some stone carved angels from the 19th century - I wonder if someone who doesn't know me and my atheist beliefs were to look at them and think I was being venerative of them as actual angels....mmm as ever much food for thought. As ever the definition of art is the intention behind it - not just the end product....

The other mention of religion I heard was on R4 when various people including Grayson Perry and the drummer from Radiohead were invited to go into a soundproof chamber and record their thoughts. The drummer talked about the peace and quiet of the chamber and how it reminded him of cathedrals and churches where the space appears to have absorbed some of the visitors attempts to both absorb and attain peace and quiet.  This in turn made me think about my working practices and how they might change if I put music on instead of the radio whilst I worked. Think I've got some experimenting to do there - I normally have R4 on all the time but it would be no great loss if I switched off You and Yours in fact it would probably be a bonus and put some music on instead.  

Food for thought was the order of the day when we treated to a talk by Morgan Quaintance - he talked about his current preoccupations and it was both interesting and thought provoking - partly from a more artists to look up and read about kind of way, book suggestions and again the idea of a white gallery space being used as a place to think as well as look at art as it's one of the few places (corporate sponsorship aside) where we are not assailed by advertising (same can be said of a church too I suppose) and also the predominantly carribean mourning practice of nine nights (need to do some more research into this) but it was a delight to hear an artist Billy Childish being described as 'Tracey Emin's boyfriend (as so often it is women who are successful in their own right being described as .....'s girlfriend) but it was also a shame to hear of women artists still being asked questions as to whether or not having children has changed their practice. Not that it shouldn't or that we should be surprised if it does but why does it seem to be only women artists asked questions with regard to their reproductive status - I wouldn't mind if men were asked the same or treated in the same way as women are with regard to wombs.

What else? well I spent the bulk of the week I wasn't coughing and spluttering preparing the Photo Walk and Talk I delivered for Buns and Roses WI on Thursday. I put together the slides last Sunday in somewhat of a hurry as the power supply is still not resolved though thankfully we have had less powercuts since last week - I am waiting to hear from the power company as to when it's going to be fixed properly though. The slides were quite basic - an image of part of mine and my husbands film camera collection, and then examples of my work and then I spent the bulk of my time either researching less salubrious bits of Leeds history (mostly on a college computer as that was less subject to powercuts and you cannot access facebook during lesson time so less distraction - in fact since then I've made a conscious decision to switch social media (aside from email) off whilst working and so have got a bit more done) and then writing up my notes. I wrote a 10 minute introduction which I tested on my cats and husband before I let it loose on my fellow WI-ers.

I also included suggestions as to how to broaden your picture taking by either looking up or down or changing the level at which you take pictures - dropping to your knees often produces a much more interesting angle if you ask me...and then I led them on a tour round Leeds with bits of history along the way - a bit about the cholera epidemics in Leeds in the 19th centuries, the growth of cemeteries,  victorian mourning practices, the medieval bits of Leeds and last but not least the story of Mary Bateman the Yorkshire With who was executed in York in 1809 for murder (it seems one too many of her love potions contained poison and alas her fortune telling chicken couldn't save her...) her body was dissected in Leeds and her corpse flayed and the skin was tanned and cut up and sold as charms to ward off evil spirits. Her partial skeletal remains are on view in Thackray Medical Museum today.

I was very nervous re doing the talk but the bulk of my fears proved unfounded as the electrics worked fine and there was no problem getting the projector to work, and the timings of the walk worked out okay too and we were back at the beginning just as the light was starting to fade slightly but still good enough to take pics without flash by. I took them on a circular tour pointing out where the biggest mourning house in Leeds Forsters had premises on Lower Briggate, Trinity Church, Leeds Library, Kirkgate and back to the Cosmopolitan Hotel.

I wish I could have enjoyed it more though and hadn't been quite so anxious. I hardly took any pics myself - though I more than made up for that on the way home from college by taking pics of all sorts of naturally occurring surface patterns on the worn stones that line the the route home. Not sure what if anything I'll do with them yet but I enjoyed taking them on my very lo-mo camera phone. I'm increasingly enjoying restricting what I use - eg when we went to Whitby for the goth festival I took my 35mm slr and my 50mm lens and left all the other lenses behind as I wanted to a)travel light and b) make the most of what I had and a 50mm is as good as nay place to start as it's fairly good in most circumstances...

The other thing on my mind at the moment is what to pick as a dissertation topic - I might pick John Waters way of working and see what I can learn from him (he is very disciplined) and I'm also very much enjoying the book he wrote with Bruce Hainley  called Art A Sex Book and maybe a response to that too... the dissertation needs to be a piece of reflexive writing underpinned with theorists and context of practice and my tutor made the useful and practical suggestion of my mind mapping each of the possibilities and see which appeals to me the most.

I've got til December to hand it in but I'd like to get as much forethought as possible done on it so it'll be easier writing it up.....there is still a huge pile of books sitting to the right of me reminding me that I haven't read them yet and I really must get them finished and in some cases started soon, just getting them renewed at the college library each month isn't helping get them read....

There was also talk of the word curate and curatorial and how that has become both more commonplace but has it also become cheapened as a result - apparently Stanford University have banned its use but that seems a tad harsh, I'm not sure what my thoughts on it are, I'm not a fan of jargon or of words somehow becoming verbs eg 'let's workshop that idea' which makes me want to respond 'okay, let's angle grind your face then' but that's possibly an extreme reaction but I do totes hate text speak ;-) and I find myself using emoticons all the time......

I wonder if you can use them in the dissertation......

Right next thing to do is make up list of possible dissertation subjects and add Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure to list of films I've seen on dvd this year - it really made me smile and I don't want to forget that and by writing it down hopefully I won't. 

  

Ma-Ness Week 11 Printing, Cyanotyping, Thinking and Stuff

Not such a snappy title this week but a slightly fuller post it note

this weeks post it note on background of openend up envelope that I used to stop the desk getting marked when I was experimenting with paint mourning borders around prints.

This week I have been doing a lot of printing - images, this blog, screenshots of stuff I'm working on, and have just taken advantage of this lovely spring sunshine by doing some cyanotypes too - sadly neither of the lumen prints I tried have worked particularly well (but one day I will succeed at lumen prints!!) and presentation stuff for inclusion in my Practice and Personal Development Portfolio which needs handing in on Friday.

I've experimented with printing some of the same images on different types of surfaces - the cyanoptype format is one I am loving - both as a process as I love its unpredictable and proper old school nature,the inverting of the image on the computer and then printing it on acetate, discovering and creating new images when putting them away, but tracing paper is my favourite paper to print on digitally as it has a translucency to it that I find really appealing plus it is also the cheapest so it's easy to get a good idea of what an image will look like in a large scale format for comparative cheaps before you go for it sizewise or on really expensive paper.

Canvas is the surface I was really excited to try but was really disappointed with the results - I still like the images on it but as a chum said surface-wise it looks like the now mass produced prints you get in supermarkets and that's not the look I'm going for.

I've had less distractions and appointments this week and so have been able to concentrate more upon putting together my portfolio to hand in (PHEW!!!) - and it's been really interesting to look back over the last few weeks and the kind of work I've been making and how my approach to it both in terms of thinking about it and doing it has changed though part of me is still slightly angsty that I haven't been doing enough reading (though I did finish Count Arthur Strong's Memoirs which are brilliantly funny - I especially love his confusion re Robin Hood and Jack the Ripper and he posits that the painter Walter Sick might have been responsible for the killings in 1888 in Whitechapel...) but hopefully I shall get some more reading done over the easter vacation.

I keep thinking about dissertation topics and first of all I thought about the possibility of something about the use of human remains in contemporary fine artwork but as a chum pointed out that might mean having to at least mention Damien Hirst and he gets on my wick so I'd rather not so now I'm thinking more of the portrayal of death in photography - especially since a brief look round the Drawn By Light photography exhibition at the Media Museum yesterday morning led me to fall even more in love with the work of Harold Peach Robinson plus this would enable me to fit in some Barthes quotes nicely thereby fulfilling the theory requirement course-wise so this is looking more likely. It's a long time to dissertation hand in but I'd rather be ahead of myself than horribly behind and trying to do too many things at once....

I was at the Media Museum to hand in my entry for the Drawn By Light competition - I didn't think I would win but I am pleased in that I can now say I have had work on show at the Media Museum, mine was entry 49 and here is a pic of it awaiting being pinned up on the wall: mine is the one in the middle, if a photo could also convey smell you would also be able to smell the strong stench of piss and skunk that surrounded us at the top of the car park but I loved how mine and my husbands reflection looked in the mirror and so stopped and stooped to take a picture......

I might not have been doing much reading recently (aside from Count Arthur that is) but I have been doing a lot of looking and a lot of listening - looking wise I watched the film about Hockney that was on the BBC recently, and I loved it - there were a couple of bits that stood out for me when he was talking about photography - IIRC he said that a photo is taken in a split second and even if you only look at it for 4 seconds that is longer than it took to make and in some ways this is literally true but takes no account of the time it takes to set up the photograph, develop it, print it though I suppose in these virtually instantaneous digital days that is less of a concern than it used to be and Mr Hockney is much more technically advanced than I am - I bet he has a phone that does tinternet for instance, never mind instagram and what have you. I do have a digital camera and there is a camera on my phone which I use to take aide memoire type photos or when I'm trying to sneak taking an image....

The other thing he said was paintings take longer to make than it does to see them and again this is probably literally true and as I'm not a painter I'll take his word for it....he also said that cameras see surfaces but they don't see space and a fellow ma-er also quoted him as saying the view from a camera is 'the view from a paralysed cyclops for a split second' which is also referenced here which made me both chuckle and both kind of agree and disagree with. Again it is literally true I suppose but there have been lots of photographs which may well have been a fixed view of something but they in turn have me me change my view about something...but I am in danger of getting myself tied up in theoretical and philosophical knots here so I'll stop other than to say I do love Mr Hockney and I still have a postcard of his work that I bought as a teenager from the Whitworth many many moons ago 'We Two Boys Together Clinging'. It's quite battered now and smells slightly of the damp bedsit walls it's been blu-tacked to over the years but I still love it both as an object and as a painting.

I am an inveterate R4 listener and have been since I left home really I think initially it was because I was quite lonely and liked the sound of voices plus music radio tends to get on my nerves as they mostly don't play what I want to hear plus I would far rather hear John Humphries relate a tale of national woe than the false most likely drug induced bonhomie of a disc jockey first thing in the morning. Anyway I now can't remember the programmes I heard them in but these points stood out - there was an interview with Helen Sharmer (the astronaut) who was describing the docking with the space station and the relief on both sides of the airlock that it had worked and how that for her 'memories associated with emotion last the longest' and someone else said (but alas I cannot remember in what programme/context) that photography has been a major cultural change as it has changed the way we remember things, which has given me lots of food for thought - including is my love affair of (most) things victorian is because I can see photographs of the people of the time as opposed to paintings or drawings or writings?

Other food for thought this week has come from a chum sending me the link to this blog which is a fascinating and thought provoking read - and I am proud to say I am a morbidly curious person and would like to see more open-ness re human remains, burial sites etc - whilst still being as respectful as possible that is. And whilst I think he has a good point re the treatment of human remains as art in that it can be 'seriously weird or deviant' I would also argue that this isn't always the case plus when people have given their express permission for their remains to be used in such a way surely it is a way of carrying out their wishes.

The other blog post which I read this week but now can't find the link to was about the storing of digital information and what we are potentially losing as formats go out of fashion. The oldest camera I have got is a Kodak Vest Pocket from the 1920's which still works but I have a digital one from a few years ago which works on batteries and does take pictures but it is in effect useless as I can find no driver for it (and the only thing online I've been able to find for it are other people asking if anyone has any software for it - alas to no avail) and so I cannot take the pictures I've taken with it and it has no screen on the back. Though the very helpful and clever chap in the print room did say that MAcs have something called image capture (I am a pc using person and so unaware of what macs can and can't do - all I know is I find them unintuitive to use and had to get the chap in the library to come and show me how to get the mac I was using to print something..which he kindly did, he also had to fix the photocopier for me when the acetate I was copying onto jammed...) which may be able to get the images off it if we can find a cable to connect it with....

Unlike the latest lo-fi digital camera I bought last week - it was £6.99 and has a massive(!!!) 2.1 MEGA PIXEL capacity - it also comes complete with its own photoediting software and it also has a 1.5 inch preview screen and can hold up to 120 photos. It's aimed at children - well actually young girls who are into Monster High as it is emblazoned with logos and characters from it. I am looking forward to using it - if nothing else it should be a giggle.

What else - potential collaborations shaping up nicely, excited about going back to Media Museum for a proper in depth look round the exhibition and to finding out more about Mme Yevonde whose absolutely sumptuous and stunning colour images leapt out at me yesterday and made me go 'wow' as well as the lovely old black and white/sepia images by Harold Peach Robinson... and I wonder if the same gallery assistant will be on duty who saw me looking intently at one picture and said 'you're the gothic artist' from the Cultural Heritage event - it was very flattering to be remembered and we had a good but brief chat about our respective courses - she's doing an MA in Museum Studies and has just handed in her dissertation so fingers crossed both of us do okay in our respective assignments....

Other things learnt this week - cardboard stencils made from cereal packets (circle and coffin shapes) to paint cyanotype solution inside when prepping paper only work well once but then are no longer crisp around the edges so might need to get some made in plastic instead. PVA glue is going to be the way I hem my test fabric pieces - rolled hems are not for me and I am too heavy footed with a sewing machine, and I am so pleased with of my cyanotypes that I cannot bear to part with them so have taken photocopies of them to include in the portfolio to hand in instead.....I wonder what that says about me - I must point out it is not a reflection on the people who will be marking it and is entirely about my haptic possesiveness of objects.

Oh and brain knives - that is knives made for cutting fine slices of the brain so they can be microscopically examined are like very long very sharp palette knives...I got to hold one yesterday at a fascinating event at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery which looked at the way mental health and psychiatry was looked at around the time of the first world war. Fascinating.

MA-Ness Week 8 Cyanotyping, Trying To Get Ahead Of Myself, Watching Others, A Dry Wank and can't quite read/understand my own notes....

Last week I tried to get ahead of myself by writing this blog post on Sunday rather than my usual Monday and this week finds me doing it today partly in an attempt to get ahead of myself, partly to take advantage of the fact that I've had a college free day today as most of my fellow MA-ers are in Poland and partly to do something so that I don't feel my original plans of having a reading day have gone to waste (as aisde from Farcebook and an interview with Laibach I haven't read anything of note so far today) and also to do something to stop my impatience whilst waiting for my latest batch of cyanotypes to dry....

I'm also trying to work out what I meant by some of my notes - in particular what I meant by BAF Syndrome - if you have any idea then please let me know.....edited to add at 17.45 - BAF stands for Blue Arsed Fly as I have been running about like a blue arsed fly most of this week. Anyone who knows the origin of the phrase - please do tell me.

It's been a really busy week not helped by feeling under the weather and waylaid by appallingly bad stomach ache either but I feel I have got a few things done this week - namely got some printing done with the help of the chap deep down in the bowels of the college - I printed or rather had printed some 7 images that I'd taken (2 digital - one of me and my husband at the top of a car park in Manchester taken in January and one of the view out of the window of the Chapel in St George's Fields taken last summer when the university very kindly gave me access to it, and 5 on film - 3 on colour film at Temple Newsam taken just before xmas and two of the same film image of a bench in St Marys Churchyard one inverted and one normal taken last November.

It was interesting to see how the different printing methods each changed the way the same image looks - the inverted black and white digital images look okay on canvas but the colour ones of flowers look like any of the canvas prints you can now pick up for cheaps in Ikea or Wilkinsons (not that there is anything wrong with that but I want my images to stand out not blend in with commercially available homogenised ones) plus canvas is quite expensive to print on.

The ones on matt A4 paper again look okay but nothing special but the ones printed on tracing paper (which joy of joys is the cheapest to print on) look by far the best - they have an ethereal translucent quality to them which I love plus they will look good either just hanging or up against a window or a lightbox and I am now planning to rescan the original negatives of them so I can get them printed to AO size without losing any of the quality of the original image.

Think I will also have to try and retake/ remake some of them on 120 film aka medium format using my favourite camera - a Nettar Zeiss Ikon from 1956 which both looks fabulous and is a joy to use. Fingers crossed they will come out okay though...aah the unpredictable joy and difficulty of using film without that handy screen on the back of the camera reassuring you that yes it's working or immediately telling you no, it isn't so change your settings......

Which leads me nicely into the unpredictable joy of cyanotypes too - I prepared a lot of pieces of paper with solution earlier this week, including some more grey paper which I really like (see top image above which is printed on it) and another piece of tracing paper but alas I am a tad too heavy handed with that and have torn the corner slightly plus it is a bit of a bugger to work it as it is so flimsy and folds over on itself so easily, and some water colour paper, the offcuts of the paper I had my images printed onto in the college darkroom (I want to make full use of everything and waste as little as possible) and some newsprint which I won't be using for cyanotyping again as it doesn't hold the solution well enough.

I also experimented with different shapes on the surface of the paper (circles, squares) and am v pleased with the circular one - though part of me is thinking maybe I should have left it in the sun a little longer but it clouded over and I thought I saw a spot of rain on the window.....and of course it brightened up again whilst I was washing it but a chum has said it has an opening credits of Bagpuss quality about it, another has said it looks v victorian and another said 'they have a very errie quality-a bit like what might stay with you after waking up from a dream' which pleases me enormously, plus hopefully once they are dried and framed they will look even better. I have started saving the dying petals from the bunches of flowers I have to go in the frames and I intend to pick some site specific flowers too if possible.

So lessons learnt - different papers/printing surfaces make a massive difference, I need to curb my impatience, practice at drawing/painting a circle and not to lose sight of the fact that this is the best photographic fun I've had in ages and as much as I love the college darkroom I'm happier at home where I'm in as much control as I can be of the process - ie no-one except a cat walking past to look at what I'm doing and no-one to dry or drain anything else on top of what I'm trying to do. Plus I am loving it's haptic hands on physical interaction as opposed to just clicking a button on a machine - though to be fair that is involved too, either with the original image or transferring it onto acetate to then put on the cyanotype paper.

Plus as I said before cyanotyping is a victorian process in origin and it was popularised by a woman called Anna Atkins (details about her here) so it warms the cockles of my victorian era loving feminist heart. However the irony of a self proclaimed goth and lover of the darkness being dependant upon strong sunlight to create the images I want is not lost on me....but then aside from a love of gothic literature and lovely old black and white horror films and a fixation with graveyards I'm quite a crap goth really and even my hair isn't as black as it could be as it's a while since I dyed it and I haven't had chance to redye it and now I'm waiting til I get it cut or else I'll have to do it twice .....and it was a music subculture when I first came across it in my tender and impressionable teenage years and I am much much happier listening to lovely 1930's and 40's big band swing, or Frank Sinatra's greatest hits.......

But I am excited about seeing Laibach* in a few weeks and read with interest an interview they did for Louder Than War earlier this week (full interview here) (and I am writing this blog post whilst listening to Spectre and whilstling along v badly indeed..) and I was most struck by their response to the question about them being provocative:

'..We like conflicting situations, but we never provoked for the sake of provocation itself; we did it out of necessity, because by definition a work of art is no good if it doesn’t provoke – and that is a vital rule, valid in any political system anywhere.' 


and there is a lot of food for thought in that for me......not that I think I am brave enough to provoke....

 
As well as printing, personal tutorials and attending the last of the very informative Leeds In Your Lunch Hour lectures at Trinty Church by Dr Kevin Grady of Leeds Civic Trust I also attended the Feminist Art Event at Leeds Library yesterday which sadly due to stomach ache becoming intolerable I had to leave at lunchtime, but which featured entertaining and thought provoking presentations from Casey Orr whose portraits were a joy, Jo Hassall made me chuckle and think with her presentation which featured a hostess trolley and a scab picking finger ( I would kill for a hostess trolley)and the talk by Melanie Maddison about her feminist zines Shape and Situate and Colouring Outside The Lines was both enlightening and empowering. I bought copies of all her lovely zines and the Home Rules presentation by half of Bristow and Lloyd was also a joy  - but the morning was also beset by technical difficulties with the projection equipment and Kiff Bamford's talk about a photograph of a vulva by Henry Machionne as discussed by the french philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard left me completely cold. Partly because he read out his slide - admittedly it was in french but even so I can read and do not need someone to read things out for me - translate yes, but not read.

There was also mention of Derrida and (my beloved) Barthes which made me feel like it might not have been very accessible to folks who are not familiar with either of those I've just named, and also like it was bit of an exclusive club and I'm not sure how I feel about that except it makes me feel a bit uncomfortable,  even though thanks to my recent reading I have some understanding of the ideas and concepts and so am on the edges of that group. Is it being on the edge that bothers me? No because my discomfort is not about not being fully part of it but being fully part of it.

Which in turn makes me worry and think is it inevitable that we all become what we most fear and more than occasionally and possibly unfairly deride?....

And speaking of intellectual approaches, was chatting with a chum who is working on the last song for their third album (and who have also kindly provided me with a soundtrack for a piece of visual work I am hoping to start work on when the weather has improved a bit and so it won't be too horrible for my long suffering ever patient and lovely husband to lie down on the ground and pretend to be a corpse for me) and you can check out examples of their fabulous work here and how hard I am finding it approaching art from an intellectual angle as opposed to an immediate emotional response and how yes it does deepen understanding, change the way I look at things and think about them and think about creating them and what I am trying to achieve with them but how it also makes me think of my chum Jon who when watching a lacklustre phoned in performance from a band at a festival pronounced it ' a dry wank'.

And this is what I fear an intellectual response to artwork may become - a dry wank of a response trotting out standard philosophical approaches as opposed to something immediately heartfelt and visceral.

What else - earlier in the week I met the external examiner for the course who seems a thoroughly nice chap (and no I'm not just saying that because at some point he'll probably read it) and who gave me some useful reading recommendations and we also talked about the uses of flowers in memorials and how they differ from culture to culture - how they are mostly used to signify a death in the UK but how they are used as offerings in other cultures which them lead to a discussion about what we have left on graves and what we want left on our own. I once left a toblerone on my Nana's grave as she didn't like cut flowers (what use are they, you can't eat them) though she loved flowers and had a kitchen and garden full of them but she did love Toblerone so I left one of those on her grave instead. My husband said I'd made a tramps day....

I'm not sure what I would want left on mine.....what would you like left on yours?

I've been dared to put a picture of Peter Cushing in my next presentation which is easy as I've done that so far anyway but the sting in this tale is that it has to be a picture of Peter Cushing from At The Earth's Core which is not one of my favourites of his as he looks nowhere near as dashing in it as he does in The Curse Of Frankenstein. But never let it be said I don't rise to a challenge so will have to find one I like and one which will fit in context.....

I've been writing this for over 2 hours now and my prints are almost dry but not quite......I'm just too impatient.....

*I think Laibach are responsible for the most beautiful cover version EVER - namely their version of Across The Universe though I am also a huge fan of their more stompy dance music too - and just hearing the beginning of Tanz Mit makes me want to put on very big boots indeed....though my fave stompy big boots dance tune is still Lass Uns Tanzen by Scooter which I absolutely adore as it reminds me of dancing about in Whitby with good chums and also my lovely much missed friend Henry who translated the lyrics for me and they mean 'let's dance or fuck or both as we will all be dead tomorrow'. Fairly good advice there I think.

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MA-Ness Week 5 Anniversaries, Comfort of Ritual and Non Sticky Sticky Stuff

I've been busy these last few days - both in terms of doing and in terms of thinking plus it has been an emotional time too. A week last Saturday it was the moving and beautiful memorial service for my friend Henry Tickner who died just over a year ago. To say I miss him lots is an understatement - he was the only other person I know who liked black and white silent german films as much as me and his knowledge of classical music was (amongst my chums anyway) unequalled and I would have loved to have talked to him about this art and cultural studies malarkey as I'm sure he'd have provided both valuable insight and a useful sounding board. Plus we both loved scumming it at the Olympic Cafe opposite the Corn Exchange as their spam fritters are the best in Leeds (if not the only ones left in Leeds thanks to the rise of corporate crap coffee shops or hipster central places...)

Plus it was mine and my husbands 6th wedding anniversary and we have had a fantastic weekend away enjoying the wilds of Cleethorpes - lovely food in a french restaurant, long walks along the salt marshes watching the tankers in the Humber and wondering what it would be like on one of the Humber forts, playing the twopenny falls and I won a lolly, having our picture taken by a disembodied american sounding Van Gogh Studio Picture Booth and seeing a very good amateur production of The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde and of course visiting one of Cleethorpes victorian cemeteries (the one on Beacon Avenue) and last but not least having ice cream in the bitterly cold wind on the front....and of course taking lots of photographs and in an somewhat unusual departure for me in COLOUR as I wanted to capture midwinter bleak and thought that would be better done in colour and having had the pictures developed I can say it has.

But I've also been thinking about the comfort of ritual and why we do what we do when someone dies, and what the apparent social niceties are surrounding death and I am still working out how to incorporate this into my artwork in a coherent manner. As ever - lots of food for thought for me......

I also took part in the Cultural Heritage Show and Tell event at Leeds Museum and it was good practice for me to make a powerpoint presentation in front of (mostly) strangers but there was one friendly face from the MA course and my husband and chum Penny also came along to give me moral support - though the glass of wine beforehand also helped. It seemed to go down well as I got a couple of offers from people who would like to model for me as faux victorian widows or corpses and the offer of a perusal of a collection of condolence letters (albeit from the 1930's but am sure they will still be very interesting and it'll be interesting to see what habits and social norms from the victorian era were still in effect then) and the contact details for the chap in charge of the anatomical specimens at Leeds Medical School.....and also at the risk of sounding big headed my slides looked the best in terms of design and layout - but then as I was the only artist presenting it would have been a poor show if they hadn't really.

I said I'd been doing lots more doing - not least because we had to take some work into college last week for a 'silent crit' which is where the artist says nothing but listens to what others are saying about the work and the way we did it was to not make any response or explanation for at least 10 minutes. It was a bit nerve-wracking but also really interesting as it's amazing to hear what others see in your work which you don't and also to find out what others are up to and what their motivations are. Anyway my doing last week was mostly along these lines -

trimming up pictures and gluing them into a notebook somewhat self aggrandisingly covered with a reflection self portrait - reflections are a recurring motif in my work, as I don't like being in pictures or having my picture taken but feel much more comfortable taking them myself - ideally in a dirty window. 

But I also take lots of other reflection style photos too. I did some research into reflections and portraits and I must dig it out so I can refresh my memory of it. 

This week it's a socratic crit format - and I need to take in something else so I am going to take in my initial copies of some dead flower portraits I am working on, and they look like this at the moment:

What else do I need to cover from my badly written post it note....well I've been trying to get to grips with some Baudrillard and am still halfway through an introductory guide which is providing much food for thought and interest, and rereading the feedback for the two assignments I handed in before xmas which thankfully I got good marks for - a massive relief as it has been so long since I did anything academic and it was good to realise I was and am jumping the academic hoops correctly...so far that is. 

I also went on a gallery tour of Leeds Art Gallery which made me look anew at my favourite victorian paintings in the Ziff room - I need to learn to really look at paintings slowly and carefully and not just immediately think of how the artist made a piece of work as opposed to why and how the kind of art an artist makes may also depend upon such straightforward practicalities as how much the artist could afford for materials at the time.

I've also got a new found respect for Tracey Emin after looking at her film about her growing up in Margate and love of disco dancing and Jeremy Millar's self portrait of himself as a drowned washed up corpse. Fascinating thought provoking stuff. I am also really enjoying the work of Ian Breakwell and his book Seeing In The Dark featuring people's memories of cinemas is an absolute joy.

Also on my post it note are the phrases 'tangential discovery' and 'wank flick and a cold bath' and I have no idea what the latter of those pertains to, except it's making me chuckle. There's also a note about moral qualms - as in I would have no moral qualms about showing a chums human remains (this is of course with their full permission in advance) but what about the feelings of their relatives? should they be taken into account to? 

I am slightly changing the way I work - though still research and photography based and in muted almost b+w colour but as I am increasingly mindful that I have so much to do and little time in which to do it, I am trying to switch off social media whilst I'm working so I don't get distracted by it and it's mostly working as is my habit of getting up and getting washed and dressed straight away and then putting the computer on and not the other way round.....still not quite worked out how to fit in more exercise though and I really need to get back into a decent gym habit too but for the time being this week is going to consist of lots more reading, more sewing, more gluing, a tutorial with my personal tutor and some film watching.

And last but not least my fave grave from Cleethorpes in which a voice from the tomb no less exhorts us to examine our foundations which is more or less exactly what I'm doing....... 

edited to add - the phrase 'wank and a cold bath' was in response to my post on Farcebook (delieberate sp) in which I said I'd watched a Frank Langella version of Dracula (it's beautiful to look at in places but otherwise dreadful so don't bother unless you want to see vampire finding horses and a Dracula with v Billy Boufant hair) and a chum told me of how she'd sagged off school to see it a cinema that usually showed 'mucky films' and a couple of people in the queue had bags with green towels in them....my increasingly poor memory is getting to be a bit of a concern....