MA-Ness Week 12 or is it lucky 13 not sure anymore......

This blog has changed from me just wittering about whatever took my fancy (usually lovely oldy worldy postcards or Sooty) but since I started back at college in September it's become completely MA-centred as has my life really - I spend a lot of time working directly on it - or rather doing reading for it as I haven't done much directly creative work in a while. That isn't a complaint - I am loving it but I'm not doing nearly anywhere near as much 'art doing' as I did before I started the course. I did take some film pics when I was in Whitby, and some colour digital ones in London (as an avowed monochromist I'm still wondering about this but suffice to say wine was involved...and I'm still mulling over the results and what to do with them - one in particular I am thinking will make a lovely fabric print) and the fact that this isn't preying on my mind is preying on my mind if that makes sense. Part of me thinks you've spent precisely one day in the dark room so far this term - that isn't enough but equally I've not made anything yet that gives me cause to be in the darkroom at the moment. But that's not to say I'm not thinking about the work I hope to make because I am and my notebook is filled with notes regarding the three projects I want to start lifting from the pages of my notebook into reality in the new year.....

I'm not going to say what they are here until they are a bit more realised but suffice to say they involve cameras, film, objects, fabric and memory and memories...and I am thinking about them A LOT!!

And because no post looks right to me unless it has an image here is one of me after having met my beloved John Waters for the third time (I'm still beyond thrilled about this as he is one of my all time heroes) and my lovely husband took it on a camera just like the one Pecker uses in the film Pecker.

My work is so inspired by victorian death culture that that is what I am mostly reading about each day. But I have also been attempting to read books about research practices with little success as so far they remain stubbornly incomprehensible.. I say they, what I actually mean is Art Based Research by Shaun McNiff. But I'm going to have to pull my finger out or rather my library card and get reading more as I have to write an essay about this for the second week of December.....I think I'll also have to do a separate blog post listing all the books, websites and what have you I've been reading and looking at and properly harvard reference them.....which is a habit I'm trying to get into and I'm kind of getting there, in that I know the things I need to note about each piece I look at (like date accessed, title, author, publisher etc) but still not got into a habit of writing them down in the right order...

This last week I have mostly been reading and finishing (hurrah!!) Mourning Costume by Lou Taylor, Death in the Victorian Family by Pat Jelland, Introducing Barthes by P Thody and P Course before I tackle Camera Lucida by Barthes himself) had a tutorial, watching Ways of Seeing by John Berger (really interesting thought provoking stuff) and put together my second presentation for the course so far. I really enjoyed putting that together as I decided to shoehorn in as many pictures as possible of my screen heroes so it contains stills of Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee and Basil Rathbone from some of my favourite Hammer films including Dracula, Dracula AD 1972, Curse of Frankenstein and The Hound of the Baskervilles  Though I have scripted this one as I still don't feel comfortable in a college setting without planning every word I want to say as I don't want to be stood there going 'um, er' and forgetting points I want to make.

I didn't pre-script every word for the talk I gave to a girl guides troop about victorian funeral customs and cemeteries in Leeds last week though. I wanted that to be more of a two way thing with them interrupting to ask questions and me asking them questions so I just made notes to go with the slides I put together. I also said right at the beginning if I used any words they didn't understand to interrupt me and ask what it meant - they didn't but they were a very quiet well behaved group and they did eventually answer some of my questions and a couple of them did have a go at trying on some black voile so they could get an idea of what it might have felt like to be wearing a mourning veil, but as they were leaving one of the older ones (they ranged from 12-17 years old) said in front of her friends that 'it was actually really interesting' - I'm taking that as a 5 star review.

Last week I also saw an amazing film called The Creeping Garden at Leeds Film Festival (though it was a bit uncomfortable having to share a sofa with a stranger at the Everyman even if there was a bolster between us) which was all about slime mould and the artistic uses that it is being put to and the research being done on/with it. Fascinating - that in turn has given me an idea for my work which would take time and possibly permission too........

I also went to an artists talk at the Tetley which mostly left me cold as it seemed to be a kind of 'profundity olympics' amongst the participants and they used the kind of 'artspeak' which in my experience puts people off and makes it even more exclusive. I'm still mulling over this though.....and how to use language in such a way that doesn't make it so exclusive and so self reverential.

I also haven't talked about my interview with two morticians/undertakers the week before - partly because I promised I wouldn't say anything that would make them identifiable and partly because I'm still mulling over what we talked about, they gave me lots to think about including sad things like how some people don't stop and let funeral processions pass uninterrupted  anymore and cut them up and they also gave me a copy of the Funeral Directors Monthly magazine (it contained a really interesting article on photography at funerals) and I discovered that you get a seat to yourself on the bus if you read that magazine on the way home....

I've also been in touch with two archives today - West Yorkshire and John Rylands Library to see about making an appointment to go in and see what victorian photographic delights they contain, and to see if they have any victorian diaries with accounts of either going to a photographers studio or a photographer coming to your house, or going to or arranging a funeral.

I've also been in touch with a group of artists based in Birmingham whose work is also inspired by death and been asked if I want to take part in work with them next year - to which I of course replied yes please!!

I think that's just about catched up most of the things I've been doing over the last couple of weeks - here's hoping my presentation goes okay tomorrow, at least this time it emailed through okay without my having to resort to the horror that is googledocs, now I have learned the trick of resizing images......

So keep your fingers crossed for me tomorrow that it all works out okay.......