MA-Ness Term 2 Week 4 - Revelations, UV Resistant Gloss, Return of Letter, Phd-Ness, Cyanotype Solution Painting and Lots of thinking and some light reading....

Slightly more on this weeks post it note - indictative of a slightly busier week too....but can't show you anymore pics as am still working through all the ones I took the fortnight before - deciding which ones to print and which ones to use to make cyanotypes of...and speaking of cyanotypes spent a good chunk of today mixing up the ready made solutions of sodium ferricyanide and ammonium citrate in deinonised water into a one part to one part solution....

Had a busy day today - been painting cyanotype solution onto different coloured paper - red, light grey and dark grey and and dipping lacey pieces of material into the solution, wringing them out and then letting them dry. I learnt that paper takes much less time to dry than material and the heavily embroidered bits of lace don't absorb the solution the same as the unembroidered bits...

Really looking forward to using them and got an idea of which images I want to try and develop on them too - one will hopefully be the angel I took a colour photograph of in the graveyard at Cleethorpes and the other will be of the shrouded female face atop a gravestone in Chapel Allerton.

No prizes for guessing that it would be images from graveyards...but as yet none from St George's Fields but there will be once I've finished sorting through the latest lot of pics I took there - well chuffed with some of the 120 ones I took - not least because they were taken on a fully manual camera and I always feel more of accomplished photographer when I've used a fully manual camera and made it do what I want it too - other than deciding on the viewpoint and releasing the shutter that is. I used the readings from the point and shoot pocket digital camera to set the exposure/shutter speed and they all came out okay. HUZZAH!!

I am still using the crap kids digital camera though - took another lot in St George's Fields in the sunshine on Friday and am well chuffed with some of them. It's such a fun camera to use. Plus it is also very light to carry and fits in my pocket no problem plus since my addition of black insulation tape over the battery compartment the chances of unintentionally deleting the images on it are minimised...though I do have to keep an eye on battery levels as it loses them if the batteries run out too.

Sadly though the letter I sent to the coffin manufacturers to ask if they had any lining scraps I could have for printing on has been returned 'addressee gone away' so I'll have to try other funeral business acquaintances to see if I can find any coffin offcuts that way....

I went to a lecture at the Henry Moore Institute last week - it was given by Tom McCarthy who is one of the founders of the fabulously named International Necronautical Society who have a manifesto that you can read here and which looks right up my street so to speak - or should that be right up my avenues of graves?...anyways I understood some of it and some of it went right over my head (I updated my to do list during those bits) but I also got some good suggestions for my ever expanding reading list including some Joseph Conrad but I also overheard a remark that is making me think re doing a phd.

A chap in the audience asked another chap how he was getting on with his practice led phd, chap replied he was struggling with the writing side of it and original chap said he wondered if this fashion for practice led phds 'is creating a generation of artists who can write better than they can practice'....more food for thought there. I think my deciding factor as to whether or not I decide to go for it phd-wise is the dissertation results which are due on Friday...if that goes okay then I think I'll start researching options seriously. Plus I had an idea re researching the kind of labour used in photographic studios when they were at their hey day in the victorian period....

The lecture was in response to Katrina Palmer's very wonderful Necropolitan Line installation which I have completely fallen in love with ('we are sorry for being sorry') and have looked at the some of the information accompanying it on the Henry Moore Institute website - including a video which looks at some of the ideas behind it - and some of the phrases which struck me enough to write them down on my post it note were:
art exceeds language (yes it can, but sometimes it also needs language to explain it/title it/help it a bit...imo)
sculpture is subject to gravity and revealed in light - beautiful phrasing and description of sculpture
it's the spaces between words which makes language work - yep - love this phrase too.

I also spent some time last week catching up with the lady who taught me Human Remains Analysis at Leeds Discovery Centre (in theory I can reassemble skeletons, determine their sex, age and possible cause of death - in practice I got very giddy because I was holding a real human skull, real human bones...) It was aces to see her and to discuss the possibilities of our working together in the future on some projects.

Projects which hopefully would make people look anew at their landscape and the kind of role it had in people's lives in the past...Places where there is evidence of human habitation and use back to the bronze age and the seemingly spiritual use of that landscape for honouring/housing the dead of those societies. I was also intrigued again by the use of water/reflective surfaces/superstitions about them in death rituals. I have done some research already about this - will have to dig it out and re-familiarize myself with it, am especially intrigued with the practice of breaking objects in this world before throwing them in the water - presumably to either stop them being used in this world so they only be used in the next...not sure about this interpretation though as it does sound a bit unproveable hippy supposition to me.


What else - well I've invested in some UV Resistant Gloss Spray - going to try it (outside or in a very well ventilated room at college)on some of the lumen and anthotype prints I have done and see if it fixes the issue of being able to show them as without any kind of uv resistance they'll completely fade...though this of course means potentially sacrificing some of the work I've already made. Will have to pick a piece carefully....

Yesterday I finally got my arse in gear to go to the Revelations Exhibition at the Media Museum in Bradford. WOW!! What a wonderful show, if you haven't been and can get there then you must for it is fabulous. Have completely fallen in love with work of Gyorgy Kepes (Ghost from 1962 is just wonderful) Berenice Abbott - she believed that science needed the voice of the artist to lend 'the warm human quality of the imagination to its austere and stern discipline'. Plus some of the phraseology used was just gorgeous:
John William Draper's Solar Spectrum from 1842 is labelled with 'time occupied in exposure', 'accidental mercury', plus some of the older prints had the tiniest precise brown (though presumably faded from black)ink handwriting on. Very fine nibs must have been the order of the day then - I love a big chunky nib, be it on a biro or on a fountain pen. I use fountain pen in my physical diary.

The others things which caught my eye were 'helioautograph camera, the embossing of the velvet cases containing daguerreotypes, 'chickens scared by a torpedo' - which can't have been much fun for the chickens but which made my husband really laugh, the work of Lazlo Monoly-Nagy, 'conventions of a single point perspective', Carl Struwe's work which looked like charcoal drawings til you got close and realised there was no visible texture on the surface like there would be with charcoal but they were in fact huge photographs of tiny things under magnification - his image of the chlorophyll chain in algae looked like some of the mourning jewellery popular in victorian times made out of hair. I also particularly loved the stark desolation of Clare Strand's 'The Betterment Room'

I also looked a bit more at how work is displayed and how it reminded me in some ways of my church experience as a youth - ie an almost silent reverent space, I also found myself reading the writing on the wall before looking at the pieces and going round things in a more orderly fashion as opposed to bull in a sweetshop fashion at whatever catches my eye first. Not sure if this is me maturing, whether thoughts of curation are on my mind as we start making preparations for the end of year show or just a well put together show.

Going to the museum reminded me how much I love 'the materiality of photographic processes' - digital is all well and good but there is something about a physical end product and a physical product other than a memory card and a camera to put images on the memory card which just makes my heart sing.

Other things which make my heart sing - graveyards, vinyl records, valve radios, typewriters, skulls, my husband, cats, really cheap and nasty roman catholic iconographic souvenirs, most museums....

Also learnt a bit more about the history of photography as a process, the impact dry plate technology had on photo taking, just how toxic daguerreotype potentially were (mercury vapour anyone?) and also looked at a photograph of a studio production line in Scotland where all the workers looked like women in mournig dress - further investigation needed there.

This week is going to consist of more boxercise classes hopefully as exercise is making me feel better and more energised, catching up with chums not seen in a while, and re-familiarizing myself with black and white photographic print making as it's been a while since I've done that and I'm missing the magic of watching the image appear in the chemical wash....I'm also hoping to make a bit more of an inroad into my unread books pile as well as a bit more of the 'trashy' novel I'm reading for fun - Silent In The Grave by Deanna Rayburn set in London in 1886, it's the tale of widowed Lady Julia Grey and her quest with Nicholas Brisbane to discover if her husband was murdered and who killed him. I'm about a quarter of the way through and it's great fun so far...