MA-Ness Term 3 Week 16 - Interim End In Sight, Playing With Cameras, Glossing, Abstracts, Reading, Happy Accidents, Photography, Language and New Favourite Cemetery

one of the books I'm reading at the moment - wonderful - on loan from Headingley Library

this weeks post it notes - on the left list of things to include on blog and on right notes to add to term overview for portfolio hand in

on left corrupted file when I first tried to print out image on right - a happy accident as I prefer the corrupted copy (close up of sign on bridge on railway in Midlands

image taken on my crappy kids digital camera which cost £6.99 through lens of medium format fancy camera borrowed from college which even secondhand would cost around a hundred times as much....pic is of husband taking pinhole picture of me on an adapted 1950's medium format camera with penny as lens cover - taken in St Matthews Cemetery Chapel Allerton -
skull blogwriters own.

Have had a busy week of writing - am in middle of writing up a term overview for portfolio hand in for the end of the first year of this masters malarkey. It's been interesting to look back over the last few months and see how my working practices have changed, what I've learnt, what I'd forgotten I'd been to or read, the things I'm really pleased with, the things I'm not so pleased with and the things I have still to work on. I have also made a start in physically putting my portfolio together - last time it was in a red lever arch file - this time it's in a black one. This time I think it will also include work pieces both bigger than A4 and a lot smaller than A4 and in different formats.

It's (almost) fun putting it together - but the fear of not jumping academic hoops high enough is also there....fingers crossed my work will be deemed to have met and fulfilled the learning outcomes, but I'm not sure when I'll find out if it has or not, hand in date is 14th August though so fingers crossed it won't be too long after that. Think term restarts the second week in September so it's not a long break as such, but I hope to have some down time in that time too. I am absolutely loving doing what I'm doing and it currently occupies almost 80% of my time and almost 90% of my thoughts.....don't know what I'm going to do when it finishes....need to crack on with research plans for practice based phds.....

But have also had a busy week of doing too  - have done a load more printing at college or rather the nice man who lives in the basement print room did £6.70's worth of A4 prints on tracing paper for me. Including the one above of the railway bridge sign. I took the picture partly because I was looking for something to do whilst waiting for the train and also because the sign made me feel nostalgic as it is written in the same typeface as the ones I often used to see when I was little whilst waiting for the train to go to Altrincham Market.  These trips with my grandparents usually involved a treat from the toy stall - if I got a doll my Nana would then crochet it an outfit whilst watching the wrestling later on that afternoon, and it always ended with a lunchtime trip to the chippy for sit down treat of fish and chips and if I was really lucky a can of Tizer. Aah happy memories.

Anyway as you can see it didn't print out correctly at first - the file corrupted but I prefer the corrupted version to the correctly printed out version (which was a digital image that I cropped and took the colour out of) but other than taking a picture of the corrupted version or photocopying it I have no way of exactly reproducing it.  Oh well. I am still continuing my experiments with the degeneration of colour and quality in photocopying. I love the way the image distorts - especially in colour.

I've also been taking lots of pictures - some straightforward pictures of the things already there and some including the lovely silver skull I bought some time ago from TK Maxx (and I still wish I'd bought the other one that was there at the time - though at the time I couldn't really afford it) and it was a new location and on three different cameras.

The location was St Matthews Cemetery in Chapel Allerton which was closed as a cemetery by the council in 1974. It seems it was active as a churchyard for a long time before the church was deemed too small and no longer fit for purpose. The current St Matthews was built on Wood Road in the late 1890's though the original church still held funerals until it was demolished in 1935. It's in nowhere near as manicured and easy to get round state as St George's Fields is but it has some beautiful examples of victorian tombstone sculpture and I suspect I shall be going again often - especially in winter when some of the grasses will have died back and the dog pooh will be easier to spot and so avoid on the ground.

I've occasionally walked through and often waited at the bus stop just next to the War Memorial which stands at its entrance on Harrogate Road. I'd never really looked at any of the memorials in it closely though and there are some truly gorgeous ones there, bits of it are very overgrown and tumbledown and bits of it aren't. I came home covered in bits of grass seeds, got scratched by a briar and stung by nettles and also had the excitement of somewhat illicitly climbing a very rusty looking fire escape to take a picture but it was worth it - there are some stunning monuments there and I got some pictures I am really pleased with.

I used 3 cameras - the new (to me but actually from 1990) Minolta Dynax 7000i very generously given me by a chum for my birthday in which I used black and white film and poundshop colour film, the very fancy indeed Mamiya 645 Pro in which I used  120 b+w and my crappy kiddies digital camera which takes warped colour-ish images. I also remembered to wear something with pockets - v handy indeed for lens caps, small kids crap cameras and the like and though I forgot to take blu tack I did remember to take the little blue folding step and my husband very generously agreed to be my assistant too and he helped with the tripod, passing me things and keeping an eye on the bags. He also helped by developing the b+w films later that afternoon and I scanned them in once they'd dried. He also took some pinhole pictures with a lens cover made out of a penny - a nice touch for a graveyard shoot methinks as it has echoes of the ferryman myth and of course the use of pennies to weight down corpse eyelids.

I got a bit flustered using the tripod as I can never remember which way you turn things to make them loosen/tighten but as I wasn't in a rush that didn't matter so much. Plus we weren't in anyone's way or trespassing (though I did sneak up an overlooking fire escape to take some shots - but it wasn't locked off or anything so not really trespassing as such) so I had the time and space to sort it out at my own pace.

The tripod was needed as it wasn't very bright yesterday and I knew some of the shots would be under trees and so long exposures would be needed - not very long but longer than I could keep the camera absolutely still and so avoid blurring on the shots. I could have pushed the film but as that would have made it look very grainy and grainy wasn't the look I was going for I decided not to.

So any blurring would be because I failed to focus the shots adequately as opposed to camera shake. I did things like take the same shots with the different cameras so I could compare and contrast between each camera. And after a while I remembered that I could vary the depth of the shot with one of the lenses I was using too - doh!! I haven't used it very often recently as I've mostly been using my nifty fifty mm lens as it's light, small and does the job I need it too so I can forgive myself that I had forgotten this as I am so used to just focusing...oh well. I also enjoyed positioning the lovely silver skull in different places.

I'm pleased with the pictures overall and some of them I am really pleased with, and some of them will be getting printed on A4 tracing paper as soon as the print room reopens,  but the camera I most enjoyed using - is technically the worst.

Yep - the crap kiddies digital camera, it's such fun to use, plus it's light, fits in my pocket easily, and most of all I am absolutely loving the lomo warped colour aberrant pics it produces. I am also loving the pictures I get with the other much better cameras - but for ease and fun of use, the crap kiddies digital wins hand down. I think the fun I have with it reflects in the pictures it produces too - the pictures from the other 'proper' cameras look ever so much more serious in comparison.

I've also been doing some glossing this week - glossing of images I've made and transferred onto canvas using matte medium and last week I emailed off my first abstract for an academic conference hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University's Centre for Gothic Studies. I think my work qualifies as gothic I am chancing it a bit as it is really a literature conference so I won't be surprised if they say thanks but no, but I'm still working on the 'a no is free' approach plus it was good practice to write an abstract. If I do get offered the chance to present you'll hear squeals of both terror and delight....which is a good way to describe gothic too really.....

I took advantage of the powercuts we had last week (now hopefully fixed) by using the lack of tinternet access (much to the power companies surprise when I rang to find out what was going on - they advised me I could look it up on my smartphone or tablet - neither of which devices I possess, or rather my husband does have a tablet but it works off the wifi and their reaction was very much one of shock and how on earth do I manage without such devices...er very well thank you as long as there isn't a power cut) to catch up on some reading - as the pile of unread (mostly text) books to my right continues to taunt me. Think I'm going to have to factor in reading time on my to-do list or else they are going to remain unread. I must also make time to reread the notes I've made too.

I am however managing to read Lady Audley's Secret - which is wonderful and last night I dipped into the beginning of East Lynne by Ellen Wood - another victorian sensation novel which was published in 1861. Tis wonderfully evocative and stirring stuff, no wonder an Archbishop of the time warned of the dangers of such books. It seems they caused a similar so called moral outrage that video nasties did in the 80's but it is very lovely to read a genuinely contemporary victorian novel and that fact that Lady Audley's Secret and East Lynne are written by women is an added bonus. Plus East Lynne is such a gorgeous book - bound in red, and seemingly bought by Leeds Reference Library in 1943. According to the plate on the back it's been borrowed 6 times - in 1969, 1981, 2004, 2007, 2008, 2011 and now me - it seems a rattling good yarn so don't know why its not more popular but hey ho.

The other book I am reading and which I quoted from last blog post is City Boy My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s by Edmund White and bits of it are really resonating with me - this paragraph for instance in which he is talking about what Paul Valery called the 'delirious professions'  'those professions that depend on self assurance and the opinions of others rather than certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I'd hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting....the delirious professions having no agreed upon standards, require introductions and alliances, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation'.  
Lots and lots of food for thought there......he also goes on to mention the writers and philosophers his milieu of writers, critics and art patrons were reading in the 1960's - Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida and Levi-Strauss.  Names familiar to me though aside from Barthes I haven't read anything by them - but I have read a lot of things about them.

The other thing which gave me a lot of food for thought this week was the Radio 4 programme No Triumph No Tragedy which last week featured an interview with Giles Duley which you can listen to here and see examples of Greg's photographic work here. His identifying as a photographer shines through and kept him going when he was injured in Afghanistan. He talks of the way he uses his work to tell stories - currently those of victims of war. He said photography acts as a passport and portal into others lives and that a good photograph isn't taken but given, a result of a two way relationship between the photographer and the sitter. He also talked of the patience needed by a photographer and how restrictions can lead to creativity. It's well worth a listen - inspiring thought provoking stuff.

So now I'd best crack on with portfolio putting together..... 

   

   

MA-Ness Term 3 Week 15 - Kiddies Digital Camera,Ongoing Music Adventures, Glossing, Kippax Grave Poetry, Translations,Abstracts, Victorian Graffitti....

this weeks post it notes and the lego Spongebob characters used as candle holders on a cake

Mapp helping me write up what films I've seen this year...and by help I mean distract me with cuteness really.....

the kiddies 2 mega pixel camera that I've been using - it takes 24 pictures at high resolution, has no memory card and a tiny screen on the back - I can hardly see what I'm doing with it - but I love using it.

I feel very tired today and not really in the mood for writing this up, especially as it has gotten late and I've normally finished writing this and published it by now but I think I'd best just grit my teeth and get on with it or else I'll fall behind with my planned workload for this week and that is worse than the alternative of leaving it til tomorrow as then I;d be playing catch up all week and I hate doing that. But at least last week I did catch up with a couple of jobs that had been on my to-do list for a while - namely drafting an abstract for an academic conference in October and writing up my films seen in 2015 list. I found writing the abstract especially difficult - partly because I've never done anything like that before hence my films seen in 2015 list is now up to date as that seemed like a productive way to procrastinate.

And one of the films I was writing up was the very wonderful The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson by Julian Temple and it was very very good indeed. It began with Wilko playing chess on the sea defences at Canvey Island and talking to Death about what it was like when he got his cancer diagnosis. It was interspersed with clips from various films including Belle et la Bete, Orpheus In The Underworld, Nosferatu, The Vikings,The Seventh Seal,  A Matter of Life and Death, clips of Wilko Johnson performing, a pirate figure walking along the concrete walls, clips of old films of seaside fun, clips of his heroes Johnny Kidd and The Pirates, the floods in the fifties, purpose made animations and sequences featuring the image at the bottom of what was meant to be a rock pool – it was funny, uplifting, touching and poignant – there was a round of applause at the end but I didn’t clap ( I very rarely clap at films - even when I've absolutely loved them) but I did make notes of some of his quotes that he used in the film:

'no such thing as happiness – only lesser shades of melancholy'  which he said came from Blake

'never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough'…which he said also came from Blake

I've sent the abstract to a couple of chums who know about these things and got very useful feedback from them both about how to improve it and I plan to have a final draft ready by the end of Wednesday so I can email it in before the deadline on Friday.

Again - I would like to know what has happened to the old me, as the old me would still be scratting around trying to get something together right up to the deadline as opposed to (hopefully) having something a lot more considered and coherent ready before the deadline. But I am much happier working this way rather than leaving everything to the last minute, I much prefer trying to plan and be considered about stuff rather than flapping about and stressing....though of course I still stress about things - just in a longer winded less time pressured way....

So this week I have been making the most of using the kiddies camera I bought a while back and then processing some of the pictures I took on it ready to make cyanotypes with them. By processing I mean using photoshop to take the colour out, boost the levels and then invert them. I have one of a pylon against clouds that I especially like and can't wait to see it in cyanotype form though given the weather at the moment that might take some time. I might see if I can use the uv beds at the college or ask the local beauty salon if I can use one of their sunbeds or use the uv lamp I have as otherwise given the gloom they'll be taking days rather than hours to do.

Technically it's a piss poor camera really - the plastic lens is slightly warped, like a short roll of 35 mm it only takes 24 pictures at high (!) resolution and you lose those if you either take the batteries out or they run out of juice. Pictures are taken off the camera via a usb cable, the screen on the back is about the size of a large postage stamp and I can barely see what I'm doing with it unless I have my 'readers' on (for those of you who had grandparents that didn't have varifocals but had 2 pairs of glasses - one pair was for distance and the other pair for reading hence 'readers') but of course if I have my 'readers' on I can barely see what I'm trying to take a picture of in the distance...at some point I might have to bite the bullet and go for varifocals after all, though I think I might get bifocals instead - partly because they are old fashioned and partly because the varifocal simulation thing I tried made me feel sick.  

But in spite of all those difficulties and limitations I am absolutely loving using it - it's very light and it makes me smile and I am looking forward to getting some of the pictures I have taken on it blown up big. It is of course an indescribably poor cousin to the very lovely 35mm film camera a chum has very generously given me as a birthday present - namely a Minolta Dynax 70001 which now I have the right lithium battery for I shall be experimenting with it later this week. I also have a new zoomy lens for the Canon I got in the charity shop the other week - I am still loving making images - whether it's with a the very fancy medium format beast I have on loan from the college or my crappy kiddies camera or with a much fancier 35mm outfit or some spinach juice.....

I've also continued the experiments I've been making with working whilst listening to different kinds of music, this week I went for vampire themed music and worked whilst listening to the soundtrack to Dracula AD 1972, Dracula - Classic Scores from Hammer, Philip Feeney's Dracula for Northern Ballet and Scarey Movie Themes. Hmm there wasn't as much out of tune singing along but I think all in all I get more done if I have either R4 or R4 Extra on, though I find if I want to really take in what is being talked about then I have to listen to it alone and not try and do something else as well - unless it's something physically repetitive and mentally unchallenging like painting gloss medium on image transfers I've done.  

I made time to go round a graveyard in Kippax last week - St Mary's Church and some of the grave poetry was wonderfully poignant and gloriously melancholy and this was my favourite from the grave of 4 children of John and Mary Land who died between 1852 and 1877

cold cold lies the clay on their mouldering heads

but sweet is the rest of the innocent dead

and the love which bore them dwell in each breast

til we meet them again in the realm of the blest.

Such a sad encapsulation of christian victorian death beliefs and hopes and how heartbreaking it must have been for their parents. I wonder if any of their children survived into adulthood?

I also made time to nip into the Art Gallery on the Headrow as I had a few minutes between meetings. I adore the room at the end of the ground floor which is filled with Atkinson Grimshaws and other wonders of the victorian period namely Evelyn de Morgans The Valley of the Shadows and The Convent Garden by FS Walker which always makes me smile. I always make a point of looking in that room as those paintings lift my spirits but a new (to me) more modern painting on the stairs also caught my eye this week - Jacob Kramers Clay from 1928, a stark but gentle portrait of a cadaver. I need to go back and look at that again when I'm not in such a rush and find out a bit more about it.

I did make time the following day (after my haircut) to go round the Tailored Exhibition at Leeds Museum (details about it here) which if you love fashion is well worth a visit. I learnt that trousers gradually replaced breeches from 1810 to 1840, that frock coats were made not to fasten so that you could show off your waistcoat, there is a wonderful example of a modern jacket with the hand stitched sections on show to show the work that goes on underneath a tailored jacket and of course beautiful clothes - including a black victorian ladies riding outfit (to be worn when riding side saddle of course) a fabulous velvet evening suit from the 70's which oozed charm, cocktails and cigarettes and babycham somehow...a pinstripe suit for a woman from the 1930's which still looks remarkably current and a ladies brown walking dress from the victorian period complete with silk fill in frills and a slight bustle. All this plus wonderfully evocative old adverts and a history of the tailoring trade in Leeds. Go see it if you can. I'll definitely be popping in again plus it's free and given this governments attitude of knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing who knows how much longer we will have free museums.....

I also went to see a fellow MA-ers exhibition Translations by Cam Reid at the College of Art Vernon Street site (details here ) and I found it moving and inspiring too - and it made me realise that I really do need to make more of an effort to go to exhibitions - partly to support venues, partly to support colleagues, partly to check out spaces and see how I could make my work 'work' in them but also just for inspiration and quiet contemplation. Are galleries the secular version of churches these days?

Amongst other books (namely the very wonderful Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon) I'm reading City Boy - My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s by Edmund White (Bloomsbury 2010)  - a writer whose work I've enjoyed ever since I went to see him do a book reading at Waterstones some years ago. Anyway some of the things he is saying about writing on page 113 could equally be applied to any form of creative work - especially visual art work

 'no-one is sincerely interested in writing a journal that will never be published - or if he or she is, it's a sort of self sufficiency or modesty that I don't understand. If a writer has the desire to communicate by writing and be heard, then he necessarily cares about seeing it in print. I suppose it's the difference between masturbation and making love- the real writer wants to touch another person. Reading the written word is participating in a dialogue in which one person is doing all the talking but in which the listening is also creative.'

The other thing which caught my eye is on pages 16-17 (and which may feature in my dissertation) is when he is talking about the veneration of so called 'great' writers is 'I begin to see the selling of high art as just one more form of commercialism'. 
As ever much food for thought as was a chum's assertion on Facebook that we are each made up of three people - who we see ourselves as, who we want to project ourselves as and how others perceive us, which struck me as especially true after someone commented on my confidence last week - I am much more confident that I ever used to be but there's still a lot of frantic unconfident and self-doubting activity going on underneath.

The week was rounded off with a birthday treat trip to the CoffinWorks in Birmingham and very wonderful it was too and you can read about it here and go to it if you can - it is an AMAZING place full of thought provoking stuff and nostalgia in the form of old style telephones, sewing machines and equipment - all of which were used in the production of furniture for coffins like nameplates, handles, screws topped with crosses, and the things that went in them like the linings and of course the shrouds. We got to see the stamp room where the name plates were stamped out and finished, the shroud room where the shrouds were made (even got to try an arm of a shroud on, I knew they were made backless but I didn't know they were made with only one arm sewn in and the other arm put on and tucked in afterwards) and marvel at bottles of things like 'cavity fluid' and labels on boxes like 'new crem high vac handles' and the people who work there are lovely - really approachable and knowledgeable. I took lots of pictures though mostly for research purposes but one or two might make their way into cyanotypes most likely one of a box of jesuses or should that be jesuii?

Then it was off to the wonderful Sky Garden at the Library where I took lots of pictures with my crappy kids digital camera, a mooch round the Art gallery where I got my Burne-Jones and Pre-Raphaelite fix - I don't think I could ever tire of Henry Wallis's Death of Thomas Chatterton, and I also fell in love with Augustus Leopold Egg's Travelling Companions and A Widows Mite by Millais. The following day we went to Kenilworth Castle where I again used my crappy kids digital camera in the pouring rain to take pictures of the ruins to make into cyanotypes, I didn't know anything about the castle before I went and it was with some delight that I discovered that thanks to Walter Scott setting a novel there it was a great tourist attraction in victorian days attracting Dickens, Queen Victoria herself and many a victorian landscape painter and photographer.  It was also interesting to see some victorian graffitti - J Perrins scratched their name and the date 1850, HWC scratched initials and the date 1866 and there was lots of other initials and dates scratched into the walls - the most recent I saw datewise was 1971.

So as ever much food for thought and much work and reading to do, portfolio hand in date is fast approaching so I'd best crack on with putting it together.....