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 7 Cyanotypes, Presentations, Potential Collaborations and Music While You Work....

It's 4pm on Sunday afternoon and in an attempt to get ahead of myself and feel a bit more on top of things I decided to write my blog post today instead of my usual Monday morning when I normally try to collate all my thoughts from the past week and lots of thoughts there have been if you look at my post it note - which is all in my handwriting this week but occasionally in different pens....

This week I have been mostly cyanotyping and presentation writing and thinking. I have just about got to grips with the process in photoshop needed to make images into a format that can be successfully copied onto acetate and used in cyanotyping - that is greyscaling the image if needed (some of mine did thanks to this pesky new habit I seem to have developed of taking images in colour) inverting it and upping the contrast so that the blacks are blacker and the whites are whiter - all the better for making successful cyanotype images and I am really chuffed with my practice ones, even if it does take longer than you think - leading to my new aphorism for the week - namely a watched cyanotype never develops......

These are some of the ones I did in college, on the left is one of my favourite reflection images of me and my husband in a mirror at the top of a car park in Tib Street Manchester (be grateful that the image does not have smell attached as the stench of skunk and piss in that car park was almost overpowering but the murky mirror was too wonderful to resist and though I lowered myself to take the image I did not let my knee touch the floor) and the other two are of my friend Jen as a faux victorian widow in St George's Fields - my usual fave graveyard haunt and which I returned to this week to do some papier mache relief work in....but am getting ahead of myself.

I loved being in the darkroom again, the act of painting the solution of potassium ferricyanide and ammonium citric acid onto the paper in thick brush strokes - it made me think of the way I paint my nails and I found it rather therapeutic plus I love the way it shows on the paper too - missed bits and lined gaps all add to the charm of the end result to me, plus it looks like a human has been involved in the process too as opposed to the clean sharpness of a digital print say.

Once painted you leave it to dry and then place whatever you want on top of it and weight it down with glass if need be, I did images I'd transferred onto acetate the previous week and then you leave it in the sunshine as it is the action of the uv light in sunshine that makes the print develop.

Once all the yellowy tones has gone from the paper then it's ready to be washed off in clear water for about 20 minutes and then you leave it to dry again. You can only really under develop them so it's no problem if you go off to get a sandwich, nip to the library or do any of the other things I did whilst waiting for them to develop. But it is more difficult to see that on the grey paper I used so although that appeals to me more colourwise I don't think it's as successful so far as showing the images than the other paler coloured paper....or maybe I just need to leave it for much much longer......

It was however a ballache when inconsiderate and unthinking fellow users of the dark room left other equipment drying on top of one of my almost dry prints meaning it had to be washed and dried again.....sigh.

But I also coated paper ready to use at home where the only potential interference is from a cat either sitting on it or knocking it but thankfully Mapp and Lucia were well behaved and other than a cursory sniff they left them alone and they didn't seem to mind being shut out of the bathroom either whilst I washed the prints - using an old litter tray which was handy as none of the red photographic trays which I know we have could be found in the garage. I am very pleased with the results too

Eagled eyes amongst you may notice a smaller than A4 print of me and my beloved John Waters - this was done on the ready made commercially available cyanotype paper you can buy and developed under the sun lamp which was wedged on top of two boxes of cat food (how's that for a Heath Robinson device eh?) and although I like the texture of the paper I much prefer the 'home made' - well college dark room made version instead.

Cyanotyping is definitely something I will be doing more of - I like the process, the like the end results and their slightly unpredicatable variability and as a process that was brought to public attention by Anna Atkins (info her here ) it also warms the cockles of my victorian loving feminist heart.

I'll also be able to do much more of it at home once I've bought some more pegs so I can hang them up to dry more easily - the perils of having a tumble dryer is that you don't have pega anymore and the clips you use to hang up film have spikes in them and so are no good if you are trying to keep the paper as intact as possible.

I also spent a big part of my time last week writing and practicing a 10 minute powerpoint presentation for the Practice and Personal Development Module I'm working on at the moment and for which my portfolio needs to be handed in towards the end of March.

I thought I had the hang of the technical side of this powerpoint malarkey as I've done 3 now but at times I wanted to tear my hair out in frustration as on Monday evening I could just not get images to go where I wanted them to and resizing them so they would be smaller and so more easily emailable and transportable on a memory stick seemed a right ball-ache too.

But coming back to it with much less tired eyes and brain on Thursday I at least got it into the shape I wanted and I got very positive feedback for it - both from my fellow ma-ers and the tutors so that was both a good and b) big relief as the one thing I've learnt is how important it is to be able to give a good presentation of yourself and your work.
   
Plus I once again shamelessly used the opportunity to show images of my beloved Peter Cushing on a big screen - which can never be a bad thing in my book. It was also a good opportunity to go over all the stuff I've been doing over the last few months and realise how much further along I am in practice, understanding and presentation too.

This time last year I had hardly done any presenting nor used the dreaded powerpoint but now I have done an artists talk, a speech at the Place and Memory launch at Inkwell, a speech at Leeds Museum as part of the Love Arts Festival (you can see me here on page 7) a talk to girl guides, a talk at the Cultural Heritage Show and Tell event also at Leeds Museum as well as 3 presentations at college.

If you'd told me this time last year I'd be doing that I'd have laughed in your face. I still get nervous and have a horrid disconnect between heart and head as in my heart is going nineteen to the dozen but my head is saying it's okay - you can do this but it's really important for me to be able to do this. And the other note to self is - if you are tired then leave it alone and come back to it when you are less tired as it'll b easier then.

Plus this time I wrote the words first and then added the images - last times I found the images first and then wrote words to fit them.....think I prefer the latter way of doing things. Oh and other lesson learnt - if printing speech double sided then write page number at top of each side of paper so you don't get confused as to which side you're on. Confusion which thankfully didn't show.....

And speaking of thought provoking images - here is one I saw on my friend Jane's facebook page the other day:

which I found very appealing and interesting but when I looked up its source and discovered it is from his weighty tome called The Essence of Christianity I decided to stick with my first love theorist Roland Barthes who I have fallen in love with on the basis of his talking of about emotion and the dead. I heart Barthes.

I went back to St George's Field yesterday to learn a little of the papier mache relief technique from my fellow ma-er Lesley and this is the result so far: a detail taken from the corner of one of the gravestones there of Joseph and Mary Ellen Beaumont - first you wet the grave and then layer it with pieces of toilet paper (apparently asda shades is the best for this job) and get it into the nooks and crannies with use of a stencil brush and continue to wet it, let it dry a little bit then remove the piece as a whole and lay it on a flat surface for it to dry completely.

I'm really pleased with this and will definitely be going back to do some more when the weather is a little warmer and less windy - I like it because it makes me feel like I am doing something with my hands as opposed to my eyes and a machine, I am interacting directly with the subject matter plus best of all from an ethical point of view it does no harm nor leaves any trace on the gravestone. My kind of process.

Plus in some ways this makes me feel more of an artist which is all to the good as it silences my inner critic which says I cannot be an artist because I do not paint or draw..an illogical view and one which I do not apply to others but do apply to myself......mmm something else to work on. As is my other illogical inner critic voice which is starting to murmur 'jill of all trades and mistress of none' which again is ill-founded and not one I would apply to others - artists need to be able to write (convincing funding applications if nothing else) so why do I feel a disconnect between writing and doing - when really they are equally important if not same sized bits of the whole...mmm a whole other thing to pick apart there.....

What else? well a couple of years ago I did a course in Human Remains Analysis at the Discovery Centre in Leeds and it was fantastic. I learnt lots, got to handle human bones and best of all my favourite things human skulls as well as have a nosey round the Discovery Centre which is marvellous - and well worth a trip if you haven't been - details here and I have stayed in touch with the lovely lady who ran it and last week I mooted the possibility of a collaborative project though as yet I am not quite sure what format it will take and to my delight she has said yes to talking about it - so watch this space for further developments........    

Edited to add - realised my posts are getting longer and longer, this one has more images than any other (will I ever reach a point where I can do a John Berger-like essay which is only images?) and I forgot to write about music which was I usually have Radio 4 on whilst I work but this week I have mostly been listening to the soundtrack from Only Lovers Left Alive which my husband gave me for Valentines Day which is gorgeously ethereal and languid.....might make a point o listening to R3 this week instead and see what difference if any that makes.....