Ma-Ness Year 2 Term 1 Week 7 - Gothic Manchester, Papers, Picture Taking, Attempts At Reading and that kind of stuff...

this weeks post it note - looking a little emptier than previous ones as been concentrating upon one main task - namely getting paper ready and practising it for Gothic Studies What Lies Beneath Conference - hence rather snazzy wristband - not worn anything like it since going to Infest way back in 2008, also note clear promotional glasses case given away by high street chain of opticians - painted over their logo with black metallic acrylic paint - but I doubt it's very permanent - think the paint used on model kits might have been better (and would certainly smell nicer), then stuck a skull image on it and then covered with gloss medium...way better than walking round as an advert for somewhere I don't especially want to advertise for nothing.

Pic of me in action at What Lies Beneath Conference - very relieved that it went so well and my classic anxiety dreams of losing shoes so being barefoot and because they were high heels too short to reach microphone didn't come to pass - also met lots of lovely peeps, learnt some new stuff, heard of work by two artists I'd not heard of who I need to find out more about, ate amazing necromonicon cake as well as dirty but delicious clown food at lunchtime and took some pictures of reflections in mancunian puddles   

ongoing attempts to capture colour/image from begonia and african violet flowers - not quite the colour I want but liking the marks left on the page anyway, next stage is to varnish these with gloss or matte medium

Last week I was mostly putting the final touches to my first proper grown up academic paper 'That's About The Bones Of It' for the Manchester Metropolitan University Gothic Studies Department Conference. I had written the bulk of it a week last Sunday and so had time to print it out, practice it, and refine it. I decided to take out certain bits - I was on the Sickness and Death panel and it was clearly labelled and described as such in the programme but even so I erred on the side of caution when it came to discussing certain aspects of the death of named individual newborn children in the burial records as I didn't want to unduly upset anyone in the audience - this is because a chum of mine has recently gone through a similar bereavement and I would hate to be unintentionally insensitive. I know that could be applied to any bereavement but the details of these children was so especially heartbreaking I changed my mind about talking about it - I would however be more comfortable about including their details in a paper and might still do so - with a suitable disclaimer that is.

So I took out specifics and talked in generalities instead. Aside from my loving the aesthetic of victorian graveyards - one of the other reasons I love using such spaces as background and inspiration for artwork is whilst there may be descendants there are no living relatives and so my chances of offending anyone is lessened. Plus by using a no longer active as burial ground as a background for my work I am not going to interrupt or disturb any services being held there for the newly bereaved and grieving families.

But even though I had left myself plenty of time to get it finished it still felt quite stressful getting it ready - I think that was mostly because a) I'd not quite done anything like that before  - I mean I had done presentations at college and for WI groups and read work at Headingley Literature festival but in my head this was something bigger and scarier than that as it needed to have 'academic rigour' and b) the self imposed deadline of having it ready a day or two before it was actually needed - as I wanted to email it through - I took a paper copy of my accompanying speech but I wanted the powerpoint slides I'd put together (all 36 of them containing specially resized images - which I'd individually resized using Paint but thanks to a conversation in the Print Room and my moaning that doing it individually had taken for-effing ever, I know now of a way to do images in bulk using Photoshop....) emailed through in advance as that way I knew they'd be available on email - as well as on my little memory stick shaped like a little black rubber skeleton that my lovely ever supportive husband bought me last xmas. I have a horror of technology not working...and this time I didn't spend hours either using exactly the gothic typeface I wanted as last time I did that - it wasn't supported at the other end and so showed in an ordinary font, I took the view that as long as it was legible it would be okay. And it was.

I also wasn't sure how big the audience would be or what the room would be like I would be talking in - in the event there were some 120 tickets sold for the event and it was deep in a former cinema with little stage in the basement of 70 Oxford Road - an address which may be more familiar to some of you as the Cornerhouse. Plus as a member of the panel I had to sit on that stage with the other paper givers until all three of us had delivered our papers and answered questions. I hope I answered the questions I had okay - and I had that uncomfortable contradictory feeling of relief when a question wasn't for me mixed with 'oh,no-one wants to ask me a question'....and then panic when they actually did...

Plus as I am from Manchester - or rather Manchesterford as I prefer to call it, and used to go to 70 Oxford Street when it was known as the Cornerhouse - there was something especially lovely about having my artwork on show in there - even temporarily in a resized format on a screen.

But I must be honest I did reach a point on Thursday evening where after working on it almost solidly for two full days that I was sick of the sight of it - my paper was just over 3,000 words (I was told it could be no more than 20 minutes so I looked at the word count of the timed 10 minute presentations I'd done for college and they were 1500 words so I just doubled it) and perhaps this doesn't bode well when it comes to a) writing my dissertation which has to be around 8,000 words and b) articles to be published - the most obvious opportunity for me are looking for articles that are 5,000 and c) if I do go on to do a practice based phd that's going to need at least 40,000 words along with a solo exhibition...maybe it's just because I was tired and because it's the anniversary of sad occasions and well anyway it's certainly something for me to think about.  I copy and paste each of these blog posts into a word document and print them off - so it can be easily handed in as my research journal and they have got a lot longer each term. The amount of paper they take up seems to be doubling each term - the second term was twice the thickness of the first and the third twice the thickness of the second. Not sure how thick this term is going to be but it is already looking longer again...

It reminded me that this time last year I was doing a similar sort of thing and tearing my hair out trying to email through my first presentation that was going to be assessed - though thankfully I hadn't fully realised that at the time - I had just realised I had a deadline to meet and the presentation which was my first attempt at using powerpoint was too big to be emailed!!  Hence once of my first powerpoint lessons learnt was resize images before inserting them....

I also remembered what a lovely chum from the WI said to me earlier this year that I was the expert on what was I was talking about and that I speak in an engaging manner. And this helped a lot, although I don't think I am *the* expert but I am certainly *an* expert plus I got laughs in the right places - as even though it is a sad miserable subject it also has humour and I got a big round of applause and quite a few people coming up to me afterwards to tell me how much they enjoyed it so I know I must be doing something right.

My slides were a mix of images of my own photographic artwork and copies of pictures I'd taken of original artefacts relating to St George's Field in the Special Collections Unit of the Brotherton Library at Leeds University ( I had their permission to show them in this context but if I plan to publish  this paper with those images then I would need their permission again) - some of the images were from the crap kids digital but the bulk were from the fancy medium format camera I borrowed from college over the summer and a couple of appropriated but credited where from images of All Saints Park and the Sisters of Mercy.

It was fun putting them together to try and make a kind of over arching narrative - my format was bit of why/how I do gothic art, use of graveyards in gothic art, film and fiction with a few examples, specific differences between All Saints Park (also a former cemetery) and St George's Fields - the role of victorian mourning culture within it, class and economics and a brief history of some of its more famous residents - I picked the wife of Pablo Fanqo who was killed in March 1848 at one of their performances when the audience seating collapsed on her head, and Atkinson Grimshaw, a brief overview and analysis of some of the diseases listed as cause of death, the fact that occupations for dead men are listed but not dead women - they are only described in terms of their marital status, and the tombstone and records of Francis Henry Vant whose stone always intrigues me as is has on it 'deeply regretted' and it's not clear if that's his comparatively early death or his actual existence and the in my opinion desecrational relandscaping carried out on behalf of the university in the late 1960's to make it into the park space it is today.

I can't remember if I wrote the words and then found images to match them when I did the ones I had to do for college or if I found images and then wrote the words to match...think I did them in conjunction as opposed to completely finishing the words first and then looking for images to go with them like I did for this one.

I also had some printing done - am absolutely loving the otherworldliness aka shonky focus, warped lens and inability to capture colour correctly that the crap kids digital camera (renamed lo-mo digital camera for the purposes of sounding a bit more professional at the conference) captures - took some more pictures on it today around the woods and I am looking forward to getting them printed too - tracing paper remains my favourite paper to digitally print on. It has such a lovely translucency - as well as being comparatively inexpensive. I really must get those letter written to coffin makers though to see if they have any leftover bits from lining coffins that I could use to print on as well as trying to fins a way to get stuff printed - or rather find the money to get stuff printed on silk/satin in burial plot size pieces.

I took my work down from St Johns Church this week as the Love Arts Festival came to a close - it's so much quicker taking stuff down than it is putting it up and whilst there a couple of things I could have differently - could have rotated one of the skulls through 180 degrees so there could have been one facing one direction and the opposite one facing the other way and scattered them about a bit more randomly too, I was pleased with it overall. It also makes me want in a meglomaniacal way to have a show entirely made up of my own work and fingers crossed there is a possibility of that after xmas so watch this space.

I am in the process of thinking about attempting to combine some of my photography with some embroidery and I was delighted to find some old photos I'd done in the darkroom a while ago that will be just right for this - especially the test prints as I kept those along with the ones that didn't work at all. Plus some of them I am really pleased with as prints - should get them framed really, I'm reminded that it's good to a) not throw things away as they can be repurposed and b) looking at stuff again with fresh eyes is useful as you can see where it might be improved but also where it is good enough after all.

I also went to a couple of things last week that were fun as well as thought provoking - Head by The Monkees complete with introductory talk at the Hyde Park. I had seen the film before but it was interesting to see it again with some new insight - partly provided by the interesting talk given by Peter Mills but also because since doing this masters malarkey my close reading/observing things skills are slowly but surely being honed and Head is an excellent film to closely analyse as well as having a rather wonderful soundtrack - which reminds me I must get a copy of it. It consciously includes familiar set tropes from westerns, horror films, science fiction, romances whilst also making subtle and none too subtle digs at fame, consumerism, pro war tendencies and  it is quite shocking in places - especially the bit where they show the footage of a summary execution by a vietnamese general of a communist fighter (you can see the footage and information about it here) and it is disturbing viewing - not just because you watch a human being get shot for real as opposed to special effects plus the circumstances as to why he is being shot in the first place. I loved the set piece with Davy Jones dancing in black and white and white and black beautiful too. I think I'd like to watch it again and would definitely want to listen to the soundtrack again. The studio related shenanigans to get it made and the choice of actors to be in it was also very interesting.

I also went to see a version of Nosferatu at the Carriageworks by the Proper Job Theatre Company. I enjoyed it on the whole - but I was a bit thrown by the fact it was a musical version of the tale - the claustraphobicness of being enclosed on a ship with something killing off the shipmates was nicely portrayed and there were beautiful visual pieces - where blood appeared to rain down the cabin doors, Orlok's shadow flits across the stage on its own, a blood spattered hand appears at the cabin door, and a face appeared too but it was marred for me by not caring about one of the central characters when there was only 3 (well 4 if count Count Orlok too who you don't really see) - there was the rational captain, the superstitious mate and the fervently christian mate. I didn't care what happened to the superstitious mate and wanted him to fall overboard quite early on, but he didn't. 

My to do list is getting ever longer - and I really must knuckle down and get some quality work and reading done for my dissertation, and I must finish reading Secure The Shadow by Jay Ruby as that is on loan from the British Library and can't be renewed as easily or as often as the other books I have out from the library.

I mentioned last time I had sent off an abstract to a call for papers at a conference in York and I was waiting to hear back, as I hadn't heard from them I emailed to chase it up and was disappointed that my abstract hadn't been picked but then excited as they have offered to pay for an academic poster for me to stand by during the conference and suggested a couple of people to contact about their upcoming conference as they think my research and work will suit it better. So swings and indeed roundabouts.

Think I'd best crack on getting this list written too.....so I don't forget everything that is on my mind...

 -

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.....