thoughts from the past few weeks

A while ago I came to a realisation and have decided to do something about it before the end of uni.

It occurred to me that I’m a bit of a collector.

When I move to somewhere new, after a while, I take out my camera and explore the intricacies, and general points of interest for me in whatever place I’ve adopted as a place of meditation (aka that chill out and breath space), generally the garden.

My current place is a garden.

This kind of garden is like the forgotten fingerprint of a place. A tell tale imprint of tenants past and present: The remnants of a proverbial flat BBQ; a stone placed haphazardly on a tree by some friends, mid conversation; a sofa, threadbare, exposing its weather-worn rusty springs; a thread of strawberry plants, once cared for and cultivated, now barely distinguishable amongst the overgrown, under tended foliage.

A garden.

Not in the traditional ‘white picket fence plus one’ sense, but a place of being, attached to a building. A little bit of outdoors, a shameful attempt at nature, that does barely more than facilitate a gap between one building and another. This says something about a place. This is what I collect.

So now I’m at a point where I have four or five groups of definite documentations of my spaces I find and don’t want to let another one go by without realising. This one I want to respond to a little, like some sort of thank you to the space for letting me use it, by using it a little more.

These photos have been a big influence on the work I’m doing now, but don’t fit into the whole degree show thing so I’m going to do it as an outside thing so as to bring some sort of context to the work inside.

Saturday

So Saturday…

I had a friends wedding Friday night so didn’t get home till very late. All week I’d had one of those hovering cold things where one minute you feel fine and the next you feel dead, I thought it had gone but by the time I got home the next morning I felt like rubbish and it didn’t really go away till about today.

So Saturday, later (but still early) that morning I headed up along the coast to a farm to spend the day there in the hopes of capturing some footage of lambs being born. I didn’t get an actual birth but I did get some newly born ones with their mum, which was pretty cool. I couldn’t believe how quickly after they’re born they get up and get going, it was pretty amazing to watch. Most of the day was spent with the farmers wife, showing me round the field and barns, feeding sick lambs, eating soup, and generally getting aquainted with the whole sheep lamb thing. I had no clue how much work was involved and definitely have respect for anyone who does it.

In the afternoon we spent a good few hours watching one particular ewe that looked as though it might lamb. (I became very aware of the fact that I’ve never stared so intently at anyone’s bum before.) It was a bit chilly so we spent the second half of the watch in the farm van in the middle of the field. Some time had passed when I suddenly realised that I was asleep (more than a little embarrassing, even if I wasn’t well, given that I was trying my hardest to pretend that I wasn’t, and they were surviving quite well with lamb induced lack of sleep.)

Since last September, every four weeks I’ve been helping with a prostitute outreach thing. It’s a bus run by a rehab centre and is essentially just a place for them to go and talk to someone, get help if they need it, or just a cup of tea and biscuit. It’s been going on for years and has been pretty awesome. As much as I look forward to my shift, I was pretty whacked and didn’t want to drive the hour there and again on the way back (finishing early Sunday morning) but I’d left it too late to swap with anyone so had to go.

Quite recently some laws were changed (that make me angry so I’m not going to go into them) but I means that where there was a relatively safe tolerance zone, now there isn’t and the girls are being arrested. In theory it sounds fair enough, but it means they’re being pushed into unsafe areas, or underground which is even worse. It’s been a total out of sight out of mind move by the government in my opinion and actually a pile of rubbish [insert rant here].

So yeah, the only reason I’m mentioning it is because it was decided on Saturday night that the bus should come to an end in order to re-evaluate the situation. It was a pretty sad moment, but a necessary one, the only girls left at the old tollerence zone are the occasional really young one who hasn’t been arrested yet, or the occasional older one that has been away for a bit and come back. Sometimes I find it hard to believe how much good can be ruined by the actions of just a few.

That said, it’s had it’s season and has done so much good that it could never be seen as a waste of time. Makes me really happy to know that there are people out there who care enough about people to set up and stick with projects like that.

It also meant I got to go home to bed an hour earlier than expected which was no bad thing.

the sun is out

Today is a gorgeous day! The sun is shining, the birds are singing and I’m stuck in a basement AV lab editing audio and film from last weekend, and I’m feeling pretty disillusioned with uni at the moment, struggling to find motivation for the final hurdle.

Despite the circumstances I’m in an inexplicably optimistic mood. I’ve been a bit sick for the past week and today is the first day my lungs haven’t hurt and I got a whole lot more sleep than usual last night so I guess the good mood’s not that inexplicable.

And it is actually a really gorgeous day.

couple of days

I've been off the circuit these last couple of days but have now returned.
The last few days have been a mad flurry of scooting between various places, collecting work, materials etc and trying to organise a trip to a farm this weekend to go film lambs being born. It's amazing how much time it takes to fit in all that stuff. Im developing an appreciation for the bus service here, it might not be the best but without it I'd be completely skuppered.
This morning I was shattered so decided to take my breakfast and eat it on the way to uni (the theory being that the quicker I got some fresh air, the quicker I'd wake up.) It turned out to be a gorgeously sunny morning, one of those when the sun streaks across the ground emphasising the shadows cast by city buildings and saturating the grass so that everything is shiny, green and blue.
There's a park on the way to the bus I catch so I decided to go there to have breakfast. Best plan ever!
It was so relaxing, as soon as you got in there the city around became stiffled background noise and the park in all it's peacefulness was all there was.
What a great way to start the day.

What to do?

"I'm like an honourary spectator in my own life.

Photographs bring people closer to life and reveal things we would never normally see. They force us to pay more attention to the subtleties and awesomeness of the world around us; to appreciate it a little more for its beauty. They can show us suffering, passion, harmony, or something as simple as a pebble on a beach."

It's coming to the end of my time at art school and I am so desperate to leave.

It's not that I don't love it here, it's just that I'm ready for a change. Some new water to float ideas around in.

Alas, before that happens there's a lot of work to be done, one particularly looming thing being the degree show. Thursday is the day that department year have to go get photos taken for the catalogue and I've been toying over what to put in. I mean, how can you choose one piece from a group of pieces that work as a whole (and perhaps I've over thought this a little) that is going to sum up the whole intention of your work, while simultaneously becoming an image that when people look back at the catalogue after the show they say 'hey, that was part of the work by that girl...[hopefully insert something positive]... who studied PEM'

My work has been a lot to do with perception and reality over the last few years. (hence the above quote from a couple of years ago) The connectivity of life on the whole. In particularly I've been exploring the role that photography (and art) plays in that. Photography can never be more than a representation of reality; a tool to record a moment that passes quicker than we have to acknowledge it's existence. For me it is often a means of looking and collecting in order to later reflect and dissect or ponder over that moment or thing that was, in a different context.

So I came to a conclusion that I'm not going to put a whole piece into the catalogue. Apart from anything else, some of the work as a whole wouldn't really translate to a 2D space in a book. I'm going to put in a part of an image that for me, connects back to the above quote, and to a certain extent, relates to my relationship to my work. The voyeur and the subject (although obviously I'm a little more hands on than a voyeur.)

This weekend

This weekend I’ve been considering daffodils.

I hadn’t intended on starting this short documentation of life leading up to the degree show on such a theological note, but given that this is essentially a space where I can freely articulate my thoughts, and my understanding (or lack thereof) of God is generally the basis for how I perceive the world, I decided to go ahead with it anyway.

I recently moved in with a good friend of mine. I met her on the Sunday, moved in Monday morning. After unpacking my stuff I noticed a vase of daffodils on my desk that she had put there for me.

It’s coming to the end of the time of year when daffodils are a common sight along verges and in parks in the city. There to be admired by passers by. I have been one of those admirers, frequently walking past a flurry of them on the days I choose to walk to uni, but none of them have meant as much to me as the few that sit on my desk.

A week or so went past and my daffodils that gave a cheery yellow greeting to the morning sun began to wilt. I began to ignore them a little so as to avoid the fact that I would have to throw them out soon.

I eventually resigned to the idea and headed to my room to carry out the sad act only to discover that my flatmate had replaced the old dead ones with new fresh ones.

The world we live in is laking in hope. The economy, the poverty, the insanity of it all. But somehow, don't ask me how, God is bigger than that. I guess this year has been pretty hard in the lack of time and inevitability that soon uni will be over, but not yet, and I just realised how easy it is to miss the daffodils if you don't just stop and evaluate. Daffodils are like a little sign of hope that spring is here and summer is just around the corner but they don't last forever. I've been stopping to take note of some daffodils lately but then they always seem to fade after a bit, but it always seems to be, that just when I'm about to give up hope, some fresh ones appear, just when you need them. They may not be earth shattering in they're affect, but that's not to say they're not appreciated.