Rainbow at the tip

Just went to the tip with Tim to dump half his house before he goes to France to study the Welsh for a year. Looked after their little one today remonded me of been a house dad when life was much simpler and much fuller and I didn't have to think as much but was busy doing something straightforward and useful (like growing things on the farm) anyway thought this was a nice image to leave on - taken on my phone and proving that one mans land fill is another mans pot of gold

Anderloucia

Seems to be working OK from this end Kate it sometimes takes a bit of time to load up - Put a comment on your pictures things but not sure if it will help. Time space compression is interesting as it's very current and again some thing we can measure using external and personal scales. The fact that time is relative to speed is really hard to get our heads around but irefutably true although Kim won't believe it or chooses not to. I must lend you my flat earth society book which is called earth not a globe? the writer Parralax suggest that we should only make judgements on things which are within our experience hence the world is flat.

The Shrodingers cat annalogy is interesting because non scientist think it's philosphical like the tree in the forest falling when nobody hears or sees it. Infact it's not at all it decribes a real situation of quantum and classical physics and is the meeting of two different scietific descriptions of the world rather than philosphy meeting science - the cat is actually alive and dead at the same time and the exceptance of this gives us a window on the quantum world.

Hope this posting is oblique and at a tangent enough to be of no use at all I suppose I'm thinking about the idea of representation to post something back to give a slightly different perspective but doing this in such a way that it doesn't change the state of the original thing - which might be your drawings of objects because they are representations of the original things - maybe you should play with the idea of space and represetation - put your work back into the context of the farm and see what sense it makes and observe what happens as it crosses into a different domain and how to make the effects these crossing have weak so they don't change the states of the original. Sorry to be so complicated and around the houses - you could read a little bit about uncertaincy theory then again it would be better to ignore this posting alltogether as I think I've gone off on one and can't be arsed to rework it because I quite like the rambling nuttyness of it.

I'm off now for 2 weeks with no intention of thinking about work as I need a break and will be reading sci fi shite but will look at blog eagerly on my return.

STEVE

trying to blog

trying to see if it works

input required

another photo of stones please compare to the next photo i will post up
i would like peoples thourghts ina compare and contrast thinking kinda of way
this is of the stones on the mantlepiece and we find them in the field when working or walking
This is for a smalle section in my dissertation i am talking about geology, transformation of landscape and time
anyway dont want to say much tell me what you think .........please and thanks

sorry they wouldnt load up -please help

please help

these 2 images are part of a section in my bloody dissertation!
the round stones as you know are from the farm the other image is of a section of geological samples from artemis - i liked it firstly because it made me think of a landscape all boxed - like a section of the earths crust, but that it looks like a kinda landscape to. The samples are all british and labeled as such. I want to compare/ contrast the two photos, i want to know what people think of these two images - in that what does it make you think in regard to landscape , representation, meaning etc etc but remember and its important you know im from a farm and the first image is things found there. The section is about geology, the transformation of earth, time and growth
Would be good to know what people think , you will be properly referenced! thanks in advance

these 2 images are part of a section in my bloody dissertation!
the round stones as you know are from the farm the other image is of a section of geological samples from artemis - i liked it firstly because it made me think of a landscape all boxed - like a section of the earths crust, but that it looks like a kinda landscape to. The samples are all british and labeled as such. I want to compare/ contrast the two photos, i want to know what people think of these two images - in that what does it make you think in regard to landscape , representation, meaning etc etc but remember and its important you know im from a farm and the first image is things found there. The section is about geology, the transformation of earth, time and growth
Would be good to know what people think , you will be properly referenced! thanks in advance

comments needed please

these 2 images are part of a section in my bloody dissertation!
the round stones as you know are from the farm the other image is of a section of geological samples from artemis - i liked it firstly because it made me think of a landscape all boxed - like a section of the earths crust, but that it looks like a kinda landscape to. The samples are all british and labeled as such. I want to compare/ contrast the two photos, i want to know what people think of these two images - in that what does it make you think in regard to landscape , representation, meaning etc etc but remember and its important you know im from a farm and the first image is things found there. The section is about geology, the transformation of earth, time and growth
Would be good to know what people think , you will be properly referenced! thanks in advance

Saying it all and saying nothing

Had a good meeting with Kate G on friday. We caught up on the project and decided we should spend some time at Artemis working at the site and with the people there. I'd been to a seminar on socially engaged arts practise and it had made me cross. I think I get annoyed by artists talking up their role and people making a fuss about the fact they have actually talked to a person as though this is something new. I do see a lot of value in the work and the way it can inform systems and change practises but I struggle with the idea of the arts as a social good and cultural entitlement as it all seems very class driven and paternalistic.

Anyway the chat with Kate seemed to be about focussing down - both Kates MA dissertation and the work at artemiss. Kate said I should get some sausage beans eggs and chips deadlines set and also fix the meal as I keep changing it - adding ketchup and sometimes even Bacon. It feels like an important thing to do - to map a plan and build a piece of work within a timescale so we move things on and a divergent stage comes convergent through practise.

The materialities stuff is interesting and the thing that makes this project art is that we will be making new stuff and I think we have come to a point where we should do this so we can move forward.

Just to say

I am off to New Jersey, going to talk to some teachers in Princeton about artefacts and identity - here is my friend Jennifer's account of her work;

Drawing on a longitudinal study that follows twenty high school students struggling with literacy in a secondary school in central New Jersey, I will consider student portfolios of texts as artifacts of identity (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain, 1998). Photographs, digital spaces, written work, artwork, family artifacts have been gathered, archived and reflected upon and the study builds on a recognition that the materiality of these artifacts have deep consequences and significance for these students’ senses of self.

Back on 31st July

mams mantle piece

thought kate and well others too might be interested to see this section of the mantle piece at the farm - just round stones and fossilised sea urchins, . The round stones we pick up off the fields, we think they are whats left behind after the ice age [where we live the ice was approx a mile thick] -me dad calls them 'ball bearings for glaciers'.

Threads and themes

I think what I am doing is following a thread.
Brian Street gave me that quote about the turtle and the fish and the thread started with Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Function) and then to meaning which Brian now says is in Pocock's Introduction to Social Anthropology which describes the shift in British Social Anthropology from the functional focus of Malinowski on the cargoes just as cargoes carrying stuff nothing more (Kate's just sheep pens) to the focus of people like Mary Douglas on pollution in Purtiy and Danger which is on the meanings generated by household objects (Steve's focus on flooded artefacts maybe).

I suppose I am trying to encourage a thread in the project which is about the ethnographic project, what it is and what it means for artists.
The turtle and the fish is the ethnographic space - it is really a thinking tool which is what Kate wanted.
It is about saying we are in this water, swimming around, what if we went on dry land?
Hope it helps. Don't want to confuse you all.

turtles and fish

are you asking me to consider either _ sometimes we cant be clear about what we want to say because we are just putting stuff out there , because if thats it, i meant not that we have to put up total considered clear ideas but more that we should not just expect everyone to know everything about each others area of expertise. like the fish or the turtle
or did you mean i have to embrace new things and not look at what im missing or whats not there? - because if thats it i do do that i hope pretty much all the time.

Sorry also because i find the blogs hard because i cant hear the intonation in the texts like in spoken word so cant grasp wether steves just on a tangent or being serious and on a tangent!

But now im moving on.xxxxxx

ok im back

so steve , i havent talked to kim, i just knew the wanker bit anyway - only joking!!!!!
here is the photo i thought about the other day, its of Holme Fen Post it was sunk into the ground in 1841 and shows the amount the soil has shrunk and eroded since then,- its on part of the fen where once was a lake and is now farm land, The lake was drained and the owners wanted to record the amount the land went down -currently its 13 foot, 6/7ft below see level, although the fields either side are about another metre lower [its near trees which have reduced the erosion rate]. I like it because its a measure of time and space [a bit like the kids getting bigger marks on door frames], but also the fact it was made specifically for this job, its unique - from and function united - i think, well not quite because it looks like a roman column, but nearly.

ok im bakc

Don't go just do it once a week

Don't leave perhaps we should each just post once a week and keep it more specific to the Artemis project - I may have put you off by posting to often and making it seem more important than it is and dominating the thing a bit with my babble. I will stop now and just post every friday with very specific stuff if you think this would make the platform more usefull for us and the project. I have a cold today and fell over while climbing over a wall in my sandles at four in the morning after poker and twisted my Knee so I'm feeling sorry for myself.

ummmmm2

i'm finding blogging hard, seem to have lost my way, might not be back for a bit, going to go and think about it all.

The Turtle and the Fish

Meanings of Ethnography
The Turtle and the Fish

To illustrate the error of ethnocentrism Buddhists relate the story of the turtle and the fish. There was once a turtle who lived in a lake with a group of fish. One day the turtle went for a walk on dry land. He was away from the lake for a few weeks. When he returned he met some of the fish. The fish asked him, "Mister turtle, hello! How are you? We have not seen you for a few weeks. Where have you been? The turtle said, "I was up on the land, I have been spending some time on dry land." The fish were a little puzzled and they said, "Up on dry land? What are you talking about? What is this dry land? Is it wet?" The turtle said "No, it is not," "Is it cool and refreshing?" "No it is not", "Does it have waves and ripples?" "No, it does not have waves and ripples." "Can you swim in it?" "No you can't" So the fish said, "it is not wet, it is not cool there are no waves, you cant swim in it. So this dry land of yours must be completely non-existent, just an imaginary thing, nothing real at all." The turtle said that "Well may be so" and he left the fish and went for another walk on dry land.
In another version the fish said ‘Don’t tell us what it isn’t, tell us what it is’. ‘I can’t’ said the turtle, ‘I don’t have any language to describe it’.

This is the version that can help us understand what is involved in ethnography. If we go to another place, our first inclination is to describe it in terms of what it does not have that we are used to – wet land, waves, for the fish; maybe science, or coca cola for westerners travelling in the East; religion or rice for Easterners travelling in Europe; etc. An Ethnographic perspective shifts us out of this mind set and helps us firstly to ‘imagine’ things that do not exist in our own world and then to understand them in their own terms rather than to see them, in our terms, just as ‘deficits’.


I think this is helpful for thinking.
Next time I will give you the social anthropology family tree.

The Shoulders of Giants

Newton said he could only see so far as he stood on the shoulders of Giants but he said this ironically as he thought he was much more clever than any of his peers but he was also mad as he had boiled mercury in a pan and poisoned himself as he tried to make gold. I think that the search for clarity of meaning and context is important on the blog but also it's interesting to drop things in from a tangent - We all have different areas of knowledge and thinking to share. At the moment I like to think around making theory physical. So stuff which seems really complex and deep can be made really clear by making an example of it. Fine art departments seem to be a bit locked in positioning practise in the context of art history rather than social function so I think that your struggles with your dissertation are about placing your work in a theorectical framework and your reading is drawing from a massive field of theory which often contradicts itself. Anyway I think Paul Nash landscapes are the most empty and desolate paintings I've scene but they do romantisize this desolation. So I like the idea that we should be talking more about our own thinking than referencing others especily if this is not helpfull and a bit obscure but if it's helpfull we maybe need to talk about it more and how it relates to the project.

shorthand

well had an interesting end of week conversation with a guy who i met at an opening and he was telling me about a course he went on in hungary hungary thats aim was to explore and develop your critical thinking and talking. Basically they get torn down in week long series of crits, not sure thats always helpful i said, but he did say what was good was they were not allowed to use shorthand to describe a point, for example couldnt just name an artist to explain an idea or for us talk about auras and expect people to know what that meant. They all had to be clear, and fully expand the thoughts, he said that they achieved equally succint points and they reached total considered clarity and it excluded no one.
Could this be a plan?, i sometimes get confused with whats being said!

Family resemblance

I thought we should mention Wittgenstien and family resemblance as it sort of fits in and I thought we could all collect a little family of things which is a bit like the encounters shop which can be seen here (Kate tell me how to do a Hyperlink) Google encounters and Sharrow) I took a picture of my dog the other day and it reminded me of Kate P picture on her Blog - I am going to call it "avoiding the Canine Gaze" it may be the start of a family

Floods and mearsures

Synergy and lenses I thought as I'd talked about floods and rulers I should but a picture of my Pitch Pine game keepers flood measure stick. It's interesting but I'll stand corrected by Kate G who comes from a long line of Dutch Dam builders who reclaimed the land of lincolnshire only to loose it 100 years later to the rising waters. But it appears to be marked in a relative scale and it's decimal from a time of feet and inchs - the local production of a measure to be used localy and by an individual seems to fit with the idea of specific use tied to specific individual. I'm going to make some egg beans and chips lottery cards. Asked a sound artist to make a soundscape about eggs beans sausage and chips and he said no - it was my first failure but I did learn that I need to present things differently to different people.

Items from the Flood

Kim has collected a World War Two German Bomb fin washed from the sediment of the River Don and found by a man from Record Collector. A Star A-frame poster - saying "Priceless Treasures Damaged in City Flood". Photographs and stories. She has also collected a Kilner jar which came from Burton's butchers shop in Attercliffe which got filled with water by the flood so it's kind of protogenisised itself. (I made that word up) A Sylvester the cat soft toy with no nose washed up in the street. Half the city's social history collection has some sort of flood damage - they will make a decision on a few key items which will not be conserved: A silk satin embroidered Victorian screen with a serious tide mark will not be fully restored and there will be a few other items too.

the first use of the term Clagnut is attributed to VIZ comic circa 1986

My quote is from today which was in many ways horrible and hard work but I was trying to get a group of kids to think of a superhero with animal powers a year 1 student came up with androgenously named

"Pigeon Person who's super power was to poo and peoples shoulder" why is it always the shoulder.

some quotes

as my role in this project is to be the academic, here are some quotes for the day:

Contemporary urban geographies have worked extensively with conceptualisations of space and place and their importance for both identifications and identity formation. Thus place and identity are powerfully connected, but often in ways which involve active processes of exclusion. (Reay and Lucey 2000)

Pam's Bakery, his mum used to work at Pam's Bakery. I remember when I was at Junior School I would go there for a bottle of pop, they were really nice people, I mean they got to know you, Mr [name of informant] my dad was really well known around here. The lady at the shop, you know right at the top of Ferham Road, on the corner, there's a shop that sells all stuff there. If you go in there and ask about my dad she goes "oh yes Mr K***" of course because he used to go in there all the time and she has fond recollections of him still. (Informant, Ferham Families project)

No one lives in the world in general (Geertz 1996:262)

To live is to live locally and to know is first of all to know the place one is in. (Casey 1996: 18).

They’ve got great memories of sort of how they were living, even right down to er you know where Braggatt Park is now, they’ve knocked all the houses down as you go down the dual carriageway, that is where used to live, just over there, as you go down take a right into Kimberworth road there, go down there and the houses back off and the toilets would be at the rear, and they went to Kimberworth school. (Informant, Ferham Families project).

Places form a reservoir of meanings which people can draw upon to tell stories about and thereby define themselves. (Thrift 1997: 160)

Helen Sharmen

Helen Sharman is interesting as she is from Sheffield and was the first British astronaut - I thought she should be a cosmonaut because she went up with the Russians but because she was a westerner they called her an astronaut which, if we are talking about word meanings and values , is very interesting.

I'm really interested in personal connections with history - growing up in a small village I have few but I'm sort of connected to the war through my dad and it was interesting seeing the model of the R100 airship at Artemis as my grandad helped to drag it from it's hanger at Howden and we have a postcard from America from one of my gran's friends who burnt on the way back.

We all connect with history but few of us connect with authorised historical narratives and the points we connect have increased power or perhaps aura.

Anyway Helen Sharman loaned her flame retardent space underwhere to an exhibition about underwear Kim did back in the day. Michael Palin donated a pair of pouch fronts from an indian Dow when he got deli belly in Pole to Pole but not many other celebrities coughed up their briefs. So to add substance to the exhibition I manufactured a pair of electically heated briefs which most people assumed were real.

Now I would realise that the reason people thought they were real was nothing to do with the fact I'd made them look real but that they were in a museum exhibition and had entered the Authorised Heritage Discourse.

Helen Sharman tripped while lighting the olympic flame at the World Student Games in Sheffield - you need to come from Sheffield to understand the significance of this, but context and often retrospective context is 92% of meaning.

ummmmmmmm

well to catch up, steve suggested a weekly photo of the farm to gain a sense of place so here is a photo of tesco direct, made from parts of a tesco lorry, with added extras.Its used behind a quad bike to fetch sheep in from feild so we dont have to walk, hence - direct from field to pen. Wanted also to point out the floor is slatted for wee to escape through and to make washing out easier, however the back door when down is steep and so sheep find it a bit difficult , so some time is wasted in the loading!

kate can you direct me to something writen about the canoes and the cargo, i am reading a great book currently - perceptions of the environment - essays in livelihood, dwelling and skill. T Ingold and in this he also talks about similiar things - anyway would be good to see source.

lou very excitied about tape - address is 79 main road, uffington, stamford, pe9 4sn 0771 364 7715 i promise to look after and safe return, maybe payment in a print will surfice? Also I concur with commets re value etc

steve re sheep who cant be bothered to stand to eat and kneel, its to do with them having bad front feet - foot rot normally and so they kneel out of pain! - just to set you straight. Anymore farming questions will obviously be answered forth with !!!!
Also what about chicken tikka masalla, as its now the nations favourite dish ? where does that fit?

Well for me this blog is interesting to read and hard to post to, steve i know likes to talk and finds it easier to put out there the thinking, i find it hard, it comes back to the "im stupid hangup" but i will try. Please dont respond with a "your not thick" comment , i was not fishing for compliments.!!!!or even reassurances
With regard to objects in collection, i was reading about the weaving of a basket this morning and how the writer considered the basket to be grown, not made and then linked this to the landscapre and how this is grown not made and i am now considering this. I like the fact he thinks that the distinction between living things and and artefacts is soft and that these things are not that different.
Also was reading about other stuff for dissertation and came across something that made me think about the peck, and other measuring devises in artemis - they set the parameters of the process but do not prefigure the form, thought this was interesting also in thinking about feilds and the activity that happens in them etc etc....... so still thinking about the cargo!!

well there you go, make of that what you will

tesco direct = 1 sheep and between 1 and 3 lambs

Blogs

I like Blogging. At the Social Anthropologists national conference I got really interested in the fact that lots of the ethnographers wrote field notes in a different language and then wrote them up in their first langauge and sometimes put them into English for their PHD or journal entries. There was a big discussion on how the language changed the lens and the perspective. I got really interested in the idea of field notes and had a look about for some information - methods of gathering them. This was why I thought I'd keep a journal written in long hand as I've not really picked up a pen to write in joined up since I did my a levels. My Physio says that when I hold a pen my first rib pops out of alinement and this is an anchor for the pelvis - my Pelvis and sacreal joints give me annual problems so writing does actually make me ill.

Anyway a lifetime of avoiding writting long hand could not be shifted and although i baught a nice new book with lines on one side and graph paper on the other I could not bring myself to write much in it. My Ethnographer friend Tim has started doing Audio recorded field notes perhaps I'll try this but I think I'd never bother to listen to them - sound as a medium is sometimes very dense and linier.

I just read a transcript of an interview with Helen Sharman the first british person in space who came from sheffield. It was left on my desk and I was just about to put it in the Bin. Transcripts of spoken words are like copies they are a literal transfer of spoken word to paper and occupy a funny modle space - we read them with our text brain but they are infact not written text but words used as a camera to present a conversation - people use this re-presentation in Verbatum theatre but it feels to me that some of the conversations about authenticity and representation could be explored through thinking about transcripts - Might have to revisit Barthes on this. Anyway Helen has just left the earths atomosphere and says.

'When I was in space, the gulf war was happening and the ground war had recently started and I could look down and actually see the fires. Now seeing fires from space is quite rare, usually you see the smoke because the wind blows smoke in straight lines, your eye sort of follows these rather unnatural lines on the earths surface, but to actually see the golden glow of fire is very rare because it has to be extremely big and we could see those fires, that was scary.'

So I like the blog for now as I feel like I can keep it up so I'm going to ditch the long hand journal as I don't seem to be able to get out of the Dyslecsics habit of a lifetime of avoiding writing longhand and it didn't give me a lens or a new way of reflecting or ordering thoughts it just made me guilty for not doing it

Perhaps we should do one to one interviews at 2 points across the project and get them transcribed so we can see if this brings out a different type of information?

New commision

So beans sausage and egg and chips have now become political. Somebody raised the issue that unless the sausage was Halal the meal may not be appropriate for use with Muslim families. You can buy Halal Battered sausage from our chippy they are made of turkey and lamb,cooked in Palm oil so vegeterians can eat the cheese risoles. Spicy bean burgers at burger king are cooked in chicken fat and they have converted their delivery trucks to run on the old oil so their chicken burgers are delivered by chicken power but at least it's carbon neutral.

Everything especially food is political. I've asked an author I know to do an exersise where she rights a descriptive passage about eggs chips sausage and beans and then re-writes it while eating a plate full to see if multysensory proximity allows a closer rendition through words of objects .she is veggie but not Vegan (Like the rapper who can only ethically rap about chips and beans) So I talked to her about foods which tried to look and taste like meat and if this related to ideas of motif or symbol she is christian but not catholic. It made me remember transsubstanciation from when I did the reformation at school and I wondered if its just the fact I've started to frame my thinking through the lens of sausage, chips egg and beans but tonight the kids Dinasaur burgers took on a semiotic meaning which related to canoes and cargo and funtion and extintion and things which were made of meat trying to look like dinosours covered in breadcrumbs and things which were made of reconstituted fungal mould look like meat. I'm now going to watch the synthetic chiken scene from erasorhead I've not seen it for a while and it's a cracker - we must all watch the this is this scene from the dear hunter and the synthetic chicken scene from erasure head and if we are in the country the way sheep walk about the fields and leave traces - I like them lazy bastard sheep who sort of collapse their front legs to eat grass so they don't need to keep bending other. More wine - I wonder why those two London artists buggered off and set up their own blog last time - perhaps I was too much.

Beans sausage and chips

Well made it to the blog third time lucky. I too enjoyed yesterday and the day is now mythologised. Louise you should not have role envy we all travel different paths and yesterday as I'm sure you realise is not a normal day for us most days we bash our heads against numerous educational projects which slip through our fingers like dust.

I've had a very busy day today and developed a conceptual piece of work which I will now unfold. It came to me last night while eating my tea and I'm really happy with it as it traverses hi art ontology and rhizomatic practices. I will call it three fakes and an authentic. So building on the idea of the motif which evolved from the "This is This bullet statement made by Robert denero in the dear hunter I have combined this with something kate said about the tautological nature of drawing and developed a piece of work around Egg and chips and beans and sausages which of cause is the modern archetypical meal.

So in simple terms inspired by the plated tudor meal in the box which was in the kitchen at artemis I started thinking about presenting a modern meal to bring the collection up to date. Clearly this had to be eggs sausage chips and beans. I'd been drawn to these items because they are clearly in many ways very realistic but do not look real. so in terms of semiotics they are symbols of the things they represent but they don't look like symbols they look like an attempt at realism David would use a big word which begins with an M which means copying nature but I cant remember it or what comes after m so I can't look it up - David if you look at this remind me what it is.

So I started thinking about what the boxes were used for - disruption and habitous - freezing defrosting and refreezing in a cycle and thought about Kate p s Canoes which she kept refering to in a fragment- like a 2 sentance history of british anthropology which made lots of sense and no sense. And I decided that if I could make a loan box which had three representations of eggs chips beans and sausages it would be the modern meal but could be used in schools to talk about notions of the real and the copy and possibly the hyperreal as a concept but as a materiality not as an idea which I think would be a new funtion and a new use for the artemis collection changing the habitous to create a new object in a new context which would have authenticity linked to funtion rather than meaning.

So this morning I rang my friend who makes film props and we are going to speak to special effects people and together fashion a Hyper real plate of eggs chips and beans and sausages and chips - this is the key to the work - I then thought I'd buy a jokeshop plated breakfast and a seaside rock breakfast. I'd commision artemis to make a lones box which would bring the item into the collection and thats as far as I got.

To extend the idea of crossing domains I've commisioned an MC to rite and record a rap about Sausage egg and beans but he is Vegan so says he will have to do Veg sausage and no egg. I've also commisioned a photographer to capture the most realistic picture he can of the above meal.

So I think I was spured into action yesterday I'm happy with this as a concept but welcome suggestions it hinges on our ability to make a hyper real meal which will not be easy but perhaps it may be about the journey - STEVE

I thought yesterday was stimulating on lots of levels. I guess a theme for me is how we facilitate 'a giving permission' to allow our slightly-less-to-the-fore-selves (or identities, as we are all multiply identitied) some fresh air, myself included. As an ex-art student and not-practising-at-the-moment practitioner, it was really great to re-engage with that aspect of myself and - yes I was swamped by role-envy! - but I loved looking at the work and truely enjoyed the dialogue we were having - the sort that I used to have a lot but not so much now - and what it made me think about when I got home. Its also made me introduce parts of the dialogue here at my work - with interesting take up - so now I am having that dialogue more even as we speak - result!

If 'perceiving the practical need' or worrying about what we should be doing (according to....?) boxes us into a default way of responding to the context, yet pushing ourselves to explore alternative values (thereby questioning whether the practical and operational has always got to come top of the hierarchy) proves fruitful (even if it feels a bit counter-intuitive and selfish compared with habitual ways of being) are we modelling a freedom, that, in the long term, actually serves the social good of freeing us all up?

Wouldn't it be great if the project incidentally resulted in teachers being inspired to use the loans collection in a different way than to support the teaching of history because the work gave them that permission? and even greater if we have no control over how they do that or that we discover that they do it in totally unanticipated ways. Wouldn't it be great if the academic community recognised that this work is, in fact, lifelong education in action, for the artists and researchers, and for anyone subsequently touched by the work, and that lifelong education isn't just mature students having HE done to them, that CPD can be many things in many different informal contexts -

anyway the most important thing being we have a green light for the pig tape measure and it is in the post to me and will send on to Kate G when UI get an address

so long, Lou

Welcome to our blog!

I thought we would get going by thinking about what Louise raised about the relationship between value and need.
In the gold case, for the Rotherham project, we realised that gold had a different value than we, as Westerners, associated with it.
In this project, what is valued seems to be at the heart of the project - is it a Papyrus from the time of Moses or Kate's father's wheelbarrow?
Answers on a postcard please.