Linkages

Here are our first selection of images for the linkages exhibition it's a bit of a game of finding connections - shape colour politics, context style - a bit of what takes your fancy - each picture will be linked by a picture taken on our phines in the "real" world - came together really well and is a nice examples of how good ideas simply realised can work.

Understanding things

It seems to me that we move towards understanding things in a very simple way - even very complicated things and relationships. it's really easy to set up a smoke screen of complicated things which stop us realising and ultimately understanding that most of the important things we are interested in are quite simple and straightforward to understand but knowing what it is we want to understand is the difficult thing. Arts practice can present a way for us to experiment in a very unscientific way, to search for understanding through active engagement rather than through observation. I think that we should revisit the idea of methodology rather than method for our collaboration - I could dig out the AHRC application to revisit and see if we have any starting points for thinking about doing something in the new year.



I'm amazed that lots of teachers don't seem to want to understand what education is for and that lots of curators don't really question what collections are for and that lots of academics don't really question what their research is for and lots of artists don't think about what their work is for so perhaps this question of social responsibility is also one of agency.

Happy new Year

To everyone
Just to update you we didn't get our grant but somehow I feel relieved in that now I have space and time to think about this project.
I am also interested in where Steve and Kate are going, and their focus on social responsibility.
I like the idea of working on another project, something around the interface between artists and the world and using the object project as a case study.
I am in a writing mode and will happily write about stuff - am thinking about the move fromfunction to meanign and wishing I could go back to the heady days of functionalism.
ALso we have offered and had our offer accepted on a house right on the peaks on the edge of Sheffield.
Hurrah.

A New Year

1. So a new year dawns and my attempt to look sexy in a PVC Santa suit purchased from a sexy super store in the post Christmas sale begins to loose it's gloss. If we can only truly understand things in the past perhaps I need a little more distance from this impulsive purchase. If Walter Benjamin could see that suit crumpled on my bedroom floor he would be overcome by it's immense shadow. Anyway I've had a nice break over Christmas and done lots of thinking around Artemis and the project. I'm 90 percent happy with the way things have gone so far as I think I've learnt a lot about my work and how I want it to develop These are now so clear in my head I can almost write them as bullet points which I think I should do as I am often accused of going around the houses.

1. I think I have a much bigger social responsability than I realised and feel funny about been paid to produce my own work or have cpd opportunities ( This was unexpected)

2. I am really interested in sites and how I can influence them through practise.

3. Both me and Kate work very differently but we are both trying to engage people to look at things differently.

4. I've become really interested in the Agency of objects and ideas and I'm not sure where this has come from but it feels like the start of something - Doorstops spring to mind.

5. I find it hard to make space to make - something always comes up and gets in the way - I feel like Kate has much more focus than me and this is something about the discipline of drawing - I don't think I have a discipline and need to work on this - if my discipline is shifting systems and thought I need to understand this better.

6. I really want to collaborate more with other artists I think this will move my practise on as it will encourage me to communicate better.

So these are things I think I'm beginning to understand a bit better. I am going to take the pressure off and put it on again by not been too focused on producing a new body of work but giving myself a big chunk of time to work just on this project in April through to June so I can better define what my work might look like and how it will have Agency.

Working with lots of Artists on CP projects who feel like they are losing site of their own practise because they are doing too much work in schools I think I have had a good handle on this for a while but this project makes me question this as it is so much more personal but this also makes it feel a bit like a student project - a bit indulgent which goes back to bullet point 1 I think I will tackle this head on so I understand what my problem is. I think I need to become more positive about the role of artists within society and a bit more confident about my role and then it will not be as big an issue it will also be good for me professionally as I have noticed myself putting myself down a bit to much lately and this is very bad if your self employed and want to get people to engage with your work as if I think it's a bit pants everybody else will. Perhaps this is the result of a little two much navel gazing and not giving the project enough dedicated time which I always promise to do but never quite manage. So the Artemis project is becoming phased into introduction, exploration, and production and maybe this pattern could be something I carry into future work.

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doors stored for later

this made me smile so thought i'd post it up.
Anyway, was just thinking about drawing this and other things like it to add to my now growing library, i think photos arent quite art yet, although quite like the idea of snaps or something similiar, anyway ......
Also after someone suggested ive looked at foucault - the order of things. i like the bit the preface which is from an old chinese encylopedia where he orders animals my favourite from the list - animals that from a distance the look like flies.
Anyway, other suggested index, lists, systems, greatly appreciated.
was looking at artemis index last week - went in on thursday was good, spent the morning with the kitchen shelves, the index is standard in some sense but also completley unique, and arranged around nigels logic. Even shirley the admin and filing lady thinks its a mad system but knows how it works so wont change it! Love it
I think theressomething in this to add to our training activites , need to think on that.........................

doors str]

Library

So Kate I've being thinking about what a library is as opposed to a collection. Libraries do not have to be complete but they are repositories of information. This information does not have to be of interest or of real use but perhaps it needs to have potential use. I've just read this book about the man that made the first geological map of britain. He was involved in digging the canal system and collected samples from all the different strata and catalouged and recorded everything and found out loads of amazing stuff but he could only work this stuff out when his collection got to a certain size - a critical mass of information. The correlation I picked up between his and your library was that he didn't know what he was looking for when he started collecting he was just gathering evidence that he had a hunch would lead to something.

So I think that your friend was right and you need to just get stuck into collecting your library and it will become something and demonstrate potential use.