Pea Arts About

This week, I completed my eighth and final session of online Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. My teen years spent chatting inanely to friends on MSN instant messenger trained me well for this strange but hugely positive eventuality. Given the lengthy waiting lists - 13 months, I was told in September - for talking therapies, I was offered live messenger sessions that are more experimental and have a short waiting list. I was tentative because the idea of typing everything out was daunting. But I considered it realistically. Since having a prolonged breakdown four years ago from stress caused by workplace bullying, I have struggled with speaking. If you're aware of my podcast , you might think this strange, but I'm a damn good editor. I salvage decent slivers and piece them into something coherent. In a way, that's what I've always done as a child and now as an adult maker of things and stuff. Maybe I'm in the process of becoming the Hollis Frampton or Chris Marker of

Marianne Hirsch opens chapter 9 of her book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust by outlining Hal Foster’s identification of an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art around the turn of the millennium. For Foster, it is an impulse in contemporary artists to connect the unconnected and redress failures in cultural memory through creating imaginary pasts and futures. Hirsch, however, applies the notion to readings of postmemory, aftermath work that seeks to ‘reclaim historical specificity and context’ (pp. 227–8). A similar turn, or at least something in between the two, can be drawn from the sort of work I studied for my PhD on visual culture in contemporary, post-Agreement Northern Ireland. But that’s if you look at the more widely known names in art and film there. Beyond them, something else has been going on, but a lack of regular critical engagement and analysis – itself lacking appropriate platforms and resources – means the e

November's episodes of Audiovisual Cultures podcast have been all about audio drama. In 78 we heard from producer, director, writer and actor Jack Bowman about his varied career in audio drama since the emergence of the medium then known as digital downloads and now popularly considered to be podcasts. In 79 we hear even more about working in this medium from Brendon Connelly who talks in detail about the Scooby-Doo/Buffy-inspired spooky series Circles made in lockdown earlier this year, created and co-written by Brendon and directed by Jack. It's been a time of reflection for me about the podcast. It's been a long hustle to make it, promote it and keep gathering a following. Progress feels glacial, but it is progress. I've made tremendous improvements and developed many skills in editing, recording, presenting, interviewing and marketing, and am always making tweaks as I learn new things.  In these two episodes, we talk quite a lot about the logistics and challenges

It was our dear friend Sandra Johnston who was tasked with the difficult work of telling us that Sally had died on 11 November. When I first moved to Newcastle in August 2014, Sandra had already been here for a couple of years. She was travelling when I moved across, and put me in email contact with someone who had become a close friend and who was involved in organising a site-specific screening I'd find really interesting. Sally had me go round to her house and we chatted and got to know each other a little. I felt like I'd known her for ages, perhaps because we both felt affection for Sandra.  Sally drove us out to Lindisfarne and we parked up, met the rest of the group attending the screening, and all walked across to Holy Island, carrying the kit and supplies. Those with the tech and equipment set up a screen, a generator, a laptop and a projector. A bright, long summer's day in the North, we chatting and picnicked and listened to a Northumbrian piper as we waited for

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Part 6  Repeating History In addition to the similarities between Northern Ireland and Chile, Good Vibrations and No were produced and released in the wake of political shifts to the right in the leadership of both governments. A coalition government led by the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was established in the UK in 2010, replacing the Labour leadership held since 1997. In Chile also in 2010, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera was elected President, replacing the now dissolved Concertación, or Coalition of Parties for Democracy, voted in after the 1989 general election. While the Conservative government remains in power due to the UK’s firmer shift to the right after the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, Michelle Bachelet of the Chilean Socialist Party, was returned as President in 2014, only for the billionaire Pi ñera to be re-elected in 2018 (Chilean Presidents understandably cannot hold office for consec

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4   Part 5   Reconfiguring Time and Place A number of years before the resurgence of Belfast’s live music scene in the early 2000s and the more widespread simultaneous nostalgia for punk, vintage and vinyl that has emerged and grown since, Duncan Campbell’s video installation Falls Burns Malone Fiddles (2003) captures the intensity of the working class youth culture in the 1970s and 1980s that gathered around energetic live music and was fuelled by an ethos of dissent against distension. The video’s title derives from a phrase commonly seen in graffiti in Belfast during the conflict, and is indicative of class tensions between different areas of the city. This same class tension, or more specifically, anger against privilege, emerges in much of the punk lyrics of the time. 1 The images in Campbell’s work consist of photographs from the time held in the Belfast Exposed photographic gallery’s archives. It gives movement to still photographs of underpr

In buying myself a bit more time over the half-term period to work on part six of my 'Re-Viva la Revolución' series , I thought you'd be keen to hear all about my recent adventures where I had never been before. My partner is one of those late Gen-Xers who has since childhood loved Star Trek ( The Original Series hereafter) and Star Wars (he fervently will not refer to the original film by its retrospective subtitle 'A New Hope'). Although a self-professed sci-fi nerd, I could have happily lived the whole of my life without seeing any of either franchise. He has most certainly irreversibly changed that outlook. While I have now seen, let me see, the first and third Star Wars trilogies plus Rogue One and Solo , and I admit to enjoying the outlanders of the franchise Rogue One and The Last Jedi , I would maintain that I am not a fan. But when it comes to the Star Trek universe (galaxy, really), I hugely enjoy the company of the characters and the knowledge that flo