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