Pea Arts About

I've had heaps on lately and haven't been blogging but I couldn't let this week pass without marking Array Collective's historic win of the 2021 Turner Prize. Although Willie Doherty has been nominated twice before and 2014 winner Duncan Campbell had studied and worked in Belfast, this is the first time the UK art prize - which began in 1984 - has been awarded to artists from Northern Ireland. And what a win it is. While important, this is so much more than acknowledging the work of individuals and even collectives, as is the emphasis of this year's exhibition. For us nordies it's recognition, it's not being so much a place apart, it's being seen and heard at last, it's no longer being the little backwater to be pitied, written off and ignored. The vibrant subculture out of which Array emerged and have taken by the horns has been around for a while. Through their concentrated efforts they're charging ahead, showing how it's done and what can

For a while now I've thought that our most impacting encounters with art and culture occur when we are most receptive to the ideas they present. I have often felt like a latecomer to a lot of things I or others feel I should know more about, but sometimes we're not ready or interested enough to engage with. As I've written on this blog a few times over the last year or so, coming to Star Trek after ignoring the franchise for 35 years keeps inspiring revelations in me and it has gone far beyond being just a set of television shows I enjoy. It strikes me that in exploring 'the final frontier' it is really confronting humans with the first frontier: understanding and knowing ourselves in all our complexity. I wrote before about feeling an affinity with Klingon anger, but with their relative absence in Enterprise - which I've been watching for the last few months - I have gradually felt even more of a connection with the Vulcans. More than ever before in Spock (L

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge . As I've written about before , this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her. Messy adaptation for a performance prop. It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not per

Continuing our Star Trekking with Enterprise has got me thinking about the general landscape of media in the 2000s. It is a show that was unfortunately timed, going into production in early 2001 and premiering in September that year, just a couple of weeks after 9/11. It just wasn't the time for naive exploration, mishaps and making galactic friends and allies with some friction and enemies along the way. The 'noughties' became a gravely toned decade for US television in response to attacks on their soil, and related themes and issues such as torture, internment, collateral damage, weapons of mass destruction, distrust, paranoia, large-scale warfare, razed cityscapes, and learning that not all baddies are baddies that are familiar in more directly relevant shows such as 24 . These begin filtering through Enterprise around halfway through season 1 as the writing caught up with current events and are all-encompassing by season 3 which first aired in 2003/4. In addition to

On 6 May 2021 I attended a free online creative writing taster workshop offered by Newcastle College. I had a really nice afternoon with an interesting bunch of people. We talked about writing in the present tense to pull in the reader, finding ways of giving information without explicitly telling it. A task we built up to was writing around memories of a single piece of clothing as a vehicle for defining relationships and characterization. The others edited as they went, whereas I spill out everything in my head, my hands usually struggling to keep up with my brain. I like having a lump of clay to work with in the edit. Here is what I wrote that day: I once had this gorgeous black jumper-dress. It is such a big regret that I ever gave it away. I wore it all the time. I'd still wear it now. What was I thinking? I ordered a size 12 but they sent a 24. But it was class. I could dress it up or down. I could be slouchy and comfortable or I could put on a broad, brightly coloured belt a

Back in January, a friend drew my attention to a book series inviting proposals for monographs. Here is my informal pitch that was knocked back within an hour of emailing it to the series editors who said the topic was interesting but wasn't a fit for them. I welcome comments, suggestions and discussion because I'd really love a crack at this and I think there's something in it. Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Paula Blair peablair@gmail.com Dear [...], I am writing to propose a volume for your Adaptation and Visual Culture Palgrave series. Provisionally titled Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable , the book would examine the intricacies of acts of adaptation and appropriation in Damien Hirst’s major exhibition in Venice, Italy, in 2017. ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ exhibited hundreds of items across two major galleries, many of which were claimed to have

I wasn't planning to post anything this week as I'm working on other things that, although not urgent, I feel a sense of urgency to complete, but the sun is too good and rare to waste. I just had to recharge, grab a pen and paper, and jot something down about what I'm working on.  My own work plans are on a bit of a hiatus while I have the great undertaking of contributing to various aspects of activities amounting to retrospective and memorial events for my dear friend, the artist Sally Madge. I'm compiling an audio patchwork of testimonies generously provided by people who've known and been impacted by Sally in some way, and I am in the process of finishing textile artworks Sally had been working on for some time. The aim is that an exhibition and symposium will take place in November around the first anniversary of her death. The textile work is something Sally talked about when she kindly guested on Audiovisual Cultures podcast in 2019. Her idea for the finishe

Quite some time ago when I told my friend Sandra Johnston about my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project and interest in work attributed to Damien Hirst, she recommended I read Gene Ray's 2005 book Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory , particularly the essay about Hirst's more morbid works involving live, dying and dead flies and so on. I was in the full throes of the research in late 2019 / early 2020 and writing my draft work up in these blog posts on a weekly basis with the aim of compiling enough to form the basis of a book manuscript to structure and edit. Then came the enormity of the cumulating pandemic in March last year.  There was a week that month when Newcastle University - my partner's employer - went from announcing 'business as usual' on the Sunday to giving staff less than two days' notice to clear out of their offices by the close of business on the Friday. The library invited its members to ransack its shelves with

On 17 June I had the great pleasure of returning to an art gallery for the first time since early March 2020. With lockdown restrictions easing, spaces have been able to open up again with measures in place aiming to keep visitors safe while they encounter the work. As exciting as it was for me to get back out - I've been voluntarily isolating as much as possible since 12 March last year - the Delta variant is rampaging through England, and in that week in Newcastle alone known cases had risen by nearly 800 from the week before. So it was not without a degree of angst and caution that I entered the Hatton Gallery for the Newcastle University Fine Art Degree Show . While it was great to be in the presence of art objects placed in space again, and as much as I enjoyed the nostalgia the degree show always gives me for the heady opening nights at the Belfast School of Art equivalent, the hyper-awareness of other people and everyone's aerosol entering the space - because masks only

Bertha Dochouse has become a major source of access to documentary cinema for me and I’m sure many others since much of our lives moved online. As things open up in the UK, Bertha continues to stream exciting documentaries from all over the world. Concentrating on a short few weeks at a women’s dorm at a rehabilitation detention centre in Tehran, Sunless Shadows (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei, 2019) shown on their website last week was right up my alley.  Having spent a chunk of my PhD looking at women’s imprisonment, the experiences of women and girls as what many think of as perpetrators continues to fascinate me because the stigma is so much greater when crimes are committed by members of a sex/gender that is supposed to be caring, nurturing, demure and passive. It is all the more shocking when that crime is murder. Sunless Shadows focuses on a group of young women who passed breaking point and took the life of an abusive man in their lives. The film is shaped around autonomous video diar

I wanted to highlight my latest lecture video about Shirley Clarke because she's a film-maker who represents a lot of what I feel is my unfinished business in film studies. I had so wanted to research her in depth and some day visit the UCLA archives of her work. Never say never, I guess, but I'm sure there are people working on her and doing a fine job of progressing what scholars such as Lauren Rabinovitz initiated in redressing the shameful marginalising of Clarke's work in film histories. I use plural histories here because she crossed the too-oft gate-kept boundaries of documentary, social realism, experimental, independent and avant-garde cinemas. I find her work utterly fascinating, and I've only been able to see a little of it first-hand. It has galled me since I learned of Clarke (after my own formal film education I might add, and from my mentor Dr Des O'Rawe who was doing his own 'decolonising' of his knowledge and teaching, which he passed onto m

Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was jus

As I grapple with an inner tug-of-war about reasonable reactions to things, I have come to appreciate depictions of rage more and more, particularly when it comes to the deep wounds of trauma. Many of us who remain scarred by the harm incurred from the actions of others have to make tremendous, often invisible, efforts to mask anger so often triggered by any number of inconsiderate, rude, obnoxious, mean, nasty or thoughtless actions. It is all the worse when the behaviour comes from someone oblivious to their own effect on the people or environment around them. Then there's the self-doubt that you're being too sensitive or unreasonable. Minefield. One of the things I have apprecated from my late-in-life Trekdom (it was bound to come up again - we're on season 4 of Star Trek: Voyager now) is the unapologetic grumpiness and anger from loner characters including the marginalized Klingons Worf (Michael Dorn; raised by humans and traumatized by the tragedies wrought by his own