Pea Arts About

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