Pea Arts About

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