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After some enriching conversations during catch-ups at events celebrating Hugh O'Donnell's life, I've been thinking in depth about art writing practices and the ways we engage with art for ourselves and how we communicate it to others. Explaining my Arts Council England-funded Developing Your Creative Practice project to Brian Patterson and Sandra Corrigan Breathnach of Bbeyond was hugely helpful in nudging me back on some sort of track with things somewhat derailed between mothers flinging themselves about with bone-shattering consequences and friends taken from us far too soon. With everyone's memories of Hugh flowing, my own encounters with him came to the fore, and so I'd like to add to my previous post another instance of where cause, effect and encounter led to my own early experiments with blurring the boundary between written documentation and live performance.  I may well be misremembering and misattributing as it was nine years ago, but let's run with ...

Prompt word: sunshine Are there any memories which this word ignites?   On an appropriately sunny afternoon in Newcastle upon Tyne, I have joined my first ever New Writing North writing hour. It’s a shut-up-and-write session that offers prompts to get the creative juices flowing. It is perhaps a little strange to do this over Zoom, but it feels less lonely and we’re more accountable to ourselves if we remove all distractions and feel the connection to other writers, even if we’re not seeing or listening to each other. I wish I had discovered it before, but there we go. I miss the shut-up-and-writes with the Deeners.    But I digress, for I am supposed to be writing about memories to do with sunshine. This is a struggle at the moment as I’m in the premenstrual phase of my cycle and I’m battling with insomnia, so my brain’s not interested in recall right now, but just muddling through the day! Andrew and I had a great cycle in the sun on Sunday, which it just occurs to me w...

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...

Before returning to Newcastle after a brilliant week and a half visiting family and friends and touring round Ulster, we hit up the Fringe. Last year we went to the closing weekend, leaving behind a tired, littered, dishevelled Edinburgh. This year we tried the opening weekend as the buzz was building and the acts still fresh. We learnt from last year’s rookie mistakes that we made despite warnings from hardened Fringers that venues can take longer to reach than maps indicate due to steeper-than-expected hills and the swelled volume of people occupying the streets. We had a relatively relaxed time this year, although we got roped into more audience participation than we’d bargained for. It was an excellent three days, and listed below are what we saw and my personal highlights. Saturday 5 Aug   Fringe Film Festival An intimate showcase of informative and thought-provoking international documentary and fiction shorts. The Guilty Feminist Our timing worke...