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Raining on the Sun , woodcut print 1/6, Clinton Kirkpatrick, 2013 While feeling drained and conflicted at the moment, it is a good time to look in detail at some artwork in my life. In early December I went to Clinton Kirkpatrick's open studio sale and bought a couple of his woodcut prints. I connected with Clinton initially through his involvement with the Amabie Project curated by Johanna Leech, and we spoke for the first time when recording an episode about his work for Audiovisual Cultures Podcast nearly two years ago. I have followed the development of his characters and methods since and always feel enriched by our conversations.   The pictured image Raining on the Sun is one of two woodcut prints I bought after pouring over a great many of Clinton's paintings and prints that morning. I was focused on finding something I could bring to Newcastle without getting mangled in my hand luggage as well as something that spoke to me. I think throughout the whole of my life I ha...

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 ...

On Saturday 26 November many of us woke to the deeply sad news of the death the previous day of artist and friend-to-all Hugh O'Donnell. Hugh was a member of the Belfast-based performance art collective Bbeyond, a studio-holder at Flax, and an active campaigner for disabled and LGBTQ+ artists and access to the arts. Most importantly, when you had a conversation with Hugh you came away feeling fantastic, elated, as if you and what you were doing mattered. His loss hits hard. I hadn't seen Hugh for ages, mostly because I hadn't been to Belfast for nearly three years and I didn't bump into him when I finally did visit again this summer. My encounters with Hugh, and often together with his partner Aaron, usually occurred when we were having a skinful at Late Night Art or after a Bbeyond performance monthly. In the interim we'd occasionally 'react' to each other's Facebook posts and that's how I knew he was okay and there.  I didn't see enough of Hugh...