Pea Arts About

On 29 December 2021 as the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 settled in to its rampage across the UK, my party of three managed to visit Coventry and spend much of the day in the delightful Herbert Gallery and Museum . We tentatively booked our free tickets a couple of weeks before, unsure until the morning of 26 December that we'd even get away to the West Midlands to visit family. Testing negative on the Wednesday morning, Andrew, his mum (textile artist Jacky Shail ) and I struck out east from Malvern to the 2021 UK City of Culture and found the Herbert. The staff were welcoming, informative and helpful. We felt as secure as could be from seeing them regularly cleaning surfaces and kindly but firmly putting across a message of 'no mask, no entry' to anyone not covering their germ-holes. I'm going to mostly focus on the Turner Prize show in these notes, but it's also worth pointing out the venue's other offerings. The Herbert's museum section traces Coventry...

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 v...

Part 1 Part 2   Part 3   Part 4 Part 5 Part 6   Part 7   Culture as Threat The type of punk memories re/enacted in Good Vibrations were recorded at the time by filmmaker John T. Davis in Shellshock Rock (1979). The documentary was famously banned at the now much more liberal Cork Film Festival for its ‘poor quality’, that is, its energetic lo-fi presentations of bands’ live performances – an aesthetic now long standard in music videos – and the anarchic punks’ unsavoury behaviour (including instances of mooning), which, again, are tame by today’s standards. Davis’s film indicates that Good Vibrations is an accurate portrayal of twenty-first-century nostalgia for punk and the hopeful message in official peacetime invoked by the notion of Northern Irish punk having more in common with hippy values than the anger and style of punk’s branches in Britain, Ireland and North America. Good Vibrations also had to become a saleable product, and so appeal to the nostalgia ...

    A recent discovery in my growing self-awareness has been learning that within my broad love of cinema and art one of my favourite sub-genres is the art documentary. By that I mean documentaries about the art world, market, artists and practices rather than artists' films that are documentary in nature, although I'm partial to those too. The latter have often fuelled my research and teaching, but as a form of relaxation and more gentle learning, I do love a good doc telling me something about art and artists. It is a way of seeing that to which I typically do not have access because the works are hidden away in private collections or galleries I'll never get to visit. But far beyond mere interest and information, Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, written and directed by Halina Dyrschka and available to view now via Modern Films , simply blew me away. Hilma af Klint was a Swedish artist born in 1862 who made paintings substantial in size and sum and kept meticulous note...

At the end of February, I resigned from my lecturing post at University of Salford where my job and life had been made impossible largely by two senior women colleagues. In early March, I moved back to Newcastle upon Tyne, a city which has become home since I moved there from Belfast in August 2014. In a later post, I will reflect on my academic experiences and how my fraught relationship with the academy – but not research – has come to an end. For now, I am focusing on recovery and looking onwards. Spending International Women’s Day (8 th March) in a positive, safe and supportive space celebrating women and cinema was an ideal beginning to the healing process. The day was facilitated and hosted by Newcastle University’s Research Centre for Film (full schedule on its website here ). It involved an impressive breadth and diversity of film work and practitioners, sparking discussions on the women working on the periphery of industrial production, and inventive approaches to pres...