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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...

Last one of these attached to Linda France's New Writing North climate residency and not sure what we'll get up to yet. My writing lately has been scraping at the edges of my DYCP Treasures project and planning for a guest seminar for my friend Jenn's MA module on language in TV and film taught from a linguistics perspective. Getting back in Metz after a long time away from film semiotics and it's giving me such a lift at a tough time. His final book Impersonal Enunciation was beautifully translated into English my Cormac Deane in 2016 and it's a breath of fresh air.  Linda is asking us to think about place. The places in my mind currently are my mum's room in the intermediate care home she's in while rehabilitating from surgery on a badly broken hip. If that's where I choose then we're staying with it for the session. Ok, let's document it.  Prompt 1: Describe this place. Write freely and loosely, but remember detail. There's a little nature...

With my mum in hospital and the uncertainty around her care, and then all the running about that having a close relative in hospital involves, it has been difficult to find headspace for writing at all, and writing for my DYCP project specifically. Rather appropriately, I started vaguely reading Geoff Dyer’s Out of Sheer Rage: In the Shadow of D. H. Lawrence (Abacus, 1997) in which Dyer wants to write a book about D. H. Lawrence but finds himself doing anything but writing a book about D. H. Lawrence. This is my current experience with my Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable project. At least my ACE grant is about developing practice and doesn’t expect a big shiny outcome other than a report on the development of your practice. But I do really want a manuscript to come out of it. So I’m carving snatches of time between hospital runs to write something , even if it’s skirting the edges of what I really want and ought to be writing about. Plus it’s cathartic, getting stuff out ...

I wasn’t going to try to blog for a bit. The material I had scheduled has dried up and I haven’t prepared any more. I was feeling a bit of pressure with increasing deadlines in my paid work and the ramping up of my Arts Council England project to the writing practice phase when we were hit hard with Covid infections. I’m feeling angry that the deemed-on-our-behalf healthy and working population haven’t been offered an autumn booster when it was inevitable that all the nasty viruses would be rampant as soon as schools and universities were back in action. By the same measure I’m grateful I had 3 jabs in 2021, even if their efficacy has waned as I suspect my infection may have been severe enough to warrant hospitalisation had I had no protection at all. I’m recovering a tiny bit more every day, but progress is slow and I am significantly weakened.   On top of that my mum had an accident and needed emergency surgery on a fractured hip. I’ve been very anxious about such a scenario for ...

In November 2020 North East-based artist Sally Madge died. At 74, Madge was still creating her legacy. She was renowned for her radical approaches to arts pedagogy with a reputation as a mischief-maker at Sunderland where she taught for years, and for being a woman who made space for others in the arts throughout her lifetime. An avid collector, particularly of debris, detritus, discarded objects and clothes, minerals and animal droppings – all traces of life in waste – Madge left a wondrous (or wandrous) archive from her encounters with the Northumbrian landscape and coast. Barring essays by Tom Jennings, there has been little formal engagement with Madge. I interviewed her for Audiovisual Cultures Podcast in 2019, and in 2021 produced a 2-hour episode filled with testimonies of fellow artists and colleagues who had been impacted by Madge’s interest in them (she also collected the living whom she nurtured). I propose to use this opportunity to create a text for and using the WA...

It's just gone 3pm on Thursday 21 July 2022 and I'm on a coach waiting to board the Stena Line ferry home. I'm feeling quite panic-stricken at only having my telescopic keyring pen (an excellent gadget gifted by my dear friend Fran) with no refill or back-up. It'll be fine. There's pens at home, sure.  But what if it runs out now? Have I used it enough?  How tedious it is having an anxious brain. It takes my mind off being the only masked person on this nearly full coach, I suppose. We didn't reach Port Ryan quickly enough to get out for a breath of Irish Sea air (I know we're not quite there yet, but practically).  That wasn't why I started writing in my DYCP notebook. I've just read, today cover-to-cover, Diana Athill's late-life memoir Stet , or Somewhere Towards the End (2008). No, I'm not sure about the abbreviation. It's been an enthralling read. I have felt as if she's been telling me her life story and about all the people s...