Pea Arts About

The following paragraphs are my supporting statements from an application to Arts Council Northern Ireland's Support for Individual Artists Programme. Even though I reside in England I was encouraged to apply on the basis that others who have had to move from Northern Ireland to Britain for work have been awarded grants in previous years and much of my work is still concerned with home and I still have a family address there. My application was ineligible this year.  *** In observing arts and culture in Northern Ireland for the past 15 years, initially as a scholar of film and visual studies and now as a practitioner developing a creative-critical writing practice, I have identified what I call a performative impulse. The generation of artists prominent in the 1980s to 2000s, to generalise, exhibited more of an archival impulse associated with memory and post-memory processes as examined by Marianne Hirsch, and for example include Willie Doherty, Alastair MacLennan, Victor Sloan an...

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...

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...

Climate letter challenge Prompt 1: At the top of my mind about climate and ecological change is... deep anxiety that collectively we're not doing enough. There's too much pressure on individuals. We do all have a role to play, but what's within our power is so small compared to the huge corporate polluters and other huge corporations that prop them up and benefit from their polluting. So there's me mithering about getting refills from an inconvenient location that I can't really afford rather than buying things in more plastic bottles that are unlikely to get recycled, or be recycled more than once if they are, but which are fine and affordable. Or being freezing all the time because of the guilt of both polluting the atmostphere with gas or fire smoke, plus the expense. And don't even start me on the green-washing companies are doing. They pander to what's popular and desired and don't actually address the problem. I'm cross about those Boody bras I...

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...

Prompt 1: Half-way through the year... and things are finally moving. Just four weeks ago I got word that my application to Arts Council England's Develop Your Creative Practice grant scheme was successful. It has been a busy time getting the paperwork sorted to secure the money, then waiting anxiously to make sure I'd done it correctly, then seeing it could take up to six weeks when my schedule had already begun and it's been a tight few years, and the relief of a big wad of cash landing in my account. I'm typing this on my new computer that I was finally able to get. Let's see, it was 2019 when Violet (my HP Pavilion) had a total systems failure and was essentially rebuilt by not-da-in-law (well, he installed an SSD with Linux Mint and I immersed myself in the joys of open-source software).  Things are also looking up on the growing front. In the May Writing Hour I mentioned that this year's peas process had yielded nothing. I was mistaken. Amongst the weeds t...

New Writing North Writing Hour led by Linda France. Prompt 1: The loveliest sight/site on E/earth is... It's bucketing today. The gardens need it. The ground is parched. Linda was talking a lot about embracing mistakes and trying to allow the consciousness to drift and dance. Allow the mistakes to happen and dance on the page. I struggle with letting the mistakes be because I'm always trying to improve. Will try to cycle round to the prompt somehow. I suppose imperfection is the answer. Imperfection is the loveliest sight and the loveliest sites are imperfect. Which sight/site/cite it was - homonyms? - was not specified, which I like. Nor was earth as in ground or Earth our planet. Both, really. All. Imperfect thinking. Distractions. I'm having a lot of anxiety dreams lately. Normal for me, but they'd calmed down. Now I'm waiting on quite a few things at once. All uncertain. Unlikely to happen, which might be disappointing, but if any do happen, everything changes. ...

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...