Pea Arts About

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...

It was our dear friend Sandra Johnston who was tasked with the difficult work of telling us that Sally had died on 11 November. When I first moved to Newcastle in August 2014, Sandra had already been here for a couple of years. She was travelling when I moved across, and put me in email contact with someone who had become a close friend and who was involved in organising a site-specific screening I'd find really interesting. Sally had me go round to her house and we chatted and got to know each other a little. I felt like I'd known her for ages, perhaps because we both felt affection for Sandra.  Sally drove us out to Lindisfarne and we parked up, met the rest of the group attending the screening, and all walked across to Holy Island, carrying the kit and supplies. Those with the tech and equipment set up a screen, a generator, a laptop and a projector. A bright, long summer's day in the North, we chatting and picnicked and listened to a Northumbrian piper as we waited for ...

Having earlier this year received counselling for mental health issues, I found the many topics raised in A Monster Calls deeply affecting and cathartic. Like Conor O’Malley (Lewis MacDougall), I was a child who lost a parent to illness and at around the same time experienced extremes of either being bullied or being ignored at school. The other kids either didn’t know how to treat me, or thought I was an easy target. I was placid, and big for my age. Aligning this with hardwired gender constructs, they decided I was ‘manly’, stoic and strong, never once considering that I was breaking inside and needed my pain to be treated as normal. It was easier to shut me down and confuse me about my gender identity than to dare disrupt their safe assumptions that parents lived to old age. At 32 years old, I was still getting bullied, this time in a bigger playground by people who could exert even more power over me. Like my childhood experience, when I defied their expectations and stoo...