Pea Arts About

On 17 June I had the great pleasure of returning to an art gallery for the first time since early March 2020. With lockdown restrictions easing, spaces have been able to open up again with measures in place aiming to keep visitors safe while they encounter the work. As exciting as it was for me to get back out - I've been voluntarily isolating as much as possible since 12 March last year - the Delta variant is rampaging through England, and in that week in Newcastle alone known cases had risen by nearly 800 from the week before. So it was not without a degree of angst and caution that I entered the Hatton Gallery for the Newcastle University Fine Art Degree Show . While it was great to be in the presence of art objects placed in space again, and as much as I enjoyed the nostalgia the degree show always gives me for the heady opening nights at the Belfast School of Art equivalent, the hyper-awareness of other people and everyone's aerosol entering the space - because masks only ...

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...

I wanted to highlight my latest lecture video about Shirley Clarke because she's a film-maker who represents a lot of what I feel is my unfinished business in film studies. I had so wanted to research her in depth and some day visit the UCLA archives of her work. Never say never, I guess, but I'm sure there are people working on her and doing a fine job of progressing what scholars such as Lauren Rabinovitz initiated in redressing the shameful marginalising of Clarke's work in film histories. I use plural histories here because she crossed the too-oft gate-kept boundaries of documentary, social realism, experimental, independent and avant-garde cinemas. I find her work utterly fascinating, and I've only been able to see a little of it first-hand. It has galled me since I learned of Clarke (after my own formal film education I might add, and from my mentor Dr Des O'Rawe who was doing his own 'decolonising' of his knowledge and teaching, which he passed onto m...

Given the machinations of social media, the ways many of us attribute value have become contingent on how many likes, shares, comments and plays a piece of content gets. My outputs attract relatively few of these. While I appreciate those few engagements immensely and am humbled that anyone is watching/reading/listening at all, I often have to catch myself on when I get annoyed that my hard work isn't reaching more. That's when I have to question my motivations for making work and putting it out there at all. What it ultimately comes down to is a feeling that my chance to deliver top-class arts & humanities education and research was taken away from me, and - realistically - I was in a toxic profession (academia) that is unrecognizable from external perceptions of it anyway. The ideal so many of us had going in and were rarely, if ever, corrected about, simply doesn't exist. And I didn't want all those years of graft, training and knowledge to go to waste. I was jus...

As I grapple with an inner tug-of-war about reasonable reactions to things, I have come to appreciate depictions of rage more and more, particularly when it comes to the deep wounds of trauma. Many of us who remain scarred by the harm incurred from the actions of others have to make tremendous, often invisible, efforts to mask anger so often triggered by any number of inconsiderate, rude, obnoxious, mean, nasty or thoughtless actions. It is all the worse when the behaviour comes from someone oblivious to their own effect on the people or environment around them. Then there's the self-doubt that you're being too sensitive or unreasonable. Minefield. One of the things I have apprecated from my late-in-life Trekdom (it was bound to come up again - we're on season 4 of Star Trek: Voyager now) is the unapologetic grumpiness and anger from loner characters including the marginalized Klingons Worf (Michael Dorn; raised by humans and traumatized by the tragedies wrought by his own ...

Arranging myself with pen and paper at my maker table rather than computer desk (that sounds more luxurious than the cramped reality of each), I am determined to get writing again. It has been an intense few weeks of action working on all aspects of Audiovisual Cultures podcast , and my brain and body need a break away from computers and electronic devices in general. I have had to have the same word with myself as I've had before about not equating being hunched over a laptop with productivity. I've probably said this before on the blog, but words just flow out of me when I handwrite them, whereas I get exhausted after typing half a sentence I've just thought of.  So, no, better to jot this by hand and type it later; a method that befits the intermedial qualities of the artworks I want to discuss in this post. Following a wonderful phone catch-up with my dear friend, the North East-based artist Richard James Hall , Dick sent me an equally wonderful gift: several intricate ...

Well, I've gone and fallen head over heels in love with Community and pretty much every character in it. It's a show I didn't see much of first time round, and since it released on Netflix last year it has received a new lease of life and a whole new fanbase, including me. One of the reasons its run on NBC (2009 - 2014) was dogged by low ratings (as well as being up against The Big Bang Theory in the US) was that internationally it was being shared and downloaded illegally. Oh the days when we had to wait up to two years in the UK for American shows! I'm sorry to say that this was how I ever saw the odd episode as I was seeing someone who downloaded it from bit torrents and it was part of a jumble with Parks and Recreation , Arrested Development and shows I didn't enjoy and can't remember the titles of. This was during my last PhD year so it's all a bit blurry, and if you know what I was researching, you'll know I needed escapism. And my goodness, is Co...

The timing made March a 3-episode month for Audiovisual Cultures, and what excellent episodes they are. In all three there are instances of creative and technological innovation with emphasis on some sort of community. The first is a joyous conversation with Belfast-based artist Clinton Kirkpatrick who deals in the weird and wonderful world of the absurd as a way of navigating the strangeness of life and to explore his experiences with race and sexuality. Episode 87 features a lively panel with some of the creative team involved with the Secret Library.* Producer of Odd.o.Ts' Entertainment Todd Zimmerman, events manager Debra Beardsley and actor Katrina Michaels thrash out the learning curves in shifting immersive interactive theatre and gaming online in our fun and informative discussion. Finally, for episode 88 I spoke with two filmmakers in Hamburg, Lars Henriks and Nisan Arikan, who are doing the exciting and arduous work of using the technologies now at their disposal to for...

Because I couldn't think of anything for this week's post, and especially because I'm sure you're all dying to know, I thought I'd update you on where I'm at with my late-in-life Star Trekking.  We completed Deep Space Nine a while ago and I do miss that crew. We also watched the four Next Generation movies, and with those done that means my time with Worf (Michael Dorn) is sadly at an end. I do have a soft spot for the stoic Klingon.  As I write, we're most of the way through season 2 of Voyager . Gaping wide holes in logic aside, I'm enjoying it and feeling affinity with members of its crew too, particularly Tuvoc (Tim Russ). I seem to be drawn to characters who have a stern exterior but who are actually rather vulnerable and practise stringent self-control unless something makes them crack. My favourite line so far is Tuvoc pointing out that we must 'not mistake composure for ease'. It struck me to the core. A key theme coming up in recently w...

For a week bookended by International Women’s Day and Mother’s Day, it was a stressful one. Instances of the public abuse of Meghan Markle came to a head and a young woman was abducted and murdered, it seems, by someone who vowed to serve and protect. With the timelines on every social media platform flooded with experiences of abuse, it’s all been overwhelming, even when hanging out on the podcast accounts in a vain attempt to build community.  It’s an atrocity that should never happen. We should all feel safe to head home at any time and not have to be wary that the unthinkable will happen. But we are because it does. The conversation around this becomes polarised when men who’ve experienced abuse or been attacked ask, ‘what about me?’ only to be told, ‘this is about us; go and start your own thread.’ I empathise with both positions here, and with trans and non-binary victims who fall through the gaps. I think I lean most to the question of who gets to be part of ‘us’.  The ...