Pea Arts About

I'm job-hunting at the moment and have had a go recently at putting in for academic posts. It is now five years since the deep unpleasantness I experienced in my last lecturing post at University of Salford. I reckon I'll be bottom of the pile for life. I'm reflecting on my relationship with academia quite a bit right now amidst the UCU strike action currently underway. I think I'm pretty bonkers for even entertaining going back into that noise. It's just that I worked so hard for so long and I was really good at it. I mean properly really good at it. But a lot was stacked against me and my economic difficulties, the strain of shifting my life from one city to the next year after year, and spending all my time on a contract trying to secure the next one, then encountering bullying in a toxic, corrupt environment when I finally landed a 'permanent' post, well it nearly ended me. So I don't know, I just saw some jobs and thought I 100% won't get these...

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...

I've had heaps on lately and haven't been blogging but I couldn't let this week pass without marking Array Collective's historic win of the 2021 Turner Prize. Although Willie Doherty has been nominated twice before and 2014 winner Duncan Campbell had studied and worked in Belfast, this is the first time the UK art prize - which began in 1984 - has been awarded to artists from Northern Ireland. And what a win it is. While important, this is so much more than acknowledging the work of individuals and even collectives, as is the emphasis of this year's exhibition. For us nordies it's recognition, it's not being so much a place apart, it's being seen and heard at last, it's no longer being the little backwater to be pitied, written off and ignored. The vibrant subculture out of which Array emerged and have taken by the horns has been around for a while. Through their concentrated efforts they're charging ahead, showing how it's done and what can...

For a while now I've thought that our most impacting encounters with art and culture occur when we are most receptive to the ideas they present. I have often felt like a latecomer to a lot of things I or others feel I should know more about, but sometimes we're not ready or interested enough to engage with. As I've written on this blog a few times over the last year or so, coming to Star Trek after ignoring the franchise for 35 years keeps inspiring revelations in me and it has gone far beyond being just a set of television shows I enjoy. It strikes me that in exploring 'the final frontier' it is really confronting humans with the first frontier: understanding and knowing ourselves in all our complexity. I wrote before about feeling an affinity with Klingon anger, but with their relative absence in Enterprise - which I've been watching for the last few months - I have gradually felt even more of a connection with the Vulcans. More than ever before in Spock (L...

A topic that is frequently on my mind because it figures behind the scenes in much of the artwork I analyse is art labour, particularly when that labour is invisible. For the past few months I've experienced first-hand what it is to make things for someone else's name as author or artist to be attached to it. These projects have all gone towards upcoming events celebrating the life and work of my dear friend Sally Madge . As I've written about before , this includes completing some of her in-progress work, and more recently, doing some mending and adapting to one of her performance props for another artist to use in tribute to her. Messy adaptation for a performance prop. It is not work I ever envisaged myself doing, least not because I do not think of myself as an artist, and, I find, neither do most other people. Sally and our friend Alastair MacLennan would have something to say about that, but there we are. Partly spurred on by learning languages in which you do not per...

Continuing our Star Trekking with Enterprise has got me thinking about the general landscape of media in the 2000s. It is a show that was unfortunately timed, going into production in early 2001 and premiering in September that year, just a couple of weeks after 9/11. It just wasn't the time for naive exploration, mishaps and making galactic friends and allies with some friction and enemies along the way. The 'noughties' became a gravely toned decade for US television in response to attacks on their soil, and related themes and issues such as torture, internment, collateral damage, weapons of mass destruction, distrust, paranoia, large-scale warfare, razed cityscapes, and learning that not all baddies are baddies that are familiar in more directly relevant shows such as 24 . These begin filtering through Enterprise around halfway through season 1 as the writing caught up with current events and are all-encompassing by season 3 which first aired in 2003/4. In addition to ...

On 6 May 2021 I attended a free online creative writing taster workshop offered by Newcastle College. I had a really nice afternoon with an interesting bunch of people. We talked about writing in the present tense to pull in the reader, finding ways of giving information without explicitly telling it. A task we built up to was writing around memories of a single piece of clothing as a vehicle for defining relationships and characterization. The others edited as they went, whereas I spill out everything in my head, my hands usually struggling to keep up with my brain. I like having a lump of clay to work with in the edit. Here is what I wrote that day: I once had this gorgeous black jumper-dress. It is such a big regret that I ever gave it away. I wore it all the time. I'd still wear it now. What was I thinking? I ordered a size 12 but they sent a 24. But it was class. I could dress it up or down. I could be slouchy and comfortable or I could put on a broad, brightly coloured belt a...

Back in January, a friend drew my attention to a book series inviting proposals for monographs. Here is my informal pitch that was knocked back within an hour of emailing it to the series editors who said the topic was interesting but wasn't a fit for them. I welcome comments, suggestions and discussion because I'd really love a crack at this and I think there's something in it. Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Paula Blair peablair@gmail.com Dear [...], I am writing to propose a volume for your Adaptation and Visual Culture Palgrave series. Provisionally titled Adaptation and Appropriation in Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable , the book would examine the intricacies of acts of adaptation and appropriation in Damien Hirst’s major exhibition in Venice, Italy, in 2017. ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ exhibited hundreds of items across two major galleries, many of which were claimed to have ...

I wasn't planning to post anything this week as I'm working on other things that, although not urgent, I feel a sense of urgency to complete, but the sun is too good and rare to waste. I just had to recharge, grab a pen and paper, and jot something down about what I'm working on.  My own work plans are on a bit of a hiatus while I have the great undertaking of contributing to various aspects of activities amounting to retrospective and memorial events for my dear friend, the artist Sally Madge. I'm compiling an audio patchwork of testimonies generously provided by people who've known and been impacted by Sally in some way, and I am in the process of finishing textile artworks Sally had been working on for some time. The aim is that an exhibition and symposium will take place in November around the first anniversary of her death. The textile work is something Sally talked about when she kindly guested on Audiovisual Cultures podcast in 2019. Her idea for the finishe...