Happy New Year! (ish)

September always feels a bit like the beginning of a new year; the end of the summer, darker evenings, back to teaching, meeting new students and trying to be more organised than the previous academic year. The summer seems to have gone so quickly but it has been really productive and I can't believe how much has happened since last September ... conferences, exhibitions, textstallations, book-paintings, travelling and research; a right old textual and material journey where sometimes I came to dead-ends, went backwards and in circles but have moved forwards considerably!

I spent the end of the holidays in Manchester and visted the John Rylands Library for the first time ever. I can't believe I've never been there before as it is the most amazing place ... like Hogwarts but better and filled floor to ceiling with loads of beautiful books dating back from hundreds of years ago all in one place - what more could you possibly want?!

It felt really inspiring to be in there; you can study in the big hall and I can imagine I'd get quite a lot of work done there! There was also a small exhibition called Spilled Milk: A Multi-media Storybook by an artist called Johnny Woodhams there which I thought was really interesting.

I liked the use of strips of text in his work which is something I've been exploring in my art practice and how they were used aesthetically in his canvases as well as to create a narrative.

I also went to the Chinese Arts Centre which I'd never been to before. There was a great exhibition with some beautiful Chinese ink drawings and calligraphy by artists Mary Tang and Cathy Wu. I've been using a lot of found text from different languages in my work and really liked the diagrammatic nature of the Chinese text; how they seemed to be in-between drawing and writing when viewed by someone who is unfamiliar with the language. Some of the pieces were also on a massive scale, which made them seem even more abstract and alien.

There an exhibition there as well by Tasha Whittle called Note to Self which I really liked. The work included a site specific wall-based piece and other smaller pieces which were placed at different levels around a corridor space which led to the lower floor of the building. I really liked how the work was exhibited in a space where you had to travel through it to see the work and that it was always seen at different angles and levels as you passed through.

Obviously, being me, I was also drawn to the amazing tea house there where there is one wall just filled with chinese tea where you help yourself to a pot and they top it up with hot water for you! There were loads of different types of teas ... Rose Bud tea, Lychee black tea, Jasmine green tea ... a top notch mixed bag of Chinese tea delights!

I went to see the MA shows at Margaret Street, BIAD and it's crazy to think it was this time three years ago in 2007 when I was having my MA show there as well. The show this year was a triple whammy as it included the MA shows, an exhibition called When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever and also an exhibition of work by current staff in a new gallery space in the building. There was a couple of pieces that I especially liked in the MA shows including the pieces below and an installation on the bottom floor which was like being in a chicken coop!

Claire Thomas, MA Art Practice and Education

Anna Tzini, MA Queer Studies in Arts and Culture

Andrew Dundas, MA Fine Art

The opening of When We Build Let Us Think That We Build Forever celebrated the 125th anniversary of the fantastic neo-gothic School of Art building in Margaret Street which was the first purpose built art school in the UK. It was organised by the university's Alumni Association and twas a rather classy affair including complimentary drinks, canapes and even a string quartet! It also included an opening talk by Professor John Butler, Head of the School of Art who talked about the different courses that used to be run in the building including Stained glass making, Enamelling, Embroidery and Weaving and House Painting and Decorating. Its amazing to think the building has survived two world wars and the courses have developed into its contemporary forms such as painting, sculpture, performance, film and interactive digital work!

All of the work in the show was made by former students and staff, some who studied at the beginning of the century! As I was wondering round, I thought it was nice to see a mixture of different work together and also to finally see the beast in situ. The beast stuck out like a sore thumb against the grey walls and the muted colours of the other works, but I quite liked that it visually made an impact because of the colour! After all ... it is the beast. Not sure what to do with the bad boy now though, anyone want to take it off my hands?! Ill pay you! (No, seriously, I am joking).

The exhibition included some sexy books from the Margaret Street archives which were typographically and aesthetically really interesting because of the fragility and intrictate detail of them.

The new space looked really good and replaced what used to be a small canteen. It was really cool to see the staff exhibit their work and it included pieces from my former tutors and also my DoS.

I spent last weekend working at Artsfest in Birmingham where I worked on the Heart of England Galleries marquee. I worked there representing the Shire Hall Gallery in Stafford where I work as a casual Front of House member of staff. It was an intense weekend and despite really achey feet, it was a great experience and I met some ace people from each of the different galleries. I did a free badgemaking workshop on the first day and there was a young girl who must have only been about 10 who made a badge which said 'I'm proud to be a geek'! I thought what a cool kid, I wish I had the balls to be proud to be geeky when I was 10! I wish I'd taken a picture of it but I did tell her it was the best badge I'd seen all day! Our stand was at the top of the fountain in Victoria Square so we were near one of the performance spaces so we got to see the performances including a cool drum band, salsa dancing and some street dancing where we had a bit of a dance whilst doing the workshops! : )

Also, good luck to Rachel Marsden and RJW as they embark on an intense 4 month art and research-based trip around China! Miss you guys loads!!

The beast

Well, I've finally finished the beast and I've dropped it off in Birmingham. I don't hate it as much, but I certainly don't love it ... I suppose which artist really 'loves' their work? I think being self-critical is part of the dialogue that pushes your work. I quite like some of the close up areas but as a whole I'm not sure if it works, hmmm.

k

Painting the beast has been a learning curve for me anyway and has brought up a lot of questions about painting for me, including colour, technicalities also also challenging Modernist structures situated within painting. It's been quite hard working in my study/bedroom (bad times having them in one room!) as I've had to be quite contained in the way I've been working. I love working in a studio where I can attach the work onto the wall to work on it and there are no restraints about spilling or dropping anything and I can have my materials all over the place in a sort of ordered chaos where happy accidents and the occasional process-led epiphany can occur.

It felt really good to finally hand it in and after rewarding myself to a little cake (okay so it wasn't little and who am I kidding, reward is an excuse) I had a right old gander around Digbeth/Eastside and visited the Custard Factory and Ikon Eastside. I finally managed to locate Eastside Projects and visited their current exhibition, Book Show which I've been meaning to do for aaages.

Luckily it didn't disappoint and although the work was extremely conceptual for me, it was particularly interesting to see how books had been interpreted in the sense of them being sequences of spaces and moments. I also saw the crazy offices there which was made by the artists Heather and Ivan Morison (above). At first I thought that it was an installation and thought ... oh wow it looks like actual working offices ... then I realise it err ... was! A brilliant publication called Book accompanied the show (which were only printed as 1000 copies so get yer hands on one!) which I know will prove useful in my research.

I sent off a postcard for the Paris Correspondence School last week as well which is a great project run by Charlie Levine. Lately I've really been enjoying  finding text in old books that I've collected and creating new texts which are removed from their original context(s). This was no exception and I like the fact the the chap that I stuck to the front of the postcard looks so stern and masculine and I thought the text fitted right in,

particularly layered on the image by Max Ernst underneath. I cut the image out from an old Polish banknote that was out of circulation and quite like the layering of different histories that have been made. I discovered afterwards that, the guy, Mikolai Kopernik was a famous Polish astronomer born in 1473 and was actually the person who discovered that the sun is the gravitational centre of the solar system! I sent the postcard by self service for the first time ever and forgot to put an airmail stamp on ... so I'm hoping it does actually reach Paris and is not lost in an international postal void!

A riot of colour

I've been working on a painting for the past week for an exhibition called When we build let us think that we build forever which marks the 125th anniversary of the magnificent Margaret Street building at BIAD. So far, I've had a love/hate relationship with my canvas; today we are not on speaking terms and definately not friends.

↑ Uurgh!!

I haven't painted in the conventional sense for at least three years and even then, when I was doing my MA full time and had a studio space, I was working on a massive scale and transcending normative structures of painting such as the canvas frame and the surface of the painting to create large-scale paintings and hybrid paintsculptstallations. It's no surprise then, that this piece has been a bit of a struggle. I've focused a lot on the idea of writing and text as well in my work more recently as my PhD explores the interrelation of the two, and so going back to 'painting' in a purer sense feels like I've gone backwards and has been quite hard.

I've set up a  project called Word Drafting and have also been creating 'book-paintings' which I feel a lot more comfortable with. The Word Drafting project is managed as a private blog and I've been using the book below for part of this project, which I guess is a natural progression of my 'book-paintings' that I showed at the University of Wolverhampton previously.

The book is currently on its way to Canada where the participants there can contribute to it how they want to, for example writing, poetry, textiles or photography and then send it on to the other members. I like the feel of painting in the books and there always seems to be less pressure than painting on a canvas.

I'm thinking of adding some text to the canvas I started and maybe being a bit more experimental in the colours and the mark-makings. I quite like how the colours work with each other but there seems to be no tension or compositional qualities. I've had all sorts of flashbacks of questions people ask me about my work ... what is your work about? what do you paint? what is it? ... all horrible questions that keep popping up in the back of my mind when I've been trying to work on the bugger! Aaaargh! Hopefully I'll post some images of the beast when we're friends again ... or at least speaking to each other anyway.

Who the hell is Penelope Fitzgerald?!

I had a great time last week on a low-budget holiday down south. Our first stop was Plymouth where I saw my friend Seaman Specialist Hawkins' passing out parade at H.M.S Raleigh naval base. It was a really special day and also really cool to have a look around the base to see all the things he did during the months he spent there doing some pretty intensive training, as well as being surrounded by loads of sailors which was a bit surreal!

We had a lovely evening stroll through the Hoe and the Barbican and indulged in a veeery nice Plymouth gin cocktail to kick off the holiday before travelling to our camp site near St Austell the next day.

I haven't been to Cornwall since I was little and it was nice to be somewhere so nice and back to basics with my phone switched off and no computer, although I admit it wasn't a highlight trekking across a field in the middle of the night in hiking boots and pjamas to go to the loo! We visited Falmouth, St Austell, Bodmin and some other little towns and did loads of stuff including dancing with a life-size Paddington bear (don't ask) and seeing some crazy animals like owls and badgers.

Although I left my research diary at home, I still brought my notebook and did some writing and it was really inspiring to just be somewhere else and be somewhere that was so slow-paced.

We also went to the Eden Project which was fantastic and luckily we had nice weather! The biomes themselves were a really amazing sight and unless you've been there in person, you can't really tell how absolutely massive they are and how much they impose on the countryside around it aesthetically.

I love taking photographs of flowers, especially ones which have really intense colours as I'm really interested in using really bright saturated colours in my work. And of course being at the Eden Project, there was a mélange of every type of flower imaginable!

I had a great surprise when I came back and found out that I've been selected to take part in Interrogation: West Bromwich in September which is run by Longhouse and the artist Anna Francis, which I'm really excited about : ) I took part in Interrogation: Walsall last year (and really didn't think I'd be selected this year, mostly for this reason) and did a collaborative project with my friend and fellow artist Rachel Marsden and it was such an amazing experience so I'm really looking forward to taking part in Interrogation: West Bromwich, in a new location and with the opportunity to meet new people (and also to wear a moustache again).

I've had various meetings in Birmingham since I've been back and noticed that some massive murals of birds had been painted on the side of the Birmingham Central Library when I was passing through. As the new

(and slightly controversial) library is being built to replace the current library in 2013, I guess the council decided to experiment a bit with the building which I think is ace!!

Lastly, I have to finish by asking the question: who the hell is Penelope Fitzgerald?! As you know I really love The New Art Gallery Walsall and went to visit their new exhibition programme (which is fab btw) when I came across this lovely and charming comment in the visitor book ...

Although I laughed, I must admit, I was actually quite shocked as well for someone to have such an extreme reaction to an art gallery. I don't think I'd like to bump into Penny when she's had a bad day!