I must confess ...

I've always struggled to make work for other people and at Christmas when I had a (not so) genius idea to make people pieces of work for gifts, I had a few too many epiphanies about the state of painting in attempting to do so. And, I must confess ... I don't think I can paint anymore! There, I said it. "Oh, but you can, your work isn't that bad!", I hear you say. But really, I can't and it's okay. It's actually quite a relief!

When I got back in the studio after Christmas I realised that I haven't actually been 'painting' for quite a while. So, when I tried to paint canvases in a conventional sense, it just didn't work. Instead I've been making paintings and making 'things' (and unmaking them as well) that reference paint and question the status of painting such as book-paintings, textstallations and paintsculptstallations rather than painting paintings ... if that makes sense. And instead, my work is all about deconstructing and re-thinking painting in new ways such as through drawing, stitching, collaging and challenging the boundaries of what painting is and phallocentric structures embedded within painting. Its also about exploring alternative spatialities about and with paint in some sort of in-between space or outside of painting ... but not actually painting in the sense I though I was or what people consider painting actually is!!! Phew!

When I got back into the studio, I had a right old paint/make-o-rama and worked on a massive piece of Fabriano paper about 2m x 1.5m which I've been creating in dialogue with a large mind-map the same size on the opposite wall and also created a framed piece (which I did actually give as a gift). Already it feels much easier; knowing that I am using paint to draw and make marks in a deconstructive and performative approach and I feel much more confident being experimental.

I guess this is just the beginning in a new stage of makingness so the only thing that can happen now is to develop and hopefully in some interesting and surprising ways. So, just watch this space. And that's a warning!

I've been working this week on something called The Sketchbook Project which is a fab project where you get sent a Moleskin sketchbook, fill it how you like and then send it back off where it goes on a super duper tour around the US. After all its travels, it then lives at the Brooklyn Art library where you can become a member and loan out the sketchbooks just as if they were library books. Genius! I started to fill mine in after Christmas and it looked pretty crap, so ... I decided to unbind it and take all the pages out and then add in pages made from canvas, newspapers from different languages and pages of different books. I've had to work quite quickly to make the deadline, but sometimes you get surprising results from working quickly and with a little pressure. I'm actually quite pleased with the little blighter ...

Anyway, it's been an absolute age since I last wrote a blog post. Not because I had nothing to share, but because I had too much!! I don't want to go back and share it all now, after all the moment has passed and it would be extremely boring. However there are some things I'd still like to share. The first are images of some fantastic work at Festive Flair which was a contemporary craft fair held at the Light House in Wolverhampton before Christmas.

Above is the beautiful work by fellow blogger Hen's Teeth and below are images of lovely work by She Thought Beautiful Things ... who are made up of the equally lovely Katy Magor and Jo Davis.

Secondly, as some of you may know I am currently betrothed and with forthcoming nuptials, I asked six of my creative friends to make my wedding invites. They could do whatever they wanted and they could all be different as well. My lacklustre photos don't do them justice but here they are ... in all their wonderful eclectic sexy creative glory! Jazzy!

Pieces of Aberdeenshire by Georgina Barney

Pretty, pretty, pretty invites by my sister Corinne

Drawn and sent all the way from Vietnam from my brother Laurence

Beautiful printed and embroidered pieces by Katy Magor

Super sexy collages by Georgie Macbeth

Hand-made conceptually embedded paper by Rachel Marsden

Rainbow pie

I've never seen a rainbow before where you can see it as a full semi-circle and was met with this unexpected surprise as I was travelling through none other than Wolverhampton! The camera couldn't really pick it up but it was there for at least 20 minutes. I guess that's the bonus of having crap weather in Britain, it's just a shame we don't see more rainbows!

I had a bit of a crisis of confidence yesterday when I realised that I just have sooooo much to do and doing a PhD is such an overwhelmingly massive task. I've been loving working in my new studio-office (and it's vacinity to various coffee outlets) and have been trying to write a sort of structure of my thesis and what's going to go in each chapter as my aim is to have a draft of part of the first chapter by Christmas. No pressure then eh?! I'm generally a pretty disorganised person and have been trying to give myself a routine and some sort of structure since studying  full-time otherwise I tend to go off on all sorts of (work-related) tangents and then before I know it, it's about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and nearly the end of the day!

For the past couple of weeks I've been disseminating the research diary I've kept since I started and have been working on a huuuuge roll of sexy fabriano paper where I've been physically mapping it out to try and link together my ideas. I'll post some pics when it's built up a bit more. I also found one of the books that I'd been working in when I've been organising my stuff. This is definately something I want to keep working on and I've been steadily accruing lots of lovely old books to work into.

I had the most a-mazing experience in a fab little second-hand book shop recently. There is a really beautiful and quaint little book shop that I've been in to a couple of times called Paramount Book Exchange which is on a small-ish road at the back of the Arndale Centre in Manchester. There's jazz music playing and a sofa to pop your feet up and have a flick through something you're thinking of buying and every type of book you could want. This place is a little gem. I'm a self-confessed bibliophile/book geek and ♥ books; the physicality of them, the texture of the pages and the aesthetic qualities of them (I think I need to get out more).

I'd been looking for a book by the poet Ezra Pound for a while and I noticed one in this book-shop a couple of weeks ago. When I first saw it I didn't buy it as I'm a bit stingy and I don't really like spending money, but when I went back recently it was still there and I saw it as a sign that I should get it. I bought it with another book and to my surprise when I got to the till, the gentleman who owned the shop told me that because I'd spent over £10 ... I qualified for a free piece of fruit!!! He was genuinely quite sorry when he said all of the oranges had gone as they were the most popular so he only had pears left! I of course exclaimed that a pear would be amazing and that he had made my day! I have to say it was a bloody nice pear as well! Now that's customer service!!

After my fruitful experience (gettit?!) I headed to the Chinese Arts Centre and stumbled across a right beauty ... a piece of street art by Space Invader! Some idiot had painted some dodgy black paint around it so I thought I'd better check that it was actually his and there is a great image on his website here of the original before the black paint was applied.

I came across his work originally in the film Exit Through the Gift Shop by Banksy which is actually GENIUS if not a little mental and definately worth seeing. Ever since seeing it, I've had an intense desire to make work on old walls etc. but I guess I shouldn't really admit that incase I ended up doing it and then someone realises it's me ...

I visited the Chinese Arts Centre and although the main exhibtion space was undergoing a changover, I got to see Sonia Khan's work 'The Mother and her Untamed Entity' in the installation space that leads to the lower floor.

I really liked the piece and how it worked in response to the exhibition space. I also noticed Tsang Kin Wah's site-specific installation, I Love U, which was printed onto the walls on the lower floor. As I've been working with text quite recently, I was really fascinated by his piece and the way it spilled over onto different areas of the walls quite organically.

Afterwards, I went to Manchester Art Gallery and saw the new exhibition called Recorders by the Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. If I'm honest, I was expecting it to not to be very interesting as I am not that interested in digital and electronic art, however I'm so glad that I had a look as it was absolutely amazing! The exhibition included seven interactive installations where each of the pieces record memories that have been obtained by the works throughout the show such as thumb prints, visual images, voice recordings and pulse rates.

I particularly liked 'Pulse Room' where the participant holds two sensors for about 15 seconds which then detects the person's heartbeat and then converts them into flashes of the lightbulb to the pulse rate. When you'are in the room, your pulse beats really hard to the rythm of the pulse that the lights are flashing to and it's a really wierd sensation. It is on until the end of January so get down there!