Blog
First impressions
23rd September 2022
5th November 2022
To Do Lists
The purpose of the first meeting led by department head, Dr Anya Lewin, was to introduce the course to the students in their first of 3 years in the MAFA department, and the students to each other.
So much anxiety!
Who else was going to be there?
Will I make a fool of myself?
What was the first meeting of the department lead and the new MAFA cohort going to reveal about us all?
Are there going to be people I feel threatened by?
Are they all going to be young or all going to be old?
Apart from introducing ourselves, what else are we going to talk about for an hour?
There were three other students, one young, one middle aged and two of us oldies - a good mix.
Steve - cool
Adriana - ambitious
Shannon - complex
Anya Lewin kept the conversation flowing, reassuring & encouraging where she needed to be.
I was the last to introduce myself and I felt very much at ease. There were no intimidating presences - just lots of different experiences.
Anya started taking us through the Moodle contents - oh my word! What a lot of information and insights into the course for the next semester! I just thought that we were going to present our work, week-in, week-out! No! There is a plethora of different activities - including, but not exclusively, presentations!
We will have an academic tutor, Dr Laura Hopes, and we will have 10 minute pastoral sessions! I've never had one of those!
And the technology! To die from!
We are to make our blog sites and to send in the links this week.
We must bring along a small object to the first session next Thursday - I know what I'm taking but am I taking it for effect or to say something about myself? I can see why we can't take something big - but how small is small? My beaten out copper plate? My 'mask' seaweed cyanotype?
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James Elkins: What Photography is.
Ch 30
"I am as mesmerised by the eloquent meaninglessness, the meaningful muteness, of materiality as anyone who was brought up in modernism." (Elkins 2011 P49) He writes of Marco Breuer & how he cuts, scratches and burns the photographic paper.
Like Elkins, I want to come back to what photographs actually are: what their surfaces and depths look like, what happens when I try to look into them, whether they have depth or weight, and how they feel - even if that feeling is a glassy computer screen or a weightless page from a newspaper." (Elkins, 2011, p49)
This will affect how I approach the photography in my project - somehow.
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Elkins,J.(2011): What photography Is. New York: Routledge.
After my chat with Amanda Lynch who was one of the leaders in the prisons residency I attended in April, and many exchanges with fellow student Catherine Banks, I decided to start a list of all the links and contacts for my prisons and seaweeds projects. Both Amanda and Catherine have been hugely encouraging in my prisons project, very generous with their links and information for which I am ever grateful.
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I was going to have lists with emails here but I felt that this was too public so I have made entries in my OneNote books
10th November, 2022
My slide presentation of my speculative proposal to the MAFA cohort:
23rd November, 2022
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Presentation feedback
Dear Anna,
I just went through your blog and it was very enjoyable to read about your experiences and your reflections.
I think you can continue with the prison work and the seaweed but I don’t see the need to worry about a metaphorical connection. It’s fine to have two strands of work.
I do think play can be an important part of an artists practice but it comes to people in different ways. I found your proposal presentation very playful. I enjoyed the waving silks and the idea that you could make an analogue immersive dome. You are also a good story teller and can hold a room (all that teaching) so that may come into your practice at some point.
Sometimes it feels like things don’t have meaning or are not going anywhere – don’t rush to assign meaning keep going with the process and let the project find itself.
Can you read French? I think you can so here is a book you might find interesting?
Anya
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15th November, 2022
Helping out
Fellow student Steve asked if I could help him film a performance of his in Totnes, which I did. These are some of my images from the afternoon's activity:
A serendipitous find in Totnes high street!
23rd March 2023
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I had an appointment with Nicola from the library to see why I can't work EndNote. I need to download an app for Word on my Mac. there isn't one for the iPad.
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I think I've understood - I will have to actually work at it and it will help with citations and referencing.