Category art

Updating…

My last update was in October, it’s been sporadic on B&B for many reasons. Firstly I actually returned to work full time in September although strictly speaking it was supposed to be part-time starting in October. I was immediately sucked into a very important Faculty submission for the Research Assessment Framework. In my role as Deputy Director of the Art and Design  for Westminster this meant total immersion, total engagement, total subjugation to the process. This was gruelling but also in a masochistic kind of way pleasurable as it enabled me to get away from my illness and engage with the world again.

Secondly since my Stem Cell Transplant in early July i’ve been in waiting mode. I’ve been tested on a regular basis during this period and will be in the near future to assess whether the transplant was successful or not. So I’m in a kind of limbo, while I feel well, I don’t know if I am. This has meant that I’ve been deliberately avoiding the blog. I simply haven’t felt psychologically strong enough to engage with the process of laying bare how I was feeling. At times it’s been very difficult to manage the uncertainty.

I am (sort of) resolved to start up again as in this pause I’ve had ideas about how to shape and forward the project. I have a clearer sense of it’s conceptual framings, approaches and linkages to other similar work.

I’m also looking for a haematologist to work with on the project so please contact me if you think anyone might fit the bill.

More after the new year.

t.

Hat Index October 13th 2013

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Hat Index 14th Sept 2013

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Dreamtime in Norfolk

Norfolk salt marshes, photo by Rob Stoke

I have been having very vivid dreams, I’m sure there is a connection to the huge amounts of chemicals I have ingested over the past few months. They tend to occur just before I wake. Sometimes these dreams are relatively mundane, but I did go through a period of quite extreme nightmares; I wont talk about these here.

This morning I woke to the tangy smell of sea heather and mud flats, my REM perambulations had taken me to the north Norfolk coast which I was crossing on foot in pursuit of some undefined task, but which involved transportation of the hats seen on this site. The salt marshes of north Norfolk are very dear to me, I’ve been visiting them since I was a small child, they are hugely atmospheric and as a result of glacial sculpting from the last ice age, muddy and flat. Continuously reshaped by the scouring effect of the tide this vast interstitial site is a landscape for loners, the terminally self-contained and lapsed hermits.

Back to the dream; crossing a tidal creak I was surprised by a cross-country motorcyclist who side-swiped me leading me to drop my hats in the creak. I scrabbled about in the thick mud and cold seawater, my precious cargo was ruined, the hats disintegrated in my hands. I woke.

On Monday I return to hospital for my stem cell transplant. Journeys and interstitial sites.

Hat Index 16th June 2013

Hat: no hat

Hat Index 7th May 2013

Hat: no hat

Museum of Contemporary Cuts, No Detectable Level, March 2013

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Kasa Gallery Istanbul, Body of Evidence Exhibition documentation, March 2013

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Kasa Gallery Istanbul, Body of Evidence Exhibition documentation, March 2013

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Kasa Gallery Istanbul, Body of Evidence Exhibition documentation, March 2013

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