10pm

another 10 hour shift at the studio.

For most of last I was in at 7.30am and left at 5.30pm. I tore paper, people came to visit or stopped as they walked by. They asked;

‘how much do you need?’

‘what will you do next?’

‘how do you feel when you are doing this?’

On Wednesday we had a peer critique. I avoided talking about my work and just continued tearing, and on it went until Friday when I arranged collection of an almost broken washing machine to be brought to the studio.

This morning I arrived again at 7.30am and tested the washer. It didn’t work. I continued tearing but all day I felt this sense of doubt and panic about what I am doing. Maybe it was the arrival of the washing machine which signified the next step for the process. I wasn’t so concerned about the fact it didn’t work, perhaps part of me felt no sense of urgency to get it going.

It began to occur to me that perhaps the tearing of the collected paper was something separate to the work with the washing machine.

I moved into Studio 4 last Monday and I have tried to spend all day every day there since.

On Monday morning at 9.30am, after only fiding a hammer to taker down the boards around the sink I was confronted with a dilemma. My good friend and work colleague had a family emergency and needed support. I offered to take over for an event that would happen on the Thursday. It was my last day of work for ExLab a project I have been co-project-assisting on to help fund my MA, which coincidentally was happening in partnership with my friend and colleagues department at the university.

It was also the group critique with Marcia Farquar from Tuesday to Thursday So I spent a few hours on Monday and all day Friday in the studio.

Tom Hall was also in Studio 4. He is one of the tutors on Fine Art. He was making a sculpture from cardboard. He said he once had a talk by a sculptor who carved in marble and he said you should steep you hands in urine everyday to keep them in the best condition for sculpting after this he said he use cardboard.

Interestingly, in the afternoon when I was quite tired from the event the night before and the clean up this morning Tom asked me where I had gotten the paper. Without much thought, except for maybe informed by the latest piece of text I had produced in response to Cultivate2 I responded. I told him I’d collected all this paper over 6 or so years because I found that I had no control over the decision to keep or throw it away. I explained that in life, much of life just happens, we have no control over the body and circumstances we are born into and we have no control over our inevitable death. because of this we make decision making a high priority but actually it counts for very little in the end because we may set out in a direction but there is no guarantee things will go to plan.

I showed him evidence of this in the papers I had kept where a decision could have changed my life, but I will never know about that now and is it worth worrying about? i showed another example of a decidion i made that probably put me where I am now, but i will never know which was the right one and if there is no right decision the could we be happier by relinguiching all decisions?

He went out for a smoke.

i continued taking the papers from my suitcase and sorting them into piles on the ground.

Then he came back and asked ‘are you sure?’ i said no, I am not sure. He told me about control; he could get a haircut, put on some new boots and then he had control. I presume he meant that he could control how he feels about his outlook rather that face things unprepared.

he said that I showed him pieces of paper where I had relinquished control, like the Sheffield Hallam folder that I didn’t pursue because I came to AUCB and that the decision to relinquish decisions was still a decision I had made.

Now he said it is like your paper. This looks out of control and by sorting it you are taking control again.

I said maybe and we both got on with working.

the first of the hoarded paper went to Tallinn in September 2011

I have been called raw. I have been called considered. It has been written that I have a transoppressive approach yet I am committed to strenious practice and training. It is undecided as to whether I am a sculptor or a performance artist.

I could be like Rebecca Horn and be both. I think I’d like to be like Gina Payne, Eva Hesse with a little Sophie Calle and some Pierre Armand and hang out with extroverts, cool kids and maniacs.

If I go to Japan it may cause some problems but may give me the discipline to make and the grace to perform with a little more class.