Progress is good. The Simalcrum series is about halfway through now. And interaction with students is good.
Earlier this week one of the students I had met earlier came in to discuss our attendance patterns and use of the vacuum screen printing press. And talked about paper as well as our work. Apparently there is a paper very like fabriano but not the same price, . . . Awaiting more information. . . .’
Another student, Jan or Jenny, I missed the name so apologies there. Enjoyed a discussion around the similarities in both our work. Both using found images and allegory. She explained her use of the Last Supper as a base for allegory. So it will be interesting to see where she goes with it as she develops her ideas, working out how it will read differently with different audiences, especially after hearing all the background to it.
There is a definite a change in interactions now. I think they are used to having me around and I feel more included and it seems more open, with students finding me and sharing more. So the residency is more interactive than parallel as it was at the start. Good progress in all aspects.
As for allegory, my interest stems from a use of found images and materials in my degree with a very direct connection and signification to subject matter, to a very different approach by the time I studied for my MA. I started to define, or is that realise? Maybe a bit of both; what that interest is while researching for writing my thesis. I never really wrote it, though, although tutors said that I must have toiled over it. But well, all I did is typed up my notes, printed and handed in. Teaching commitments got in the way, so I never really defined and argued the points in my discourse. Who knows if it would have been significant. But there is something I find significant about allegory that didn’t seem to have been written amongst the theory I read. I read Eco, Barthes, Derrida and other theorists and key things like intertextuality, which came up in relation to photographic images and writing. What seemed unresolved was whether we could say that the original story or references on allegory could either remain intact or if they could be altered or left behind. In metaphor the signifier may not be the signified and in agreement in language we all assign the meaning through contexts which somehow locate that meaning. So can we think of allegory in a similar way? Something in the general signification brings the context into play and we can work with that and steer the meaning somewhere else. In the simulacrum series I am working with ideas about the copy, but also steering the photographic references.
Enough for now.
