Selected links.

5 things that are true explores narrative using text from a flash fiction piece.

liminality, unknowing – explores liminals and use of text in painting by incorporating, with permission, parts of a poem by Amanda Huggins. The painting is to sit alongside the poem in her forthcoming collection.

Physical/digital art trail shows collaborative work with other artists, a local arts group, and a small business owner.

Final painting in the rift series but not included as a submission item due to its different palette. Others were excluded due to inconsistency of aspect ratio.

Exercises 3-8. These address preparation for the assignment 5 video.

Where my inspiration comes from – a series of short discussions.

Exhibition in the wild – a proof of concept trial for installing art work in outdoor places and outwith galleries.

Assessment video.

Essay

Reflective review in words and referring to my experience from first beginnings in 2018 to now

From there to here is a fold in time, nothing in the scale of cosmology.

From then to now has been a slow moving cataclysm of existential threat.

We are not who we were.

I am not who I was.

But I am wilder than before; fearless in what I make and how I make it.

I came from tiny pencil drawings, tight and precise but lifeless.

I have arrived here as an artist confident enough to put virtual art in public places, knowing I know how to do it, knowing there’s so much more to learn and not being daunted.

I have been called ‘professional’ by someone I asked about putting a river on his van, and the owner of a Grade II listed building who baulked before I explained and demonstrated from those public places.

An excited twitter user has been in touch to talk about festivals.

OCA did this; freed me up, made my arms swing to make big gestural marks, and showed me how to wait while something resolved itself on my easel and in my head.

And I am not done yet.

Listening to The Verb (BBC radio 3 July 8th, 2022), I heard poet Michael Longley describe his approach to writing, how he doesn’t know what he’s writing until the poem shows itself, that he waits for the lines to ‘present themselves rather than carving them out of silence’, and that’s it’s ‘important not to wade in and fail’. These feel like important reflections on the nature of unconscious creativity. From everything I understand about unconscious processes, the key is to feed them well and give them space to emerge. This is what Longley is doing and I’m happy to say it’s how my work emerges too and that I trust it to do that.

From The Verb website: “Michael Longley is one of Northern Ireland’s foremost contemporary poets. His debut collection, ‘No Continuing City’, was published to acclaim in 1969 and since then he has published many more collections of verse, including ‘Gorse Fires’, which won the Whitbread Prize, and ‘The Weather in Japan’, which won the T.S. Eliot prize and the Hawthornden Prize.”

The episode is available for ‘over a year’ according to the BBC website and Longley’s reading of his work a beautiful thing in its own right. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0018r05