phase 1: thinking and planning
20/12/25 [Proposal]
I haven’t documented anything about this module yet, I have felt busy with the rest of the course & life. Today, I am setting some goals and starting proper in whatever way feels right.
In a GCSE PC throwback, I will try and make my targets smart:
S - Specific
M - Measurable
A - Achievable
R - Relevant
T - Time-bound
20/12/25 [Proposal]
First, a spitball & a think about what my relationship to the future (& present) is like.
I want to do everything. I could list, I will list, all of the possible futures that I get satisfaction from dreaming about at the moment. I find it difficult to dispense plans from dreams. For this reason, I struggle to take my plans seriously. I know I will do things, I know I will put my all into them, but the way that things come about in my life seems so abstract from the way that my thoughts about the future form, that I am never clear on the relationship between the two.
It’s not that I believe I don’t do enough, or that what I do is thoughtless. The opportunities that I have taken over the year so far or have in the works for the future (will document) are all based on a foundation of effort and planning (+ luck). The significance of that, the satisfaction & pride within that, is just hidden behind the thick shame wafting off of the things that I have dreamed up or planned but have not done.
I think too much. I think in the shower, I think as I brush my teeth, and when my head is poking through the head hole of a t-shirt, without fail, I am thinking. I think as I breath in and as I breath out. I think when I am talking, about what I am saying, and I think about what I was thinking before I started talking, just so I don’t lose track. I think into existence a conversation longer than any I will ever have with anyone. And I get tired of it. By the end of every day, I have at least one new idea about the way I should live my life moving forwards that I am absolutely committed to. Today, I have three.
I should structure proposals to different artist residency opportunities in Europe (irish passport ✨) around making the remaining panels I have as in situ art pieces. Could coat liquid emulsion on the stripped panels and photograph as they both lumen print and then rust. It would be like a small and big cycle pictured over time spent in one space, within one object. Could be cool?
I should mock-up my Arnolfini space now so I can make glass sculptures to fit into the gaps left by whatever panel design I choose. Could do tone-seperations across stacked glass panes. Or could do little shelves drilled into wall with 3d triangular glass sculptures.
Max Ferguson is having a show at his studio I could go on the 17th and make a london career’s weekender out of it, try to arrange a meeting with Lewis Khan too or Myles Morgan Bailey? Would need to come up with a mode of presentation.
And perhaps everyone thinks in this way. But what I know is that it can hurt me sometimes. I end up feeling stressed and ungrateful. In theory I am investing maximum time and energy in my future, but in practice I feel less and less sure of myself and more and more scared of the whole thing.
Recently, I have had a bit of time to slow down. I still think a lot, but I have had time for the feeling side of things too and my feelings have turned into a pit, a good pit, of instinct. I forgot that when you relax, you become much better at navigating life. I want to find a way through this module that both capitalises on (and makes reality out of) the ideas I have, but also involves a lot of slowing down.
There are two (very connected) things that happen in my head that I have to follow. One is inspiration, it may come all at once and all at the wrong time, but it is the source of all of the good in life. The other is instinct, and the only way I can separate it from intuition is that it relates to what is around me, it is tangible, where inspiration is intangible. I have to pay attention to inspiration in the same way I watch tele, read books, run or so on. It is something to engage with, but not to replace life with. Instinct on the other hand is life, it should take up time, it should be pushed unrelentingly from thought to action and out into the world. It may be similar to inspiration, it may feel loose and fantastical at times, but the difference is that where inspiration can transport you across time and space into scenarios that you could only dream of, instinct is offering you a path in the real world, guiding you somewhere that may be unknown but will be tangible.
The journey should be done in conjunction with proper structure, time and probably most importantly there should be a level of co-operation. These are things I have learnt from comparing my false starts to my lengthier travels. Co-operation is often where I fall back. The form it takes can be slight, but it has to be there in some form: in making Clove Hitch there was no collaboration on the back-end, but by structuring a personal project around interviews I had external validation and a little more pressure. In terms of structure, hopefully the SMART Goals can handle that. First, I will split (spit?) my thoughts into columns of inspiration & instinct. Some will sound very random because I do not have time to give context.
INSPIRATION
INSTINCT
Use M level study / graduate scheme / internship to switch into a different career (while producing art on the side) that my skills would apply to. There is a grad scheme called Pathways to Planning that recruits from all kinds of degrees and gets you into urban planning. Interested in that kind of stuff + architecture. The rules around architecture qualification are changing over the next few years and I emailed RIBA to inquire about what this would mean for someone looking to get into architecture from a different background. Their reply was cryptic but open.
Use M level study in Art to move to a new city, make a bigger photo network and take practice to a new level.
Write fiction for Crystal Garden.
Apply for grants to make another trip.
Use ESP2 to create a solid portfolio of your practise & rinse it for every application that is open to an artist over 2026. Look for residencies especially, opportunities to be mentored, & opportunities for studio use.
{During} Show completed work to gallerists, art buyers, agents, curators, journalists & everyone else. Invite them to Copeland & Arnolfini.
Find ways to exhibit after, rinse contacts & make new ones.
Keep making work when I leave & use it to create relationships with people and places that can facilitate a working life.
Move home, spend time applying for everything, see what sticks, get a job that fits around it.
IN MOTION / UNCERTAIN THINGS TO DOCUMENT
Applied for Sustainable Darkroom open call for essays with Clare (Hewitt)
Have been in discussion with ICVL about a paid internship for months, but UWE internship funding has not gone through though :?
Have spoken to Clare about getting archive experience- Bread and Butter work is open to me & ICVL may have paid work too.
Have arranged mentoring for year following graduation but need to firm up dates.
DONE THINGS TO DOCUMENT:
Clove Hitch
GLUE @ ICA
Kit Form Darkroom Workshop
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Clove Hitch - I planned & designed an online magazine in May, after the end of the last career’s module. I arranged an interview with members of the MA cohort who were putting together a show outside of uni (On Being @ The Island), recorded a conversation with Archie (Byron, 3rd Year) about his practice and loosely transcribed it, and edited an old piece of personal writing. I sent this to everyone I could think of, got some lovely replies (especially from Max Ferguson) and felt great! I am currently working on a new 2026 edition of it, adapting my dissertation into the right format, and researching for a piece about what I (and the rest of the world) love and fear in the comparative auto-fictional/ memoir-ish works of Karl Ove Knausgaard & Sally Mann. And a third something, more of a personal thing again, which may involve sharing some of the writing I am doing for Crystal Garden.
- GLUE - Back in May I also put in motion plans to run a stall at a new photo-book fair being hosted by Hannah Geddes & the ICA. I saw the price for a small table was set at £70, asked Dan O’Reilly from the year above, who has just got a job at a commercial printers and was looking to get involved in stuff, if we could split it two ways. Dan was keen and we let the idea simmer over summer until it was a month away and we didn’t have a single book to sell. I had an idea which I half stole from my parent’s description of an activity at a small gallery in the east of Holland, where you selected artworks from a particular painter in an order of your liking and received a super quick & simple printed zine to take home. I adapted the idea into my own: me and dan would sew dummy books- interesting ones with mixed media pages like maps and old magazine cut outs, get photographers to submit images that we would print as high quality stickers, and then invite participants to select a few, stick them in their own sequence, and take away a unique zine. The format worked so well in the end that we sold out. We made a profit of about £5 and bought at least £25 worth of pints each. But we sold an experience to 70 people at least, and got to interact with all of them while they stood and got genuinely involved with a medium that is otherwise extremely distanced from the outside (non-photo) world. That is exactly what I had hoped for, the whole experience was one of the most affirming of my life in the art world. I made a lot of things which I will have to document, from hand-sewing 70 books to making a website from scratch and desinging the promotional material. And also there was an immense amount of organisation and communication from both me and Dan.
- Safelight Session (Darkroom Workshop) - In July, I got a DM from Illayda asking if I could help run a workshop at Kitform on October 10th, paid. I imagined it would be limited to assisting, but when I handed on my phone number and picked up a call a few days later, it turned out to be different. I was put on the spot and asked if I could design a darkroom workshop to deliver to 14 people, the only parameters being that they will have little to no experience and we will only have an hour. I have never up until this point been required to take charge like this, and it felt so good! On the call I suggested photograms, obviously because of the parameters and how convoluted it would be to have people bringing and handling negatives. I gave some examples of work made with acetates, we agreed on incorporating images from an archive connected to the organisers of the event, and I got the gig! Over the next few weeks, it turned out that the darkroom was currently, for all photographic purposes, simply a dark room. It had no enlargers, trays, chemicals, etc. So we (me and Rosie who I co-ran the workshop with) made a budget for everything we would need, found an enlarger of facebook marketplace, and got everything set up. The workshop itself happened the day after I got back from my 3.5 week long trip for Crystal Garden. It was a massive success, we timed it perfectly, and on the fly, so that everyone was shown through the process and able to print something with their own hands before doing a group activity to close.
14/9 @ Glue
Organisational material me and Dan wrote together and promo material I designed. We printed this
Website I designed:
https://nsxch.cargo.site/
Books I made (learnt to use a sewing machine for this!)
GOALS
Make a ~ 10 page PDF of Crystal Garden, by start of easter break.
Write a cv for internship by end of January, show to ICVL.
Upload (wip) Crystal Garden to my website by end of February.
Research competitions, residencies, studios, people to show work to, grants, etc. by start of easter and arrange meetings over the break.
19/11 Suzie Howell Talk
I am writing notes throughout the guest lecture & in response to it so these might be rough. But I forgot that this is the best way to make the most of lectures, rather than listening and regurgitating at the end.
materiality of the studio space - taking things into a separate dimension
In the room, in the conversations & in myself there is a lot if what I would identify as fear. But perhaps the people who deliver it, outside of myself, have no idea or no influence over the fact that I am reading fear into it. Perhaps what it was when it was sent out, was excitement, enjoyment, and hope. I can feel the change even when I open my mind to the idea of it.
Using it as a way of processing, thoughts. It makes sense, because things naturally grow out from themselves, repeat, contain and are contained in fractals of themselves. So processing will always lead to, and contain, more processing.
How could I apply this? Paying attention to some of the things I am drawn to doing. Welding, because I am drawn to the philosophical act of welding. What do I want to weld, and to what? I want to hold things together in permanence. But I want to retain the ability to separate things again too, I want a material that goes both ways.
Introducing colour because I want to philosophically ‘colour in’. To play in the way that children play. Why is that?
Distance (2019- Ongoing)
Exhibited at GLUE
Panic and time, two feelings that have come up more and more for me while I have been exploring the past/ present.
I can definitely relate to this discomfort with being. It is the reason I wanted at one stage to call this project ‘all of us are struggling to be here’. I understand so completely in this moment. Maybe that is why I am here, today, feeling a bit pushed and stretched by the experience of time.
‘Creating your own landscape’
I am really interested in this! I love the idea (I am not sure that this is what she meant though) of taking both colour and film images in places so you can put the two together again. Or more aptly maybe, mixing together different landscapes, the ongoing present of colour, and the stuck past of black and white.
The words of Louis Stopforth
Rearranging and twisting the possibilities of the single image, she aims to search for something closer to reality.’
Is this the relationship of colour and black and white?
Colour is an ongoing present. It must be and experiment (like the rust is) is must stay alive and fresh.
The black and white images are a structural thing which can be chipped away at, tuned into a more and more perfect form (for carrying the weight around it)
A bowl of tears to drink from (?)
Like in a dream, the thing you are running after, always out of reach. Like running on a hamster wheel. Certainty in life is something you do, not something you grasp.
Going back into the GLUE spirit. I think it is easy to get lost, I have been lost hoping that I will do one thing which buys me a ticket to go through the eye of the needle and out into the separate world which only exists through that validation. It is absolute bullshit, I know that. Whatever I am doing is what I am doing, if I decide that it hits a wall if nobody else saves it, it will. If I decide that it will leave the ground and carry me through the rest of my life, it will. There’s no magic in it, that is just the way things work.
I think some tension exists in many aspects of life, like career and art stuff, that doesn’t exist at all in my family life and relationships. Recognising that alone, means shedding light on the whole thing. I behave in a way with my partner and my family that guarantees- to the extent that I am able- a nurturing environment for those relationships. I do that because there is no question in my mind about those aspects of my life. I want only one thing, and that is to do the best thing I can to help them grow. So what about everything else? Why is it hard to have the same intention?