DONE THINGS TO DOCUMENT:

• 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.