Waiting

This mind map – or cluster – explores the theme Waiting. It ended up being quite large, about a metre wide. The person who asked, ‘does your brain really work like that?’ looked quite horrified but I suppose if you have a linear or logical approach to thinking, the prospect of letting your mind free associate and make subconscious connections would be quite scary. I started off drawing small clusters in a notebook but now they’ve developed to a point where they’ve evolved into artworks – text pieces that exist in their own right.

Fresh Meat Week

An illuminating insight into freshers week at Sheffield Hallam as youngest son posts his first photo album of student life (entitled Fresh Meat Week) onto facebook. Find it reassuring that the ritual of balancing as many objects as possible – ashtrays, food, pizza boxes, discarded underwear – on top of comatose student clutching empty bottle persists. Treated to another photo of son fondling fluorescent pink dildo. I post comment ‘Is that your new light?’ He comments back ‘It’s OK, it was boxfresh – just to warn you there’ll be lots of random photos – oh, and I’ll probably be broke soon’. His student loan went in on Friday. It’s lasted three days. How long before he turns vegetarian?

Found

Found: Discarded light shades at recycling centre.

Map of Leeds

I constructed this map of Leeds from memory as a way of discovering the city centre when I first moved there. Inevitably it focuses on places I visited.

A rude awakening

OK. This is how the day starts. A rude awakening to The Cult’s She Sells Sanctuary (6Music) followed by three cups of Columbian coffee (cardiologist assures me this is OK). Treat hens to an armful of tarragon and fennel. Rewarded with four eggs. Postman delivers bank statement though not pre-release copy of debut album by eldest sons band (promised yesterday). Consider bike ride then reconsider (no helmet, too much traffic) and decide to walk. Text mother who emailed from Cyprus yesterday,  ‘did you get my message? I don’t understand what they’re saying’. No, I didn’t get the message. If I knew who ‘they’ were I might understand what you are saying. She doesn’t text back. Listen again to Shaun Keaveney (6Music, Thursday) playing Seasick Steve, I Started Out With Nothing and I’ve Still Got Most of it Left. That makes two of us Steve …

Hello world!

Thought I’d keep the WordPress default Hello world as a title for my first post. Sssh. I’m a fugitive from Blogger. But I’m here now, as are examples of my stories, poems, memoirs and flash fiction, linked to my sidebar on pages instead of posts. Whee.

Unpopular culture

Artist Grayson Perry curates Unpopular Culture – an Arts Council touring exhibition currently showing at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston. Perry’s selection of figurative painting, documentary photography and bronze sculpture is a personal narrative of Britain from the late 1940s to the 1980s. Brilliantly conceived, it juxtaposes stark black and white images of the working class – pub-goers, beauty pageants and harassed dads – alongside vigorous and lyrical paintings by Auerbach, Burra and Carel Weight and bronzes by Moore and Paolozzi.

Perry has produced two works in response to the exhibition – a large ceramic vessel inset with cameos of a woman in a headscarf and a bronze skull (a response to Hirst’s Diamond skull), an icon of Britishness and relic of colonialism. ‘Arrangement in Turquoise and Cream’ (1979-81), a painting by David Hepher dominates the exhibition; the decaying facade of a 1950s tower block is interrupted only by the vibrancy of its ‘grubby’ curtains and a pink blanket – a reminder of the opening scene in Billy Liar which tracks a panoramic vista of post-war urban regeneration along to a sound-bite from Housewife’s Choice.

Unpopular Culture is a refreshing and optimistic antidote to the blockbuster show, reflected in its choice of venues; Bexhill-on-Sea, Preston, Durham, Southampton, Aberystwyth, Scarborough, Wakefield and Bath. A cloth-bound catalogue and limited edition silk headscarf designed by Perry accompany the exhibition.

Unpopular Culture, Harris Museum & Art Gallery. Exhibition runs until 13 September 2008.
(Contact gallery for opening times: 01772 258248).