The useful art of dealing with critique

A family member is studying design at present and is taking on the daunting task of being critiqued by her tutors and peers. It’s something we all go through if we are in the creative fields and while it may seem daunting, critique can be one of the most beneficial experiences for your practice. I’ve…

Text-based Research May 2019

To go along with my image collection I usually create mind maps examining certain themes and ideas within the work. I wrote a statement that I think sums up much of what goes on in the work: Communication of otherworldly experience requires a symbolic language due to the ephemeral and unexplainable nature of the phenomena….

Dissecting symbolism and intention in my latest works

Often when I’m exploring new work I come up against questions that I struggle to answer. In the current series of photos and videos I have been creating I started wondering about some of the symbolism I was drawn to and also the intention behind the desire I have to use women as the protagonists…

The Ritual of the Mass & the difficulties of portraying esoteric ritual practice in contemporary art

Image: The main iconostasis in St Kazan Cathedral, St Petersburg, Russia. I’ve been discussing the idea of filmed ritual with Josephine who has collaborated with me in my video work. We were wondering about how have to have a more active ritual aspect to the work and how this would translate. The main issues I…

Saya Woolfalk and Psychedelic Shamanism

I came across Saya Woolfalk last year when I was looking at an article on the Artsy site about shamanism and contemporary art. I’ve thought about her work quite a bit since then and how to express my reaction to it, because that reaction is also deeply connected to how I feel about my own…

An Alchemical Explosion

(Image:Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. The rippling spacetime grid represents gravitational waves traveling out from the collision, while the narrow beams show bursts of gamma rays expelled just seconds after the gravitational waves. Ejected clouds of glowing, neutron-rich material swirl around the merging stars. Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet) Scientists at LIGO have detected,…

How to survive as an artist who doesn’t make enough money from their work. Yet. (Eternally optimistic.)

(Cartoon from The Oatmeal. The expression on the guy’s face is exactly the same expression I have when sitting in my studio, although my feet tend to reach the floor www.theoatmeal.com) I’ve read a number of times the advice that an artist without an established art career needs to have another source of income for a)…

Carl Sagan: A Glorious Dawn

The NASA announcement today of their new solar system discovery immediately made me wonder how Carl Sagan would have felt on hearing this news. There are 7 Earth-sized planets orbiting a small star 40 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius, they could hold life, they could even support our life. Sagan said it was…

The Finnish Sauna

Saunatonttu – the spirit of the sauna Last night I had my first opportunity to use the sauna at Arteles. It is a traditional  Finnish sauna with a wood-burning heater and water boiler. The sauna is a central part of Suomi life: “After centuries of temporal use, the sauna acquired spiritual significance. The sanctity of…

“Why are creative women dismissed as ‘quirky’?” – Eva Wiseman

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/feb/08/killer-word-quirky-eva-wiseman That’s a very good question. My work has been called quirky on any number of occasions and every time I hear it I cringe internally and have to hold back from rolling my eyes. There is something very lazy and dismissive about the word which Eva Wiseman manages to articulate well in her article….