Back On Track

Hi Ben, sorry you've been ill, I've not been that great myself, but I'm really glad you decided to share these GIFs.

I enjoy the movement in them, the way the windows move forwards like footsteps. I also see what I think you were suggesting, the way we have each linked separate images/blocks, me through the paper pathway that I pieced together from past instagram posts and took for a walk, and you by linking images across the instagram divide.

The GIFs also frustrate me - they suggest the lack of control I feel when a computer is denying me access and I don't know what to do about it, and the speed at which they move reminds me of an anxiety I feel when overloaded with information.

I have made work before exploring different layers of my identity and the different aspects of myself that I show to people, from a biological body to a private, personal and public persona. I guess we all use different selves in different situations? Thanks for the observation, I'll ponder that one and I'm sure it will continue to inform future work.

With this being our last day of the residency I can't see myself getting much more done in terms of making (although I still plan to document the outcome of my most recent experiments in my kitchen), but the noticing and layering, the thinking and hopefully our conversations will continue.

It's been really interesting for me to explore the relationship of my work to yours, and how that relates to our explorations of who we are in terms of sexuality and identity, access, belonging etc. I am left thinking in particular about your focus on the found imagery and spaces of the virtual world and mine on the material world, and how that relates to inside/outside. I'm also looking forward to meeting you in the flesh at the Symposium in Winchester.

The images here show what I have been up to since my last blog post. By taking the printed images of previous #BlockChainDissentArt Instagram posts out for a walk, as a line of stepping stones/a pathway, I felt like I was back on home ground. Once home from that walk I continued in my kitchen. I made quite a lot of artwork in my home after we adopted our little boy, out of necessity more than anything, and it's been good to reclaim that as part of what I do.

Overall it has been great to use Instagram in a more open, playful way, and other apps to manipulate and collage together different found images, especially at those points when I didn't have the time or space to get out of the house by myself (Half Term, illness etc). But ultimately I feel that I am better placed to use digital media in order to re-present found images and made objects, as documents of my experiences and thinking. One thing I have particularly enjoyed is videoing elements of my working process, and that's something I'm going to develop further.

I've really enjoy seeing and hearing about your work, and feel I have a lot to learn about what different media can offer me, and I've also learned that I need to get out of my head, off my phone and away from the computer regularly in order to feel connected and 'me'. I'd be really interested to hear if you decide to take yourself and your work into the 'wild' of the outdoors a little more, and what that looks and feels like... maybe our work might start to meet in the middle?

PS. I wasn't going to try and sum up what I've learned or exactly what it is we've been exploring as I believe it's still emerging and is evident through our documentation of that the process here and on Instagram, but then I posted a tweet to share this blog post, and it captured it nicely from my perspective - 'Recognising authenticity and vulnerability as a form of dissent. Using art to notice boundaries, and experience connection beyond the binary'