Tracking MA Drawing

30 Sept: Off to Chelsea to enroll. Huge queue of students again making its way slowly up the red carpet, along the corridor, and into the banqueting hall. I stand there dutifully double the age of most almost triple the age of some, feeling it’s hard to do this second time round. Like visiting the church you got married in when you’re getting divorced.

10 October. Induction, Centre for Drawing.We show a drawing each. I take my big cloth hanging with Menston (West Riding Pauper Asylum) heads and text. Had been working on that intensively for about a month. Stitching, printing text sections from stencils, transferring images from printed photos from the archive to cloth via heated iron. Presented some challenges with the large head. It had to be ‘sliced’ in Adobe Illustrator. Tricky in IT terms. Rowland had to help me. It’s great to be in the clean, white well-lit space of the CfD with its warm wooden floors. Nice to put up the hanging in this space. Even if the piece is far from perfect, I feel pleased to have designed/built the format. The cloth is doubled; a pocket stitched along the top for a wooden pole; then two small screws with loops for the nylon cord. Simple but satisfying solution. I feel I will use it again for other pieces. The piece has the format of a newspaper page, with a mixture of columns of text and images of different size. I can see I haven’t done enough with the format, haven’t pushed it far enough – explored the tension between the 19th century content and contemporary newspaper references. All the same, it’s got possibilities.Am definitely drawn to long hanging format. I like the thought of a moveable format. Roll it up and move on, the way Mary Queen of Scots moved her tapestries. She even dismantled her dresses, turned them into embroidered front panels, sleeves, kirtles and so on, and they travelled in itemized form. Been thinking about the form of paintings after the year in Chelsea. No particular reason a painting has to be a rectangle of canvas on a wooden stretcher. That suited needs of particular classes and consumption.

There are some very finished pieces. Tania says my piece is interesting, and not yet resolved. Am interested in Janine’s work. Totally different from mine. Highly polished, geometric. Like early Russian constructivism, El Lissitsky, Vladimir Tatlin, Rodchenko. Very subtle gradations of tone done in pencil. Detached, cool. Warmth blooms quietly in subtle discriminations. Her geometry defines space,

each line builds an angle, a plane in space. I had been impressed by her work at the interim exhibition. The exquisite geometrical shapes also seem to be asking to be taken off the page into 3-D space. Does she need to build a great big steel sculpture the length of Wimbledon yard with bits of rusted steel hanging off it, and steam puffing out of it - a bit of Chelsea? On the other hand, maybe that’s wrong. Just be true to yourself. True to who you are. A bit like comparing the stories of Katherine Mansfield with those of Gogol.

Tania does a great job of explaining the whole first term of the course, what is expected of us, what we will be doing, and why. Couldn’t be more different from Chelsea.I feel happy. The whole structure makes me feel confident, inspires trust. At Chelsea, we were told when we arrived that our job was to have a party for several days. I remember feeling dismayed in the Banqueting Hall when the group started getting v. excited about party hats and party food and inviting an administrator who had written us course letters but whom we hadn’t met. Elaborate scenarios planned around the arrival of the missing Sarah Bowles. A chair prepared for her and letters for her to read. The whole thing for me deeply unfunny and a bit cringe-making. Would she much appreciate all this? Meantime, Brian Chalkley and Babak Ghazi wandering around in the background, with eminence grise smiles - the Lords of Misrule of this protracted party. Made me feel insane because I couldn’t see the point of any of it. So right at the beginning I ended up opting out. What was supposed to make the group gel actually kicked me right out of it because I’ve never been any good at parties, or small talk. I end up feeling alienated and split off from everyone, then find it hard to row back from that feeling.

I like the group here at Wimbledon. End up talking to Caroline on the log outside. Her husband of forty years, Sandy, has died. Two years ago. She is here because he is gone. We have an understanding. Quickly established in a short space of time. Grief/loss. There is a language.

11 October: Lecture, Permindar Kar. Interesting young Asian artist. She took a gap of several years to have two children. Makes families of creatures (In cloth, putty, paper, eg cloth black and white teddy bears) and puts them in strange positions in a gallery space to say something about people who fall through the social interstices. Invisible people. One image that stuck strongly in my head is the sculpture of a table with a short skirt about it. The skirt is made of a handsome thick material and is softly frilled. The legs of the table, on strange metal points, are squinted outwards, as if they might slide down the floor and collapse. The sculpture does something strange

with points of view. Are we at our mother’s feet, crawling under the kitchen table, looking up her legs? Or observing a skyscraper woman in a mini-skirt who can’t walk in her high heels, or someone whose vertebrae has been damaged so she can’t stand up properly? Nothing stands up properly in its proper place.The image troubles perception because it goes off in different directions. We can’t easily read what it’s up to – and it stays in the mind.

12 October: Workshop Inductions. Metal. Absolutely fantastic induction into the use of welding. I have used metal at Chelsea to make the QBE chandelier but it’s great to use it now for a free artistic purpose. We take our line drawings and try to translate them into metal. We use our hands to twist thin copper wire, then use the spot welder to do small solders, and get training on the big MIG (?) welder. Big red curtain has to be pulled round, serious helmets, serious boots, big leather gloves. I love this welder, which you have very little control over. I mark a small thick piece of steel, about the size of a little book of psalms, with script running left to right. The metal bubbles up under the massive heat – like watching the earth’s crust moving. The curving line is partly controlled, partly totally out of control. It ends up looking like a scar with a raised welt. Later Tania says it looks like a young scar, young scar tissue, and suggests displaying it on two nails in the wall. It works perfectly like that. Makes me want to do a series: ‘Little Book of Scars’, where you have two or three rows of small metal blocks each with markings that suggest a different type of scar. A different stage of healing. Sarah, the technician, sees me enjoying the welder and shows me huge sheets of aluminium at the back of the workshop. You can order them and do giant drawings. I love the idea but where the heck would you put such a thing afterwards?Charmain does a beautiful fine wire drawing of a shoe, an elegant pump. I ask her about it. It turns out she used to work in the shoe industry, designing shoes. Not surprising she can nail a shoe.

13 October: Showcase Presentations. We have to present one piece of work on the screen in front of MA drawing and MA Painting students. I make a complete hash of this. Haven’t prepared my talk enough. Need to practise the timing and not get too bogged down in abstract thinking too early. People can’t cope with it straight off. I should have just focused on describing the work in a simpler, more straightforward way, and then led on to the more complex stuff if there was time. A lesson learnt. Painfully.Very interesting to see other people’s work. I like Charmain’s drawing of herself, very detailed portrait, where the clothes seem to have an insignia suggestive of black history; Caroline’s figure drawing and her

multiple print of figures; and again, Janine’s austere, compelling abstract world. Interesting to see her narrative of where she gets her ideas: shadows on the kitchen table, on the walls. Tiny things closely observed.

13 October: Dinner with Isobel and Nigel.

14 October. The Drawing Room. Wonderful visit to this converted brick industrial unit. Fantastic space. Simple, clean, bare. And the drawings all got space to breathe. A gorgeous library for drawing. All sorts of books you can’t find anywhere else (eg. a book consisting of the experimental marks made by Mira Schendel on the way to her large text hangings – you wouldn’t find that anywhere else). Really want to go back there. We are all floating on air after this.Jerwood Drawing Exhibition: Exhilarating to see the centre and the exhibition. The centre itself is lovely and we have a nice lunch together in the courtyard at the back. The exhibition is full of inspiring things. Pushing at the boundaries of drawing definitions. Big piece of cloth marked with print and stich; animations (touching cartoon drawings with people talking about what they would do if they only had one hour left to live); abstract geometric drawings which do amazing things with space; portrait of a young man clothed in a bath done in purple biro, (the overall winner?); fantasy drawings with sci-fi cartoon icons; big charcoal head drawings; text drawings; even a couple of figure drawings, with a spare but true line; wonderful film drawing of a big splurge of white ink suspended in a substance and turning slowly, making incredible shapes, like some kind of mobile porcelain suspended in dark liquid. PM Tate Modern: Georgia O’Keefe. Not a huge fan of Georgia O’Keefe, but a big fan of the fact that she is a woman and lifelong exceptional artist and looked at as such – though that recognition seems to have come tardily and grudgingly. Nice poem about her by Patti Smith.

Great painting of adobe houses in New Mexico. Abstract shapes of the black doorways against the white wall. I seem to like the rectangular and angular more than the opulent curving forms I associate her with. Jacqui is there. I enjoy Jacqui’s syncopated off-centre relationship to the rest of the group. She is black, the rest of us are white; she was fostered and her mother was a cook; the rest of us are genteely middleclass. She has facial hair that tends to a beard, wide intelligent brown eyes, jeans which bag heavily at the behind, and wheels a sizeable suitcase behind her at most times. (Is it her home, or just the easiest way of carrying her kit?) Her presentation was all about record

covers from the 1960s/70s and 80s, with the great musicians behind them. At the exhibition, she homes in on the New Mexico landscape, which she is familiar with. On the way to the Drawing Room, we have an interesting conversation about prisons, cancer, family break-up. Jacqui can’t rush. She keeps up the same steady unhurried pace, with her suitcase rattling behind her, as we talk about these topics. At one point, I see the group up ahead, waiting on the pavement, Tania’s face a little contracted – we have a lot of distance to cover - with the stress of someone who has to keep the group together and moving along. Jacqui’s face seems generally relaxed, clear, as if she has no stress, but then her forehead suddenly puckers, and her shoulders hunch round her torso, in a way that makes you think social connection might be harder for her than you think. In the group discussions in the portacabin, when we have been asked to summarise our work, she can get defensive, prickly rather than confidently communicative. It’s a behaviour I recognize in myself. The unsafe child? Who is it who tells you what you have to say is worth listening to, will be attended to? And if it doesn’t happen at age 2 or 3, how can you make it happen at 22, or 52?

19 October: Eleanor Bowen lecture. An artist who writes. A writer who makes art. She is now writing a memoir of her grandmother’s life. She headlines some main points about doing critical practise research: suggests focusing everything round a driving question. Gives us an exercise. We have to describe our burning question. Then swap with our neighbor. Relay back to him/her our understanding of what they have written. Does it make sense? It’s a good exercise. Helps to be pushed to formulate our idea at speed and for the purposes of a defined piece of communication. I also meet a nice sculptor from the fine art course.

20 October: Pecha Kuchas. Lecture theatre. We’re all dreading this. I have spent the previous day – about 12 hours - gathering images. It becomes an exercise for me in visual memoir, gathering images about my mother’s life, putting her life in cultural context, as well as pulling together some of the artists whose drawings have influenced me most. Not an easy thing to do.I haven’t prepared the talk enough. It’s taken everything I have just to gather in the images. All the same, even though it’s a bit chaotic, I feel I’ve made some creative progress. It’s another way of drawing – taking a line for a walk through history. Have had the idea of writing a memoir of my mother’s life for years. This exercise feels like a part of it: plotting her life in historical chronology: images of the Blitz, 1950s film and advertising stereotypes, the explosion of demands for civil rights, women’s rights

in the 1960s, the invention of the pill. This is the backdrop for an individual life. Gathering in images of drawings that have been important makes me aware of v. early childhood: the Michelangelo drawings on the staircase in Parsonage Farm House, Newnham, Van Gogh’s boots, Durer’s hare in Grandma’s drawing room in Edinburgh, the framed print of Rubens’ son above her bed. Which I now have unhung upstairs. Very interesting hearing everyone’s presentations. Extremely good exercise. You realize a bit about other people’s work, the culture they come from, their artistic roots. Fantastic icebreaker, and genuinely introduces us to each other, not as at a party, but due to a genuine point of interest: the art. Love to see other people’s tastes/influences in drawing and painting – and to see examples of Chinese, Korean, Japanese artists I have never encountered. Although these presentations have immiserated the last two weeks with stress, I have to admit that it’s an extremely good exercise. We end up energized, stimulated, and feeling more connected with each other.

24 October: Life drawing AM. Sarah Spackman, Sunningwell. Been going to this wonderful class for over two years. Something new each week. We have to sketch the model moving up a series of boxes, pausing at the top and then descending. We have to seize points of the body as they go up and down. I like the disrupted texture that results. Multiple marks/multiple movements. I like indeterminacy in figure drawing – that the eye can read many movements or forms in a multiplicity of marks.

PM: Modelling from life, clay class. Pam Foley. Sunningwell. We are doing two figures. One is Bill in his costume Sikh turban, purple trousers and waistcoat, and warrior’s dagger tied to his hand with fine leather strap. He is seated on a chair in pater familias control pose, two fists resting on his knees, big costume boots spread wide. Then there’s Pauline, naked as a pip beside him draped over his shoulders. There has been a whole saga about being sensitive to Bill’s Sikhism and not having him lie down which might tumble his turban or do anything that would offend him in any way. A flurry of emails between the Oxford ladies exhibiting high levels of politically correct sensitivity. At the same time, Pauline is expected to earn her crust by stripping stark naked and holding a standing leaning pose for hours, despite the fact that she has a bad back and is in pain. I find the whole thing skewed and distasteful. I feel no connection with this pose and can’t represent it. I don’t want to leave the class, though, because I’ve paid for it, and want to learn about clay. So I get on with doing freehand little clay figures – twisted and arched torsos, broken body parts. I like

these figures. They have an expressive life. It’s like life drawing in clay, and liberating in a sense to do it without the figure.

26 October: Wood workshop with Pete. Fantastic induction. Very intensive. In the middle, manage to send flowers to my father in Edinburgh for his 82nd birthday. Part of the endless rushing at the moment between children, Oxford, London, finding an airbnb place near the art school, driving to and fro, and the demands of the course. Constant sick clenched feeling in the pit of my stomach because of all the things I should have done and haven’t at home.

Lecture: Geraint Evans. Very interesting hearing Geraint talk about his work, his journey to the paintings he does now. What comes across is that it takes time, is not a given. He spends several years looking for his way after the Royal College or Slade, then finds it when he goes to Canada on an artist’s residency and starts to explore cliché images of the great outdoors. That leads him eventually to intricate paintings of suburban hermits with long beards lurking by privet hedges in rucksacks and sturdy walking boots. I love his animation of a skeleton hung up on a wire and turning like a wind chime in an empty landscape.

Tacita Dean at Frith Gallery with Caroline. (written up on the blog.) Stunning drawings of clouds on slate, including short lines of exquisite writing (her writing is drawing, as Beuys said), a short film of Hockney smoking three cigarettes, and a wonderfully intelligent and moving film about acting in the sumptuous little theatre at the back.We have dinner afterwards in nice Japanese restaurant. Beats the soggy Thai round the corner from Tina’s airbnb.

27 October Phillip Courtenay. Approaching Research Seminar. Very nice but does like the sound of his own voice. Pub philosopher. Interesting how he came to create himself a job at UAL. Basically hoovering up all the problems that the system isn’t dealing with – all the emotional fall-out from a system that tries to cram in students without always thinking through how to offer them a coherent enough service. All the contradictions of big ticket international fees (‘money on legs’ as Glynis calls them) and students whose English isn’t up to speed but who have to perform a minimum written standard for the whole thing to qualify as an MA. So Philip proposed his own job to the powers that be.

28 October. Screenprinting with Ling. I go for an individual screen-printing induction with LING. Wonderful. Getting taught benchmark techniques on benchmark equipment. Very different from trying to

cobble it together at Oxford Printer’s Cooperative. Ling doesn’t suffer fools. You’re expected to listen up and get it fast. But she helps me with how to translate my files into bit maps and prepare them for the screenprinting process. She has a real capacity for teaching complex IT stuff in a very logical, lucid way – only someone who is totally on top of their material can do it (The way Lara teaches maths or Rebecca teaches singing.)Get my Menston heads out! (Have prepared a photoshop document of Nancy Farrar from the Menston archive and converted it so that you see the fine details of clothes, Victorian buttonholes and collars, but the face is blank. This is repeated nine times so there seems to be an army of dark blank faces.) Ling doesn’t want to do it, She doesn’t want to facilitate it because she says it should be done differently. It should be done via textile printing with the cloth pinned on the wall. The way I want to do it is all wrong – with the large piece of cloth flat on the printing bed and moving the silkscreen along the rows – it will lead to muddled and botched results. But I am desperate to make the thing happen. In the end, she helps me to do it, but reluctantly. Master printers want to do a flawless job. They’re like French chefs. I just want to run something up the flagpole and see what you get. At this stage, I don’t mind about errors/mess, the fact that the heads aren’t perfectly registered etc. For me it’s more important to make it happen and consider it, whether it makes artistic sense at all. Perfection can come later – ie perfecting a technique because you know there’s an artistic end it serves. I really like Ling. Am truly grateful to her and don’t want to offend her.

29 October. Oxford Printer’s Cooperative: spend the day printing with letters. Take the jars of letters I have recuperated from lasering text into Perspex, wood and acetate. I take them out and play with them on the etching press, scattering the letters on Japanese rice paper and rolling it through. I like the effect of the letters randomly scattered and then clotted in rlumps. Also like the long hanging effect of the rice paper.

30 October. Drawing at home: Spend a few hours drawing Rowland marking scripts. He’s very tired, very busy. Got back at midnight from his three days in Dublin. Has to bus from UCD to Dublin airport, plane to Heathrow, bus to Oxford, cycle back home. At the moment, it’s the only real chance we get to be together. Me drawing while he marks his big boxes of scripts. Lovely to slow down and do that kind of drawing again. I miss it. All the frenzied MA activity (plus planning a PhD proposal) can leave the deeply loved things behind. Am I losing track of myself, letting cleverness and analysis get in the way of core stuff? I came back into this (visual art) drawing family, domestic objects, the kitchen sink, doorways. There is something almost holy about this

observational drawing for me – what the medieval philosopher Duns Scotus called the Dasein, the thingness of things. Their absolute thingly nature. Drawing the people I love mainlines into this for me. It’s where it began all those years ago: lying on the kitchen floor aged 5 and drawing the dog, the cat, my sisters, my mother. Can’t ever remember drawing my brother. Is that why we don’t have a very good relationship?

Note: Avigdor Arikha. Drew the concentration camp he was in age 12. His sketchbook saved his life because an SS guard found it and he was spared. Amazing drawings of queues for food, people shot in the mud, absolutely unacceptable things to draw. Afterwards, in late 1940s, early 1950s Paris, abstraction was all the rage. Arikha was working to establish a reputation as an abstract painter and gave up drawing from observation. Then one morning he woke up with ‘AN IMMNESE HUNGER OF THE EYE’. He put away the abstract paintings and for eight years, and drew only from life, and only in black ink. Beautiful ink drawings of his wife, over and over again, his chair, his bookshelves, his printing press, his wife’s coat, his own shoes, the angle of the studio door. There is something about this thingliness of the things that surround him that is absolutely spiritual: only someone who had seen what he saw in the concentration camp, witnessed the vanishing of a people and a world, could describe the small things as he does? An umbrella standing in a corner, a book open and laid face down on a desk, a woman’s coat hanging on a door – these things are studied through the vision of someone who knows what it is when a civilization takes away the possibility of them. That’s why I don’t agree when people carelessly put down figurative drawing or drawing from observation. It’s all in what a person does with it, the seriousness of the intent. Discuss, as the Oxford general paper says.

31 October: Life Class. Sarah Spackman.Modelling from life. Pam Foley.

2 November Drawing into Printing, Etching induction. Wonderful induction with Ling. We make monoprint drawings; little etching plates (on easy-to-mark Perspex plates); simple linocuts. Asbolutely lovely to be in these print rooms being shown basic processes on different presses. I have been trying to cobble together bits of printing techniques across the last two years - awkwardly, expensively, frustratingly - and now this training, exactly what I have wanted, is being laid out before me without even asking for it. Can’t really believe it. Feel like the drunk sailors in the Tempest wandering across the island and coming upon a great store of sack.

PM: Edwina Fitzpatrick talks about her PhD. Researching a sculpture park in the North of England. All a bit underwhelming as most of the sculptures seem to have rotted into the forest and she doesn’t seem to have been able to track down many of the artists. She does design a large red plastic balloon with a fixture for her camera so that she can walk through the forest (looking a bit like Pooh on an expedition) taking footage of the forest floor. The footage is very jerky, with sudden shifts of angle as the camera swoops in and zooms out again, according to the vagaries of the wind? This bobbing, jerking footage goes on for some time. Two different people complain of migraines afterwards.

3 November Etching Induction II: Continuation of wonderful printing induction.

Drawing Lab 2. CfD. Capturing the line. Gorgeous exercise in which we trace the line round an object, as if we were touching the shape with our eye. There is no line of course, as Tania points out, but we create one. A near mystical thought. We trace shoes, coffee cups and each other’s faces from different angles. We all go into pure concentration, start to calm down from all the excitement. I love to see the quality of everyone else’s marks. I draw my shoe with its laces, making the marks through carbon paper. Love the quality of this line. Not really sure why I like it so much. Has a hesitant searching quality, a quality of hovering between two points. Also really like Glynnis’ marks, a kind of tumbling tangle which gets at something, put down with freedom and authority.

4 November Figure drawing all day at Sunningwell. (Anne’s class.) Decide to give myself the pleasure of drawing all day instead of trying to paint. Do charcoal drawing with a bit of gouache added at the end. Like what I’ve done.

7 November Life Class Sarah SpackmanClay modeling class: Pam Foley

9 November: Phillip Courtenay in the Portacabin. Significant meeting. I find his input very helpful. We have an hour together because Jacqui is ill and can’t come to her tutorial. I have sent him the draft of my PhD proposal (genetics, science and subjectivity etc.) He questions the control I have over describing my research. The conversation leads into writing as well as art. He says why don’t I just do both, or move between them as feels right. He suggests taking my

time on the MA to explore and follow creative intuition, rather than making myself follow a stated research programme. This feels right. I feel excited at the possibility of actually being free to do what suggests itself, and the idea I might be ‘allowed’ to move freely between art and writing. I talk a little about having always felt split: that I had to choose between them. I talk a little about my mother memoir idea, working through image and text. He says, in terms of the D.Phil proposal, why not make a case for yourself as doing both? Is this a genuine possibility? I still find it difficult to believe in it. Is this what Brian (Chalkley) meant when he said I was still working within a pre-existing idea of what art was rather than…. Rather than just getting on and making new art.

Lecture: Tania. Extremely impressive and fascinating. I am so interested to hear the storm of criticism about the work she did putting a condom over a statue of the Virgin Mary. Half the time, artists/writers don’t know what they are doing when they dream their dreams, then wake up, when they are at their most vulnerable – just after showing some new work – to find themselves in a firestorm of hate and cultural opprobrium. Tania was target of media attack and had people praying for her soul across Latin America. I tell her afterwards about my experience with my book (father threatened to take bring a legal case against me ‘under the law of Scotland or England’ and to summon my siblings as witnesses against me). It’s good to talk about these things: the strength to withstand criticism in an artistic career is as important as the whole question of money and financial survival. I am interested in the scale of ambition in her projects. And also in her apparent calm. Projects for major public institutions where there is every chance of things going wrong. Where a lot of things are being done for the first time, in new ways, and are dependent on lots of other skilled parties, eg getting a tree up into the roof of a major public library. She seems not to experience great stress about this, but just to go ahead, making sure it happens, negotiating with all the relevant parties, ‘seeing her vision’ up ahead of her and proceeding – relatively – calmly towards it. Note to self. Have genuine creative drive to make innovative things happen, and an appetite for hard work, but not the capacity to withstand stress. Am very bad at coping with stress. Get nasty and shout at people and fall into depression. Then feel guilty afterwards and have low self-esteem. This cycle really slows me down, hobbles me. (And is what happens over the course of this term.) Does this have to be a limiting factor for me? You have to cut your clothes to suit your cloth – make your ambitions suit the capacity of your personality to deal with them. Feel very lucky anyway, not for the first time, to have Tania as course leader. The mixture of artistic drive and talent, ambition, combined with

fairness and kindness as a teacher, and feminism, is everything I need and want.

PM: Group crit between students. We organize a group criticism together. It’s nice to talk to the Year 2 students and see more of their work. Nic a very talented figure drawer, does quick sketches of crowds, individuals, throngs of individuals in stations, cafes, parks and from the window of the CfD. She gets the absolute character in a few strokes. Enjoy Su’s pixelated head drawing from a photograph, and a man (have forgotten his name, he is a course rep. and seldom around) who has done a lovely series of drawings of twisted balls of wool or thread. They combine the tangled energy of Claude Heath head drawing with fineness of mark of Rebecca Salter. Quite small-scale and framed.I show the print I did using letters on rice paper. The input of the group is helpful. In their reactions, people use words I have thought of myself vaguely but not consciously foregrounded: mutation, duplication. They comment on the difference between things arranged by lines, rules, and things occurring randomly. ‘Mutation’ becomes my working title for the piece.

9 November Rachel Goodyear at Pippy Houldsworth with Caroline. Drawings of young women with pompoms in their eyes. Eerie, a little sinister. The figures stand in cut-off isolated spaces. She studied at the Royal College of Art and quotes the feminist short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, as an influence. I am Interested to see a catalogue of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum on the windowsill. There’s a lovely little library at the back of the gallery. Want to come back here.Afterwards we have a meal and I talk to Caroline about my extraordinary meeting with my mother’s best friends at LMH (on the blog) due to the Beaufort Legators’ Lunch. Talk also about my idea for doing a memoir of my mother’s life across image and text – of interviewing women who were born in the same year she was and went up to Oxford. Asking them all the questions you’re not supposed to and all the questions I never got to ask my mother - first periods, early sexual experiences, differences of expectations for men and women, work, marriage etc. Caroline is enthusiastic, and knows someone who might well be relevant. This friend went to Somerville in the same year as my mother. Had a child before marriage which she was forced to give up. Caroline only learns about it when they are driving somewhere together and talking about something apparently unrelated. The women suddenly stops her and says: ‘You’re going to have to pull over while I tell you this.’

Then tells her the story of the baby she had at 20 and was forced to give up. Very moving. Not an uncommon story for the era. Clare Short went public about it when she reunited with the son she gave up forty years previously. Caroline (Warman’s) mother had a baby she had to give up before she went on to marry and have two children, one of them Caroline. Caroline’s mother has now reconnected with this child, who is unemployed, lives on the South Coast, struggles with mental health issues, and is unmarried. Caroline (product of the best private schools, a fellow in French at Jesus College, Oxford, wife and mother of two lovely children) did not know she had a half brother and now sees him quite regularly.Caroline (Holt’s) input about this project gives me strength. Writing this up now, I realize I have had two sources of support for this idea, Phillip and from Caroline. I want to do the project even if it can’t be part of the MA in Drawing. Resolve to borrow a camera from the Wimbledon Loan Store and start organizing filmed interviews.

10 November AM: Careers and Employability, Hannah Breslin. Very good introduction, but unfortunately, I miss most of it because of another appointment.

10 November: Unit 2 Presentations. They go along well – Su is to the point and articulate about memory; Jacqui talks about community-based drawing research; Ali about the world of women’s magazines. Then It comes to me giving my presentation about text in visual art. Ali is looking at stuff on the internet while I’m talking. Ruth tells me frankly she would ‘never read something at an art gallery’. Makes me feel sad and a little lonely that there is so little energy to commit to reading. Anyway, this presentation, which took me two days to put together, bombs. Useful, if painful experience. I need to prepare thoroughly by giving a timed speech, feeling where it sags, where concentration will drift. There’s no point doing it in your head and hoping for the best. It’s a performance and it’s got to be practiced.It’s so bad that Tania interrupts me, stops it, and says what do I hope to get from them. Ruth says she can’t concentrate. Jacuqi says am I trying to write a book, and I’ve only got 3.000 words. Ali is still watching her screen.Feel thoroughly shaky at the end of this. On the edge of tears. Struggle to get all my stuff out of the CfD and into the car, then find I’ve got a f- ticket despite the parking permit from my air bnb room in the windscreen because I hatched out the wrong day of the week – got the month and the year right, just marked Wednesday instead of Thursday because I was in a hurry and didn’t have my glasses. 2.5 hours of traffic because of hold-ups on the M25. I wonder doing whether this MA is really in my best interests. Too much stress. I can’t

always manage it. Am supposed to be being some kind of mother to the children, and can’t do this if I get so upset I can hardly drive safely. I get home, unpack the kit from the back of the car into the narrow hall and then fall over it. Feel like crying again. Lara is in the front room with Lucy. Doesn’t come to help me though I’m sure she hears me fall over the stuff. Feel like crying even more. Rowland is in Dublin. The house is a mess. Lara is not kind. We are tense together. It’s all too much. At the end of the day, you have to look after yourself. Maybe I don’t have the strength to do this.

11 November: Screen-printing day with Catriona at OPC. We have a great day. I do a big screenprint of an image of a big table of genetics calculations (preparing for the PhD idea) – also a great freehand figure drawing on floppy plastic. This material allows a kind fo instant etching. You draw onto it freehand, expose it on the lightbox to make a screenprint, print the screenprint on a big sheet of cartridge. Then I draw back into it with a rag and printer’s ink. Get a kind of washed in line. Deep oil in the paper. I accentuate the rib cages. It’s nice to be able to draw from memory. To have enough knowledge via all the life classes to be able to go free. I like the expressionist, organic quality of the line. It feels like a core of me. Part of me would just like to go and do figure drawing forever and forever. Don’t know what to do with it – where to take this drive - because it doesn’t feel as if it has much of a home in the contemporary art school.

13 November. David and Betsy Bells’ party. David former Professor of Geology at Oxford and dean of University College when I was there 30 years ago. Betsy an artist who makes her own paper, does lovely largescale prints and makes paper relief sculptures. When David retired, they ran an artist’s commune from a beautiful house in the South of France. Artists from all over Europe came and stayed with them and they made art together in the barns. Betsy has written a book about the school full of beautiful photographs. What a wonderful adventure to have after retirement. David talks about the artists with real affection – he went back and forth to fetch them from the airport – and he observes their progress with real interest and respect. Meantime, he is getting on with his own retirement career -– writing long mythic novels set in ancient Crete. Extraordinarily intelligent and humble person. I am so glad to have met up with him again.He and Betsy made the decision to come back to the UK because Betsy had a couple of falls and the house was getting too much to take care of. David is being treated for prostate cancer, hopefully manageable. They have a lovely home in Hill Top Rd, where we used

to live, but they still miss France dreadfully. David is broken-hearted when Brexit happens.

15 November. PhD long table, the Cookhouse, Chelsea. Hellish drive in – Rowland has driven – but we got lost, he refused to listen to my directions, the sat nav confuses us, and we get even more lost. We have a huge row trying to get there on time. The students are defensive, prickly, and refuse to describe their practise-based PhDs. But that’s the only thing I want to hear. What is a practice based PhD and how to do you formulate it? I have to formulate my own proposal for the Ruskin by 20 January 2017. The posh leaflet they have printed, ‘dinner table chat’, says ‘anything on the menu’. But you rapidly become aware that not much is on the menu. Specifically, getting them to give any kind of general description of their PHDs. Which is the only place I want help. One woman, who has young children, challenges them directly. Says she has the feeling she is being made to feel small with every question she asks. They virtually say take your silly practical questions elsewhere; we are above this. After a little while she gets up and gracefully excuses herself. Says she mistook the nature of the event and has young children she needs to look after. I am stuck there trying to get some sense out of this grim bunch. One woman, who teaches at Chelsea, seems to think she is the world authority on everything. Has the manner of a 1950s sexist bloke, assuming it’s everyone’s place to listen to her, and squashing other people when they talk. They seem to me to belong to the Chelsea art school culture. Too much prickly arrogance masking insecurity underneath. A horrible culture and I don’t want to be part of it. When I get outside Rowland is at the back gate of Chelsea sitting in the front seat of the car marking philosophy scripts. He has just discovered that the batteries are flat because he has left the headlamps on. We have a horrible hour trying to find some jump leads (I run around receptionists/janitors at Chelsea, no chance), and we stop taxis. Eventually find a taxi driver on the Vauxhall Bridge Rd who comes and helps us. He doesn’t even want payment. So kind of him. V. healing after all that horrible stress. We go home in a grim state. Rowland has to get up at dawn next morning to go to Dublin. All this doesn’t make sense. I probably shouldn’t be trying to do this PhD proposal. It’s just making a horrible stress out of everything.

16 November. Methods and Materials. Fantastically helpful introduction to painting surfaces and materials. Tim is a rare asset. Standing at his table with more potions, ointments, salves and antidotes spread out than Getafix, he is an encyclopaedia of knowledge about supports, paints, gessos and varnishes. Also horror stories about what has gone wrong with great paintings due to

careless behaviour by famous artists. The whole room is desperate to gobble up as much knowledge as possible. We all know it’s rare to get access to it. There were several painters at Chelsea who really wanted the chance to consult a painting technician. I have seen a huge appetite for this practical knowledge/expertise, which seems more and more abandoned in contemporary art schools. Eg Chelsea only had the digital print studio, but many people wanted access to traditional printing. There were lots of painters attending lectures on continental critical theory but had no access to teaching about paints or supports. 16 November PM: Isabel Seligman. Drawing the Line. Stimulating lecture about the British Museum Drawing collection and how we can access it. Made me want to go and spend time there but too busy right now. Too many wonderful things on offer right now properly to take advantage of them all.

17 November. Methods and Materials. 2. Another hugely helpful lecture. Tim shows us how to make chalk boards. Put fat over lean when painting in oil. Also shows us how to prepare a gesso. Discusses different grades of canvas and ranges of paint.

PM: Peer Workshop. Nic takes us to draw crowds at Wimbledon Station. Fantastic session. We all set about the impossible task of trying to capture different people as they go past. Good for the reflexes. Then we come back and make a group drawing layering the figures over each other, cutting them out, grouping them and making some kind of 3-D space. The results are very interesting – even more interesting for the layering of different people’s drawing styles within one field. We all enjoy it. And it encourages experimentation.

PM: Private View ING Discerning Eye, The Mall, close to ICA. Meet Fiona Graham Bryce to see my piece accepted there and see the rest of the exhibition. Have to miss a lecture in Chelsea on Aesthetics and Madess which I would very much like to go to, and also a lecture about fashion drawing, which I would love to go to. The woman giving it used to draw for Spare Rib, and has drawn for Vogue. She must be interesting. I want to do this course again in slow motion, taking advantage of everything. ***

18 November. Ruskin Open Day. Cycle down to Ruskin’s new centre on Bullingdon Rd to see the postgraduate open day. Planning to put in an application to do a PhD at the Ruskin and Brookes to try and get art my activity transferred from London to Oxford. The commuting and being away from home when Rowland isn’t there is doing my head in. I feel continually stressed and guilty. Every Thursday night I get back exhausted after the two days to find dirty

house, smelly dog, and grumpy teenagers. Who also think they are entitled to talk to me in seriously superior way because all I do is ponce around making art and not earning any money. Unlike their friends’ mothers – and Dad, who all have proper jobs, as Lara (16 and planning to be a doctor) doesn’t hesitate to tell me. ‘Well what about x, she hasn’t earned any money for years…. ‘ I find myself saying. ‘And she keeps going off to Paris and leaving her children…’ Not exactly a dignified way of supporting the sisterhood. My self-esteem is really in the pan on Thursday evenings, and Lara and I usually have a row because I’m too tired to absorb the put-downs and end up flaring up and reacting angrily. At which point she says how can I expect her to look after everything when I’m away, the dog, the meal, Rebecca, clearing up the kitchen, and then shout at her. I feel I’m doing a rubbish job of being a mother, and because I feel so guilty and such rubbish, and because she has said things that hurt, and because I have started and now can’t stop, I shout some more, even though it’s the shouting that’s making me feel like such a very bad person. (cf Macbeth. I am in blood stepped in so far… returning were as tedious as to go o’er…)

21 November. Life Drawing. Sarah Spackman. (Post-teenager healing therapy. A lot of the women there are at a different stage in life, retired with grandchildren. They have a bit of margin to be kind and I really appreciate it. It’s a steadying hand given the absence of my own mother, which I have felt acutely throughout my life, and feel again strongly through the parenting experience. To bring up children without your mother is to try to cover too many roles, to ventriloquise a security and a solid persona you often don’t feel. The calmer vision of these women helps me recalibrate, adjust perspective – especially through these rocky teenage years when I feel so inadequate to the job. The challenge is to forgive myself, to be gentle to myself, because maternal guilt doesn’t make you a better person – it just tends to trigger another cycle of defensiveness, low self-esteem and anger outbreak. Along with the kindness of these women, there is the pleasure of drawing. By the end of the morning I feel in a different place.

Clay class. Pam Foley.

23 November Methods and Materials 2. Tim.

I am feeling pressure about the Freud Museum Commission. I have prepared boards with printer’s ink and whiting and am planning to laser engrave the text of the Christina Rossetti poem about Secrets onto it. But I’m worried the whiting won’t stay on. Can I cover it with

varnish and still retain the effect of snowy blizzard? There is a huge queue of students with questions at the end of his lecture. I’ve got to take my camera back to the loan store before it shuts, get lunch and go to another lecture. The time is disappearing. I reach out and take hold of the little pot of Damar varnish. I start spreading it with my little brush on a sample piece of card with whiting. Tim gets cross with me. He hates anyone touching his materials without his permission. I do understand. The way I behaved is rude. I wouldn’t like it myself. I’m just desperate to get my problem sorted. The deadline is weightng on me. Getting really anxious and can’t manage my anxiety. Sending lots of emails trying to get access to laser machine in Camberwell and getting nowhere. The technician from Cambwerwell works part-time in Wimbledon but only on days I’m not there. We have an exchange of emails but he avoids a conversation by phone. The technical details tricky. Just when I think I might be getting somewhere, and he might let me near the Camberwell laser, he tells me I have to get permission from the technical site managers of both Wimbledon and Cambwerwell before going onto the waiting list for the laser at Camberwell. All Camberwell students will have precedence over me. Hopeless. I decide to give up and find access to a laser machine in the real world. It will cost me but it’s the only chance of delivering by the deadline: just before Christmas.

23 November: Yu-Chen Wang, Taiwanese artist. Drawings combined with performance. She does dynamic spatial drawings flying from one wall to another with marks like a fierce game of rackets. Works across interesting range of materials, traditional, along with wire, mesh, metals etc to make sculptural drawings. She is also doing inventive things by adding narrative. Eg Tries to animate British industrial history by doing an installation in a printing works with acting scenarios. Only half successful since she hasn’t really got much grasp of narrative so it quickly gets repetitive and the actors seem to get noisier for the lack of something to say. Nothing worse than a bunch of actors with a bad script. But she’s young and will probably sort this out over time.

24 November Peer Workshop. Ruth. We spend a wonderful morning doing walking meditation in the streets around Wimbledon and then come back and draw our experiences. It is quite scary to try and do this at first – ie to draw without a reference – but after a while it gets easier and I allow it to come out. We get lost in the psychogeography, trying to describe our walk – sense impressions, memories, observations – on the page. In my case a whole lot of words and metaphors start to pour out onto the page. Caroline says I need to take it to my therapist. Which makes me wince. The results vary a great deal between people: Caroline’s drawing is

spare and conceptual; Charmain’s a charcoal drawing of a scene with strong composition; Yi Feh’s a lovely study of leaves and newspaper on the street being moved by wind; my own is a chaotic jumble of words and images with a sense of submerged narrative; Janine’s a condensed geometric symbol that makes me think of a Zen pond or Japanese board game. The results on the wall are interesting. We all started at the same point, but have ended up with a set of pieces that are widely divergent and suggest different directions in contemporary drawing.

Lunch with Jane Reid. Jane (I met her at the Beaufort Legator’s Lunch at LMH) is engaged in setting up an art prize residential centre in North London . The house is a centre for homeless former addicts to get their lives back on track. A previous psychiatrist-director commissioned the last lot of paintings in about 1940 and she thinks they’re really grim. She wants to have new ones done. We have had conversations about how best to plan the painting prize. She drives down from North London and is a little late. She must be about 80, has a dodgy hip, but there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with her mind. I had intended to take her to the Willow Bough, which is more suitable, but there isn’t time. So we go the art school canteen and sit on the brown leather sofa, which by this stage of the day is furred with chips and ketchup, and flecks of baccy from roll-ups. I stand her a soup and we talk through the project. On the way back we cross Geraint. I ask him whether he has a moment. He doesn’t but I introduce him to Jane anyway. His manner changes when he hears about the painting prize. I really like Jane. She’s loyal and intelligent and kind, and a lot of fun. She has agreed to be interviewed by me for the project doing a memoir of my mother’s life by interviewing women born in the same year as her who went to Oxford. She says it sounds interesting and has sent me an email talking about how the person she was then seems distant from her, like a fictional character. When I sent her the photograph of my mother, she gave me the word ‘fascinators’ to describe the strange headwear. After this meeting, she is on her way to see her daughter and grandchildren. There is the familiar pang – my lifelong jealousy of the mothered, women whose mothers are still alive and have been involved with their children -– but it’s not too bad. I can cope. It’s good to feel a bit more strength about this. To feel the pain but let it go.

24 November PM Peer Workshop – Jacqui. We are asked to do a drawing of our early relationship to drawing. Afterwards, we talk about first experiences of drawing.In the course of this discussion, Charmaine tells us a story about her childhood. She made a drawing in felt at school which was selected as prize winner in a competition. When the teacher realized it was Charmaine who had won, she changed the decision. The implication: because she is black. Charmaine tears up when she is talking about this. It’s important for us to hear this. That’s one of the best things about art school, or any other kind of university environment. It’s a space within a wider social space where that story can be told and we can all hear it. Not necessarily that common.I think too the story would probably not have been told if Jacqui, facilitating the workshop, hadn’t also been black. Another reason why the art school demographics need to change. It’s only when minority groups see a representative of themselves in power that they can feel safe enough to share their experiences of vulnerability(?). I know that’s true for me as a woman. I need to see women in positions of power in an establishment otherwise I don’t feel safe in it. In an art school, I don’t feel safe enough to take creative risks. I don’t feel there will be an audience for what I do, how I think, given that it is is necessarily feminist. That was one of the problems with Chelsea – all the fronting tutors for the MA were men and didn’t see any reason to grant me the request for even a small input from a female tutor. Other women don’t feel this, but I do. It probably comes down to your childhood - how safe you were with the particular men around you. Whether you felt safe enough to go for it, have power, a voice, express yourself. If you were radically unsafe, you probably need a safe space within the wider social world to take the risks you need to take to be truly creative. An argument too for continuation in some form or another of girls schools/colleges?

25 November; laser cutting with Dave at Cotwsold Screenprinters, near Witney. Have been getting more and more stressed about the Freud Museum project because I can’t get access to the UAL laser cutting facilities in time to make the deadline. Now lovely Dave, founder director of Cotswold Screenprinters, has agreed to help me out. We discuss the project, which is v. different from his normal fare. They cut and print the fronts for industrial and electronic machinery.

26 November. Obsessive day on the Freud Museum project. (I seem to be turning into my father.) Go to reclamation yard in

Abingdon to get hold of some recycled timber. Wonderful place. Feel so happy in it. It’s got 30 foot pews from chapels in Wales; parquet flooring from old country houses in the Cotswolds; elm beams from 1814 cattle barns; rafters from an Oriel cricket pavilion. It’s a not for profit business run by people who love working with wood. They give attention and care to each customer. I go out with a beautiful piece of ash, shaped like a menhir/gravestone. Plus a sample piece I can play with.

27 November: Freud Museum project. Mocking up card with printer’s ink and whiting. Doing drawings of the text in Adobe Illustrator, arranging it in different ways to try and get the dynamics of the poem into the layout of the text. Want to capture the self-division in the poem through the way the text is displayed and cut into the card.

I also edit the draft of my D.Phil proposal to send to Professor Lisa Walker, head of cancer genetics at the Nuffield Hospital. I am going to have a meeting with her next week.

28 November. Life class Sarah Spackman. Clay class Pam Foley. Small clay figures coming

along well. I am making a whole series. Like life drawing without an actual figure. Really like this free way of working, the plasticity of the clay.

30 November. Pinhole camera with Nick Manser in the Observatory. (on the blog.)

30 November PM. Alex Hartley lecture. Seriously impressive. Range of work includes sculpture, performance, towing an island from the Arctic to south coast of England, and in the process inventing a new democracy; painting; and building modernist house sculptures in a variety of locations. He is generous in the way he describes his work eg, the patience of Miro gallery as he generally hasn’t sold that well. He doesn’t do the kind of itemized work that would sell to individuals. But he notices that for his current show he is getting more calls from the gallery than normal as if there’s a sudden flurry of excitement. Would like to sit and listen to him talk about art/sculpture/the workings of the art world for a long time. Am struck by the scale of ambition required to make an artistic career nowadays.

Evening: Go and fetch picture from Discerning Eye at Mall Galleries. B- long schlepp to pick up your picture that hasn’t sold. A mug’s game. Exactly the same with the Sunday Times Watercolour competition,

which wouldn’t even let me take my own picture away when I was there, so I will have to take a trip up from Oxford specially. And pay for it. Once you’ve got the name of the exhibition on your cv, why would you ever do any of these circuits a second time round? A real waste of time and money.

1 December Pinhole camera 2. (as on blog.)

2 December Off to OPC to make more panels for Freud. I cut up lots of panels of grey card, cover them with printer’s ink, then whiting to make the effect of a storm of snow. Try different varnishes (have consulted with Tim and ordered a special Damar matt varnish). In the end it’s no good because it just wets the whole thing down and you lose the blizzard effect. So it has to be without varnish. The lasered text will look v. good on the whiting, but the surface is fragile. I have no solution to this.

3 December: Su’s Peer Workshop. Lovely workshop that I would like to enjoy (doing portrait drawing from a wartime photograph of her father.) But I have to leave early to go belting back for Lara’s parent-teacher meeting at Cheney. Can’t miss it because it’s a new school and I need to hear how she’s doing. Big traffic on M25. Dark and rainy. I’m going to be late, am driving far too fast, and am almost crying by the time I get near Gypsy Lane. Lara has phoned several times to see where I am. The whole thing is just so stressful. Can’t put care of the children and this London art school together. Just one of several times I think about giving it up.

5 December Life class Sarah Spackman Clay class Pam Foley

6 December: meeting with Professor Lisa Walker, head of cancer genetics at the Nuffield Hospital. We talk through her work and my D.Phil proposal for Ruskin. She says she would be happy to act as co-supervisor. I am pleased as punch and very honoured.

PM: go out to Minster Lovell to pick up my panels of lasered card from Dave at Cotwsold Screenprinters ready for the exhibition at Wimbledon.

Evening: Rowland and I spend two hours getting the 8 panels of lasered card safely into the large dark Perspex frame I have on the landing. I know it’s not the right thing. The work needs a handsome box frame, so that you can look down into the blizzard and see the relief of the letters at a distance. They look crammed up against the surface of the Perspex but it’s the best I can do.

7 December We clear up the Centre for Drawing ready for the exhibition. Start installing from 11.00. Very useful lessons in how to clear and plan an exhibition. How best to store fragile drawings that need to be rolled. Go and buy a tube canister, and roll my ricepaper hanging with newsprint. Learn how to place a frame/picture/object at eye height, 150cm from floor. Take the mid-point of the object and put it at 150cm, measure out from there.Learn how to make little batons from wood and then paint them as a way of displaying drawings so that they hang at a slight distance from the wall. Charmain does this with her long drawing and it looks v. good. Learn how a very small ‘drawing’ can carry a punch. Tania picks up my little metal book – the piece of metal I welded with marks that look like a cross between cursive writing and young scars – and suggests it goes on two small nails. It looks v. good like that. Glynis gets upset because she is between two framed drawings, mine and Ruth’s. Says she feels ‘like Cinderella at the ball’. I say her piece looks good. She’s not having any of it. V. interesting to see how Janine’s drawing, folded and intricate, which she suspends in the middle of the room from a light fitting, transforms the space. Just that much 3-D presence makes all the difference to the whole exhibition.

8 December. 10.00. Group crit. Totally useful tutorial (Tania says I need a box frame, or need to display the pieces of card separately, on slim nails on the wall). It’s nice being together and discussing our work. Laura takes pictures. There is a cheerful Christmas atmosphere. Tania has to show potential new students around. I can’t stay too long, Don’t want to miss group crit of Anna, Yi Fei and Tina’s work, but have to start rushing back as usual. I wish I could do this whole course again at a different age – in slow motion - just relax and enjoy it.

10 December: Documentary about Rauschenberg. Wonderful. The exhilaration of that creativity, no holds barred. Fabulous force. Nonetheless, an alcoholic who has to manage himself through withdrawal from New York to a beautiful island off Florida. There’s nothing in life without a cost.

11 December: Whole day trying to:

1. Put the lasered boards on nails as Tania suggested at the exhibition. (Was too exhausted after the two-hour effort to get those fragile boards safely into their frame the previous evening and drive them up to London to start unpacking them immediately.

I knew too all the letters would fall out of their holes!) Got no good place to do this job so have to do it in the garage, which has no natural light. Have to clear all the rubbish out of the way, paint a section of the wall, measure out the grid, put in nails. Take the panels out of the frame and put them up. The effect? It is more interesting than in the frame, but still doesn’t seem as convincing as it would be if I did the whole thing on the piece of timber rather than the card.

2. I decide to bite the bullet. Mock up the panels on the piece of timber. It looks really good to both Rowland and myself. The object resonates before you go near it. It already speaks to you, much more than the machine cut bits of card. I really want to do this if I possibly can. But I will have to ask Dave to do the laser engraving job all over again – this time into the timber. And we’re in the massive rush towards Christmas. Eventually, Dave says he’ll try and fit me in just before Christmas break.

3. Do test pieces of timber. With black printer’s ink and then ebony varnish. The problem with the printer’s ink and whiting is that it starts to go slimy and yellow after a while. Haven’t had long enough with the ebony varnish experiment to know whether it will do the same thing.

12 December AM: 3 hours with Nick in The Observatory, playing with effects of taking flash at various points combined with low ambient light to create indeterminate ghostly effects. We do white background. Then black to create a whole unified ground on which the figure moves, suspended in space. I walk in circles, then diagonally back and forwards. The height of the head, getting bigger and then smaller, determines the sense of depth and distance. If we had a black sheet that could stretch the length of the wall we could get a fantastic sense of depth. The figure, defined by points of flash image, could project itself thorugh a long line of iterations coming forward, then recede with a long line of iterations getting smaller.I like the effect for talking about cross-generational inheritance. A way of exploring time, long biological time, the coming out of the dark and going back into it. Obvious, but rich.

PM: 2.5 hours making chalk ground boards with Tim in Methods and Mateirals. Interesting to see the BA painters. They’re good. There’s some energy going on. I like the way they set up their studios, intriguing mix of photos, diagrams, bits of writing, paintings. Tim gets v. cross when I don’t have a priming brush – I have brought a bundle

of different brushes but none of them is exactly right. My boards are also no good because I have already put acrylic gesso on them. Nor do I have any whiting! I think he’s going to throw me off, but then he relents. I don’t think he has children (later it emerges he is spending Christmas driving his mother up and down to his brother); simply can’t conceive of the difficulty of getting all your ducks in a row when you are dealing with running a home, teenagers and commuting. I don’t try and explain. It would be easier to be driven out of the ‘work’ place as a middle aged mother, but I’m not getting to let it drive me out if I can help it.

At the end of the day, I have achieved two important objectives:

1. Dave at Cotwsold Screenprinters has (moreorless) agreed to do the laser engraving of my piece of wood for the Freud Museum by early next week. That’s a deadline slippage but only by a few days. 2. I have a nice email from Rose Palmer at the Freud Museum giving me an extension of deadline and saying the images of my work I sent her look ‘great’. I am so pleased. It’s the first positive thing that has happened for ages. Been living under intolerable stress for too long with this project. Combined with the course and PhD application. The stress is telling on family life. We are having regular vicious rows. I feel attacked by the children. I’m too exhausted to cope with it. Rebecca was at it yesterday after my traumatic journey back from London trying to get back in time (driving not safe in the fog and traffic and making multiple calls on the mobile) so that Rowland and Rebecca wouldn’t have to take the bus to gym in Berinsfield. I try to defend myself. When the children carry on attacking, Rowland attacks me for raising my voice to the children, undermines me at the point of maximum vulnerability. I simply can’t stand it and we end up having a huge row. I’m not coping with the stress of everything.

13 December: reading Juli Carson, ‘(Re)Viewing Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document’ in Documents (New York, Fall 1998. Have been reading Kristeva for the Unit 2 essay.

PM: Spend a few hours working on the Adobe Illustrator document for the Freud piece to take to Dave at Cotswold Screenprinters. When this is finalized I will be able to breathe a little.

14 December: Unit 2 Assessment Briefing. We go through the schedule and work out what we have to submit when. Very clear signposting about deadlines that I really appreciate.

15 December: Peer workshops. Janine in the morning in the Observatory on shadows. We pin up wall-size pieces of paper. Janine

and Nick set the place up with lights. We interpose our bodies and get fantastic shadows on the white walls. We draw round the shadows. Then we are asked to draw half shadows. Then to take a section, trace or copy it, then fold it with multiple folds. Pin the result to the other wall. We are left with a wall full of dynamic figurative pieces, largescale organic, dramatic, v. a series of much smaller more geometric pieces. Abstacted versions, where the planes of paper with markings appear in abstracted ways, against geometric folds, and one surface overlays another. I find the results v. interesting. Don’t completely grasp the folding idea and feel I need to do this exercise again several times to make sense of it.The shadow puppetry of the wall drawings gives me an idea for figure drawing. I ask Janine to pose in crouching, twisted poses, taking up different positions along an arc of movement. Makes exciting series of stationary silhouettes which together form movement. I want to do more of this.

15 December PM: Ali’s workshop on magazine cover design. She brings samples of OK, Pick Me Up, with blaring headlines and screaming primary colour photographs. We are asked to do a self-portrait and then insert ourselves into the cover design. I do one of my Menston women and adapt the headlines to juxtapose 2016 trivia with fictional happenings in West Riding Pauper’s Hospital. Ali runs it well, having brought lots of printed fonts and acetate for us to print over. Everyone has a good time. I enjoy taking a completely different format – the blaring magazine cover – and trying to do something else with it. Would like to do more of this. Ask Ali to send me a dummy copy so that I can play around in it. She says I would need to download Indesign software, which Is on the Creative Cloud. I need to slow down and not try and do too much at once.

Take back the camera and tripod to the loanstore. Have incurred a fine. It’s clear I need to buy my own camera. Not viable running backwards and forwards from Oxford to Wimbledon and being part-time. You can’t get the equipment back in time to avoid fines. Manage to get to the library in time to borrow a whole stack of books about women artists and feminism. Exciting. Am reading quite a bit and consolidating my understanding of this area. End up enjoying writing this Post-Partum essay.

17/18 December. Working hard at preparing the AI document for the Freud Museum piece. Dave at Cotwsold Scrreenprinters has promised me a slot on Tuesday 20 in the afternoon. Lovely of him given his massive pressure before Christmas.

19 December: Lovely day in London buying point shoes and leotards with Lara in Drury Lane, Covent Garden. Vietnamese meal for lunch in restaurant just off Drury Lane. We spend quite a while in Block and then wander down by the lights of Covent Garden. Come back on the train. Lara doesn’t want to get a taxi (nervous about spending money) but I tell her I have to as I need to do another two hours work on the AI document for Dave tomorrow. If we have to take two buses at rush hour, that time will disappear.

20 December. LASERING FREUD MUSUEM PIECE! I set off with the log laid on a bathmat in the backseat of the car. With my USB and computer for backup in case there are any problems. Feeling extremely anxious. Have no idea whether it’s going to come out. But can fall back on the original card version if the timber version doesn’t work. I stop at M&S and buy Dave a bunch of white roses, and a red London bus tin of shortbread and a card saying ‘You’re a star!’. He has been so kind and helpful to me. I am really grateful to him.

When I arrive he’s behind a huge Epson printer, fixing it. Looks up with his intelligent deadpan face, high pink colour, grey blue eyes. Habit of people who are always firefighting of not expressing too much emotion in any single interaction. Has to economise. ‘How are you?’ I ask. ‘Oh, Living the life, Sarah!’ he says with cheerful gloom.’Living the life.’Dave gets the printer working then goes to his computer. Got fluorescent post it notes all over it with the requests for that day. Endless list. I can’t find a seat for all the files and stacks of documents. He takes my USB and starts to separate it into different layer instructions for the laser. We go and lower the laser bed and lay the big piece of timber on it. It really is like handling a person by now. Dave notices it isn’t just the left hand side that comes in at the base. The right hand side does too. My document accommodates the left hand shrinking but not the right hand. It’s a good job he noticed, to put it mildly. The whole thing would have been shot without it. A large part of the text would have disappeared off the right-hand edge.Someone else might not have spotted that. It was my responsibility not his to get the document in perfect condition. He is v. kind about it. Goes back to his computer and sorts it out. Back to the laser machine. We are ready to go. The laser burns the first layer of text, copperplate engraving, large font. It goes onto the snowy surface. Beautiful sight. I think: stop there! It’s perfect just like that. But there’s masses more text to go on. It makes me think I’d like to do an installation with a whole series of wooden totems lined up along a gallery wall – with the text spread out across them. The laser takes hours to do all the different layers. I leave before it’s finished because I promised the children to be back with the car so

they could go for a swim at David Lloyd. Dave says he’ll have it ready for me tomorrow. I leave the roses etc on his desk. He’s not a man you get effusive with.

21 December. Christmas shopping with Rebecca. We go to Broad Canvas and choose her some watercolours. She wants the tubes so she can drop in pigment into wet surface. She has been doing gorgeous watercolour ‘drawings’ of objects such as her lamp, little chest, hairbrush. Great swooshy rushes of colour with just the edge of a line here and there for the graphic image. She doesn’t want expensive watrcolours, it makes her nervous. But I want to make sure she has good enough quality to continue to get the intensity of colour she has been creating with the school ones. (Faber and Castell, she tells me). We settle on Cottman Windsor and Newton. Mid-range. We’re both very happy with it. And I get her one big fat brush and one fine one for detailed work.I also buy some mod-rock for taking casts of myself. Have a desire to do lighter weight sculpture. The clay is heavy and prevents quick light scaffolding. You have to build a sculpture to underpin it. I like the idea of lighter modeling.

22 December: MOD ROC CAST OF MYSELF. So happy with this. Been inspired by Kiki Smith paper sculptures. I want to do bodies and heads and then draw and print back over them. I love the friable delicate forms that emerge from the casting, both accurate to my own body and approximate where you can’t achieve fine detail. The sheath of breasts is like a delicate armour. Gives me the idea of doing a metal (female) breastplate. Also a series of hanging paper sculptures of female forms.

22 December: Rowland and I go to London to see the Abstract Expressionists at the Royal Academy. Great day. Lunch in the café down below.

23. December. TORSO SELF CAST. Get Rowland to help me do a full torso cast. He gets bad tempered because he wants to get on with other things. We do it in the mirror in the bedroom. Takes quite a long time. Then has to dry (getting cold by this time and go downstairs to stand by the gas rings of the cooker). Then he has to cut me out of it. He’s so cross by this point – he wants to go and practise a madrigal for our madrigal session later – that he terrifies me with the big pair of scissors. Yanking the plaster off feels as if he’s cutting me. I think of Maria Abramovic. I ask him to communicate – ‘this is a pull, this is a cut’ – but communication isn’t his strong suit.

Want to do lots more of this casting. Am reading about Christine Borland and her forensic sculpture. Works with Edinburgh medical school casts. I love some of this work. The 3-D forms of the delicate plaster skin that result from my torso cast lying on the bedroom floor give me a thrill of satisfaction. Lots of things I could do with them, but for now they are just lying there, propped up with cushions so they retain their undulating form as they continue to dry and stiffen.

24 December: Back to Broad Canvas to buy all the Mod-Roc they have before Christmas. We ran out yesterday and I want to do a series of head casts and then paint portraits onto them. Then suspend them with metal cables and long fishing wire.

28: Work on Ruskin D.Phil Application. Got to research context and get it more focused. More concrete proposal and less allowing myself to drift into writing interesting things about genetics.

29 December: more work on Ruskin D.Phil application. The only thing to be said about this is that the work should carry over to an application to Brookes as well.

Christmas and holiday in France.

5 January: editing essay for Unit 26 January: File essay for Unit 26 January: Appointment with Brian Peart, Photographer/printer.He takes pictures of both my Freud Museum pieces, the timber piece and the 8-panel piece. We have to arrange them carefully and turn them about to get them under his camera fixed above to point down. I am sticking in tiny bits of missing letters at the last minute. Such an immense relief to be in the hands of a professional for something. After all the stress of doing this Freud Museum piece, Brian takes some stress out for me. He is so skillful with photoshop he can even correct tiny errors, fill in letters with the scorched engraving marks etc. Astonishing what can be done. I go away with a USB of images and an immense feeling of relief.Spend the afternoon uploading the images for the Ruskin Portfolio on my website. Also send one to the Freud Museum.

7 January: Spend the day attaching descriptions (title, size, media etc) to images in the Ruskin Portfolio. Wonder whether my images are just too grim? Give a picture of someone too desperately dark: mental hospitals, cancer, depression, what a cheerful number…. R. says not, just go with what you have.

8 January: Can’t sleep with stress about all the different deadlines. Wake up at 4.00am, read for a little, try to go back to sleep, can’t, wake up at 5.00 and start typing this document. Will be so glad when all these deadlines are past. Still got to do the peer workshop, write it up, get a third reference for Ruskin D.Phil application, sort out what images to put in for the MA Drawing assessment, and organize the installation and presentation of work for this. Also bought an entry for the Royal Academy Exhibition last night, deadline 14 Feb 2017. Don’t have to think about that for a while.The Freud Museum has agreed to allow me to keep the timber piece so I can show it in my assessment. I will need to deliver it before the end of January.

9 January: Sarah Spackman Life Class Sculpture Class.

10 January: Writing this document. Plus planning and packing equipment for my peer workshop. Need to go to Hobbycraft to buy trays for the printing ink. And maybe another couple of rollers. Need to print images and get paper. Also need to pack stencils and metal press letters.

11 January: AM. Peerworkshop. My own.

12 January: Peer workshops and lectures.

14 January: Kentridge exhibition, The Whitechapel.

Lisa Walker has invited me to Attend Year 1 lecture on medical genetics for Year 1 medical studnets at Oxford University. She has agreed to be co-supervisor for my D.Phil so I need to go. Won’t understand much. It also means I’ll have to miss my lovely figure drawing class. But only for a term. Have scrabbled about to get someone to do the class for 1 term so I don’t have to lose my place on Sarah’s class. Anna refuses to help, but Vanessa helps in the end. She finds two separate people, each willing to do a chunk of the term. So I won’t have to pay. And I keep my place in the class! Sarah has such a long waiting list I’d be nervous about getting back on it.

16 January: File Online Folio. Finis.