Introduction This publication started life as a humble blog in February 2018. I intended to document my journey through a practice-based ceramics PhD. The original blog lasted a few weeks before it was withdrawn. I realised the writing I was doing for the benefit of others was equally valuable to me and my own way of thinking and making. So here’s my Blovel. First let’s address the name; a portmanteau of blog and novel, it’s an ugly word and I’m sorry! Had I known how important it would be to my research I’ve have tried harder. Nevertheless, here it is, a wibbly wobbly journey through my last four years endeavour. I can’t claim an elegant publication. Throughout the text I use different styles of writing as I pick my way along a lumpy path full of dangerous potholes and deceptive wrong turns. Ideas from 2018-19 that seem important when you read them just fall off cliffs and are never mentioned again, conversely other things are explored which have clearly been important to me but which I’ve just found the words for – or discovered them through the process of writing. What I can promise you is an honesty of the kind not usually found in a polished thesis. This document is more than a linear narrative; it is a fundamental part of the research. In what follows you’ll find me collecting data, documenting my thought processes, contextualising the work I’m making, and taking out my frustrations. You’ll meet the people around me and you might – just occasionally – laugh at one of my jokes. My Blovel may be read on its own. It might demand much of you, an acceptance of the disjointed story and certain leaps in thinking. If you’re interested in understanding more about the research you can access a secret part of my website https://www.angelatait.co.uk/phdportfolio using the password AngelaTaitPhD and if you’re still game after that you can email me for a copy of the 70000 word thesis.
a.d.tait@salford.ac.uk
And they’re off… 7 February 2018 Okay, today’s the day. This morning I start to formalise some of those ideas that have been floating around in my snowglobe-like brain for the last decade or so. This morning I started a PhD programme with the University of Sunderland, in particular Andrew Livingstone, Professor of Ceramics and Lead of their Ceramics Art Research Centre. The programme is practice-based and will take between 5-7 years. My hand in date is 31st January 2024. I was more than a little perturbed by this fact as I dealt with the dawning realisation that by then I would be over fifty (which btw is officially grown up) and the ‘new’ century will be nearly a quarter of the way through….how can this be? Having considered this for less than a minute, I embarked upon the real thinking task at hand. The first three/four months will be dedicated to formalising the proposal and a robust literature review. This will primarily involve my best attempt at making some logic from the erratic plastic snowflakes. The proposal is currently called ‘Ceramics and the Domestic Ritual’. The domestic ritual is my own construct. It’s my way of understanding the rhythm of dailiness and how making practice interacts with domesticity. Currently I’m not even sure if it’s a thing. I guess that’s why it needs researching. Keep watching…
Cast Fire Repeat 22 March 2018
Figure 1 Marbled Black and White Porcelain slip-cast Vessel Angela Tait 2018
‘Along the wall stood pot after pot, some were articulate, and some were not’ Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)
Slip casting…. A way of producing form after form with identical characteristics. But that could get quite dull. I have been casting for years, vessel after similar vessel; but what happens if the slip casting process is disrupted and starts to produce interruptions and distortions?
I feel like casting will be one of the ways I explore the rhythm of domesticity through my ceramics practice. If I break down my recent work there are some qualities which continue to occur: •
Multiples of vessels – usually slightly different but in series
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Vessels which hint at function but don’t
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Additions. Mixed media ceramics which include embroidery thread, ribbon, nuts and bolts, padlocks, wire etc
Casting fits nicely into these categories. I often cast and alter but I’ve been working on a way of making the process do a little serendipitous decorating of its own. I have been playing with a way of marbling the slip whilst in the mould. It involves a precarious element of chance and creates equal quantities of gorgeous and hideous results. The black and white clays are the same body. A low temperature porcelain slip, the white in its raw state and the black with the addition of 10% stain. Having used this combination of stain and porcelain in the past I know it reacts badly. Bloating and bubbling are often considered undesirable outcomes for ceramics production. Clearly the stain is not compatible with the high firing temperatures of the porcelain. Whilst for a
purist potter this would be a dealbreaker, it’s right up my street and the contrast between the smooth white and the rough craggy black is better than I could have hoped for. I’ll be making more, pushing the limits of what I can do with this method. Back to the workshop….
Thinking through making 10 March 2018 It’s been a long old week. Sunday, I drove to Sunderland through heavy fog, grateful that it had stopped snowing for long enough to clear the motorways and some Aroads. The purpose of my visit was the induction to my PhD research training. I had absolutely no idea what to expect. Turns out I had grossly underestimated the complex nature of the process. This invaluable course has set me up for the start of my research degree. No, more than that, it’s fired me up. I came away with ideas, lists, plans, a slight case of nerves and some new friends. I learned about such academic matters as methodology and more practical ones about keeping myself sane whilst undertaking an insane amount of work.
Today, Saturday, I managed to steal some time for making. I have been so massively busy with teaching and learning that making has been secondary. I’m uncomfortable with this. I have a couple of works on the go that fit into my regular daily routine. These have been progressing with glacial slowness, but I always think half a step forward is better than sitting still. Today I had a lot of pottery ‘admin’ to attend to. In other words, things that I’d started that needed some attention. This is the nature of my practice. Things get done in rather a random, yet economical manner. I started the day with lots of half made pieces. Let’s call them work in progress:
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Three porcelain paperclay ‘paper plates’ which had been held under some weight to establish the shape but now needed the paper plate moulds taking off them and the edges neatening.
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A whole bunch of diamond shapes cut from slabs which I plan to make into pieces to go into a paper kiln in the summer sometime and then make a quilt from them. These needed smoothing and holes punching and some glazes adding.
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A couple of slip cast ‘cardboard coffee cups’ which needed smoothing ready for firing.
And as usual there’s things I want to start making too. •
I needed to cast a couple of tinfoil food storage containers. You know the kind, the ones that take-out food comes in with a little cardboard lid that the foil folds over to make a seal. These are for a collaborative project I’m doing. Our current project is exciting and deserves more attention, but has been the victim of time constraints recently on both our parts.
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I’m continuing to play with attempts to marble the surface of slip cast containers with black and white porcelain. Each time I go into the pottery I cast another two or three pieces.
All that is about two and half hours work, but it’s how I do the work that I find interesting. It goes a bit like this: •
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Prepare slip casting moulds, tape them up, pour initial marbling to line mould, leave for five mins to firm up. Move to another bench to work on paper plates, leave in warmer part of the pottery to firm up a bit. Move back to first bench to do main pour into slip casting moulds, set alarm for twenty minutes. Turn plates over before they get too dry. Smooth the coffee cups with a sponge top up the slip in the moulds.
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Strip beds and take the washing downstairs, put the washer on. Whilst in utility room, take pie out of freezer for the tea that night. Back upstairs to remake beds – via emptying dishwasher Answer some emails…… until Alarm goes on washing machine to tell me to empty
I think this is the crux of my research…….maybe?
This goes on for another two hours. It’s like a dance. Well, more like a cross between a weird three-dimensional strategy puzzle, the krypton factor and the birdie song.
It occurs to me, not for the first time, that this replicates the disjointed rhythm of domestic work.
Figure 2 COVID Willow, Porcelain tray with original illustration
Roadkill 28 March 2018
As with most things this seemed like a really simple idea but it didn’t work first time. Initially I used my own car; It’s much heavier than this little Polo. Let’s just say the outcome was unrecognisable, even as clay. I made other mistakes, from getting dust from my feet, hands and apron all over the inside and outside of this car, to splattering the clay all over the drive. I was unpopular for both these minor misdemeanours; the owner didn’t fully appreciate my need to run clay over.
Figure 3 Running over freshly thrown vessels Angela Tait 2018
What else would you do with your freshly thrown bowls? Made with a skill that’s taken you years to develop but has been used for making functional pottery for thousands of years. Why……run them over with your car. This was one of those, ‘I wonder what happens if’, moments. I didn’t think about what might be made or what the outcome would be, although I was fairly confident it would be more two dimensional than my usual work.
Eventually I figured out that I needed to either roll over the freshly throw vessel in second gear or reverse over it for best results. There needed to be substantial cloths both below and above and it worked better if there was some decoration on the thrown form. After a good deal of thinking and rethinking these are some of the pieces that are starting to emerge.
Figure 4 Fired and finished Roadkill pot with copper and embroidery thread Angela Tait 2018
I have started to think of these pots as metaphors for parenting. You learn a skill (parenting), do your best for years until you reckon you’ve got it nailed. Then, your child goes to university and does their best to undo all that good work (that’s the running over bit) and you just have to hope the thing turns out ok in the end. I suppose that why I reform the clay into vessels again instead of leaving them flat. Wishful thinking? I’ve always tried not to think about my work in this way because it’s so subjective and personal and I know the materials don’t necessarily read the way I see them. I’ve never been keen on work which is overtly autobiographical. I do understand the viewers reading of these pieces. I relate to the ubiquity of the vessel, its place in culture and the understanding of deconstruction. I realise the materials are complementary and contradictory at
the same time. I just can’t help being influenced by my current status as (fairly) empty nester.
The fact is I’m considering a wholly autoethnographic account for my PhD. I’ve been reading ‘The Ethnographic I’ by Carolyn Ellis, her methodological novel about autoethnography. More and more I see the value of this research and its place in the social sciences. I am slightly perturbed by this turn of event, but then I didn’t come to this research degree intending to follow a rigid and predetermined path.
Storytelling 2 April 2018
Figure 5 From, 'Tapestries of Life' 1989 Bettina Aptheker Page 69
During my initial foray into the world of the domestic rhythm I’m increasingly aware of the lack of literature. If I was to politicise this thought process I would put it down to the subversion of ‘feminine’ work by the patriarchy, however, I find this blame culture quite dated and more than a little draining. In my current (and somewhat startling) spurt of purchasing random literature, I have encountered a number of delightful texts which deal with my subject in a roundabout way. One of the nicer ones is Bettina Aptheker’s Tapestries of Life Women’s Work, Women’s Consciousness, and the Meaning of Daily Experience.
It’s a text that comes from the Women’s studies department of the University of California where much of the relevant literature originates. On a quick proofread for relevance I can already see this is going to be important. I can also see formalised an idea which has been floating around in my head for a few weeks. That the woman’s experience is often told via a story. How this information is going to fit into my practice I don’t really know yet, but it’s an interesting observation which deserves further pondering.
Frustration 2 May 2018 It’s my day off. Actually that’s a lie. It’s the one day this week I’m not lecturing and can concentrate on my own research projects. It’s 1.13pm. So far today I’ve been ‘working’ since 8am and I’ve done the following:
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Answered last night’s emails
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Ordered a repeat prescription
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Washed up and emptied the dishwasher
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Sorted out a big problem for the local scouts (I’m treasurer)
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Eaten porridge
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Been to the gym (I have to go at lunchtime because I’m doing a community job tonight). When I came out of the gym I had seventeen new emails!
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Dealt with a visitor who needed paying for something.
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Missed the postman which means I’ll have to go out to the post office in town tomorrow
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Done a ‘big shop’ and put it all away.
I’ve also added a few of things to my ‘to do’ list which include two proposals (one for an exhibition and one to present a paper at a conference). I’m now sitting at my desk wearing sweaty gym clothes, eating my soup and a wagon wheel and typing.
I haven’t done a thing I intended to do and I need a shower.
This isn’t a moan, this is a diary…is a diary research?
How to Eat an Elephant 26 June 2018 In my previous life as a bank trainer I used to present a short seminar called, ‘How to eat an elephant’. It all seems a little inappropriate these days. My vegan friends would certainly (and rightly) object to the title, however, it wasn’t really about eating elephant burgers or elephant curry. It was about how to undertake an enormous task, break it down into smaller tasks and ultimately achieve it without becoming overwhelmed. I keep referring back to this at the moment. The PhD is massive! The reading list is massive (and growing by the minute), the making is massive, the writing feels massive and even the admin is substantial. All this and a life to fit around it. So I’m planning to eat the elephant, and when I say planning, I mean PLANNING! I have lists about lists. My perpetual diary/todo list which I’ve developed over the last seven or eight years currently has five columns instead of the customary three, and my PhD file on the home PC has about twenty separate categories, each with subfiles. I still have a head like a dish of spaghetti. My own ideas keep getting confused with other people’s and some days I have more on the list at 8pm than I did at 8am. So far I’ve encountered two big challenges. The first is my ability to concentrate on one thing at once. I have always been able to juggle. It’s a Mum thing. But this particular pachyderm has too many components and is too protracted to do everything at once. The answer to this is simple. One thing at a time in bite sized chunks. You’d
think this logical step would be easy enough. The problem is both the logical and the creative sides of my brains are fighting for the biggest portion of pasta at the moment. The second problem was most unexpected. I’ve always considered myself a fairly competent writer. I sometimes read things I’ve written in the past and think, ‘woah, nice words girl’. Last week I started the contextual review and words are failing me. Currently it’s just a series of unintelligent words in no particular order. Upon reflection there could be two reasons for this. Number one is what I’ve described above, the tangle of ideas which keep distracting me. Number two, maybe writing is like drawing… use it or lose it. When I was studying previously, I spent five years writing. By the end it was a pleasant experience. The writing took a while but when it was done it was logical and (occasionally) poetic. I assumed this would naturally reoccur, like riding a bike. Not so! So four months into the PhD I find myself in an unexpected position. I’m currently questioning everything I know about myself. I’m restructuring the way I work and relearning things I thought I knew; all this from a position of fast approaching middle age. It’s time consuming but I have to be patient. Anyone who knows me will realise patience isn’t a gift I have been blessed with. I knew I would have to learn a great deal during my doctoral research, I just didn’t realise so much of it would be about myself. Apologies for the excess of visual analogies. It is entirely possible I don’t really have a head full of pasta.
The Listicle 29 June 2018 This week I was lucky enough to travel to Sunderland again. I’m starting to really fall for this Northern city with its friendly people. The occasion was a research conference. I was due to present a paper about the beginning of my research journey. I’d usually do this kind of thing off the top of my head but as I’m so new to this research game and didn’t want to make a complete fool of myself I did some prep! It went beautifully and once again I met helpful people and cemented some relationships with both research students and academics. Every time I’m here I learn a tonne of new things. I often wonder how much of a disadvantage I’m at being off campus. I am fortunate to have my own friends and colleagues at Salford who are unfailingly generous with their time and knowledge so I’m calling that an even playing field……ish.
Here’s the paper
The Domestic Ritual is my own construct. It’s the way I understand how my making practice interacts with my own obligations at home. I realised at least a decade ago that there was a relationship between the pieces I was making and the rhythm of plain old domestic chores.
Wash, hang, fold put away, wash, hang, fold, put away Cast, fettle, polish, fire, cast, fettle, polish, fire Shop, cook, eat, shop, cook, eat Throw, turn, dry, fire, throw, turn, dry, fire
As I’m so early in my research I have little to report so I’m taking today as an opportunity to introduce and speculate.
I learned a new thing last week. That’s what comes of working with 150 teens and twenty somethings. It’s called the listicle. It’s a cross between a list and an article. You know the kind of thing, 61 top eyebrow stencilling techniques or eight and a half best Moroccan mountain walks.
I thought this would be an appropriate way of presenting my ideas today. So here it is… Angela’s Top four things that might be important in my PhD research….I acknowledge I might need to work on the title!
I do love a good list. Some days my to-do list is the only barometer of achievement I have. The days when everything I do is a maintenance task. This leads me to the first item on my listicle.
1. The Maintenance task. This is the name I’ve given to anything that has to be done again. Things like cooking, washing up, wiping the kitchen counter, school runs. I suppose the equivalent in my ceramics practice sort of reflects the household maintenance tasks. Coating the kiln shelves so things don’t stick and mopping the floor in the pottery. Also I’m putting applications for residencies and things like doing the accounts and ordering materials in this category. The maintenance task is important because it’s the marker for the domestic ritual. It’s the thing I’m going to measure and monitor when I’m using myself as the primary case study in my research. Which neatly segues into item number two. 2. Collecting data. One of the new bits of language I had to figure out when I started was this thing called the ‘shape of the research’. Being a visual type I took this rather literally and this is the shape of my research.
Figure 6 Drawing, Illustration of 'shape of research' Angela Tait 2018
I have a number of these drawings addressing different issues but all the same shape. This is the one where I was mapping the ways of collecting information. As a fundamental of the research process this is one of the first things I had to figure out. •
What data did I need to collect?
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How would I go about that?
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Then what do I do with it when I’ve collected it?
This kind of thinking takes a surprising amount of time. After five months I think I have a plan. My information is coming for all over the place. Firstly, a contextual review. Now I’m a lecturer. I read dissertations and supervise research projects all the time. The contextual review should be like that, right? Well, no not really. My undergraduate students are dealing with things that we already know. Cultural certainties and established truths. At PhD level I’m dealing with gaps in knowledge and decidedly patchy theory.
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Is there even such a thing as the domestic ritual?
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Has it been explored before and does it match with my definition?
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What might it look like?
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How have people used/responded to this idea?
Secondly, I am the primary case study. This makes complete sense to the research. It’s my idea, my work and my hypothesis therefore I need to use myself establish some facts which I can then use to test against other people’s experiences. BUT How do I establish these ‘facts’?
Next, The ‘other people’. These are the ones that test my findings about myself. •
Who are those other people?
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How many of them are there?
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Are they Angela clones or do I deliberately seek out variety?
Then there’s the messy question of gender. As housework is traditionally a women’s role, am I at risk of mounting a crusade or imposing my belief systems upon the research? This is starting to get complicated!
3. Methods and methodologies Who knew they were different things? Really early on I learned the word ‘Bricolage’. The definition of bricolage is, ‘the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things’. Now as an artist this appealed to me. I think it’s given me permission to use a variety of methods for collecting data and even make up my own. The logical place to start with collecting information about my own daily routine would seem to be a diary in the form of ….yes, you’ve guessed it….. a list. 8.05 drink coffee 8.15-8.35 answer emails in pyjamas 8.35 put on washing machine
You see the way this is going?
Ok, this is a way of recording but it’s not very interesting or inventive or creative? One of my key collaborators in my art practice is a photographer. I started thinking about how a photographer would record their dailiness. What about a photo essay? That’s visual and creative and (potentially) beautiful. But I’m not a photographer, I make things out of clay. What if I make a clay model
photo essay? Is that even a thing? Making fine art pieces that double as the collection of data? Now I liked this idea….a lot! But it still opened up a number of questions.
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Is this really a suitable process for collecting data?
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If it is how do I analyse what I’ve collected?
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Is there a precedent for this?
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Then how do I use the same format to collect data from my ‘other people’?
4. Making things Phew, this I can deal with. This is a practice-based PhD. The crux of everything is my making practice, remember, it’s right at the middle of my ‘shape’. The things I make will be a big part of my contribution to knowledge and so far I have absolutely no idea they might be. I’m currently making things, I can’t stop, it’s my default setting. I’m playing with ideas using ceramic. I have made a whole body of work by throwing bowls and then running over them with my car. I call this ‘school run’ or ‘road kill’ depending what kind of day I’m having. This week I’ve thrown bowls and then left them in the local stream to be washed away and turned back into riverbed where the clay came from. I liked this idea because it resonated really well with the idea of the maintenance task. But this just lead to more questions. •
How do I record this?
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What are the precedents for thinking about this performative practice in ceramics?
And •
Will the fish be ok?
So currently that’s my listicle. It seems to me that at the moment it’s a list containing sub lists which consist of endless questions. I counted up the number of questions I have asked myself just during the course of my presentation today. There are 18. This is probably the number of new questions I find to ask myself every day. I’ve decided to give the first year of my research a subtitle…………. Towards an occasional answer.
Figure 7 Roadkill 2018 Angela Tait Thrown and altered vessel with copper and embroidery
Washing and Potting 9 July 2018 Today is sunny. They’re calling it another 1976. It’s been sunny for three or four weeks; like really hot! Great for drying washing. And I have a lot of washing! First load ready to go in at 8.30 but the washing machine smells. It gets like this and needs a clean sometimes, so I do an empty load with a bottle of machine cleaner. This takes more than an hour and is frustrating. Meanwhile I’ve hung out the residual washing from yesterday which wasn’t quite dry when I brought it in. When the empty load is finished, I put in the first real load which is mostly bedding. This is a regular wash and will take an hour and three minutes. I know that I can only write efficiently for about 30 mins without getting distracted, so I hammer out some good words and do some thinking (the kind that you do when you’re writing) for a while until I start to lose interest and become hungry. It’s about this time the electrician needs to turn off the power so I back everything up and go to the pottery to rattle off a few small jobs in there. On the way I make brews for everyone and put out the bedding and refill the washer. The pottery takes more than an hour. It never takes less. It would be uneconomical to spend less time in there with setting up and clearing up, which coincidentally is the right amount of time for another washing cycle. Some of the early washing is dry and so follows some put out and take in. This is helpful because I only have a finite amount of pegs so a rotating cycle is beneficial! Another bit of writing, more brews, and a visit to the gym for a spin class. The gym is a fundamental part of the day for lots of reasons but primarily for my mental and physical health. I wouldn’t call it fun exactly, more a
necessary and comforting routine. It gives me a much-needed boost which (usually) stops me from falling asleep in the post lunch slump and also gets my blood flowing which combats the guilt from a sedentary day at the desk. So I’m back. It’s overcast and feels like it might just rain for the first time in weeks. My washing is out. Shall I risk it? I think I might. I’ve brought in any that’s dry and now have two basketsful of nice clean, outdoorsy smelling, folded clothing. I’ll leave the putting away until it’s all ready. Economies of scale is one of my strategies for dealing with domestic obligations. The only other thing I can remember from today’s to-do list is repotting Harry’s cactus (which is flowering!). I am going to write for as long as I can concentrate, and my next interruption will be to dry my hair and repot fluffy. It strikes me that the day is interwoven, a bit like a tapestry or even basketwork. It’s virtually impossible to separate the domestic from the ‘work’. The pieces are conjoined, no, more than that, they’re inseparable. Experience makes me plan a little ahead, a bit like a snooker player, I think about the structure of the day so no time is wasted. Walking to the washing line is the same direction as the pottery and I have to pass the post box on the way. Three jobs in one short trip. Following this train of thought, the supermarket is next door to the gym, and I have to go past the chemist and the post office to get to both. This fact is also exploited at regular times during the week. Next, I need to do some drawing. Thinking through the structure of the day has given me ideas.
Autoethnography and the Blovel 24 July 2018
Figure 8 Raw Clay tile from the Birmingham Research conference (Made by JR)
My head is full of thoughts which have to be written in some logical order or else I’ll lose them when we go away next week. It’s 10.22 AM. I’m going to write for as long as I can concentrate. Would be interesting to see how long it is before I make my midmorning coffee or I get interrupted by the door. This text might be wobbly. It might go from subject to subject as there’s several strands to the research, all of which I’m thinking about at the same time. This feels like a really unhelpful strategy. It goes against the ordered nature of my life and my inability to think around corners. I find writing things down a great way of organising my thoughts and tracking progress, but, on this
occasion, and at the risk of making the writing slightly rigid, I feel like a quasi-list is in order. A thought pops into my head, is it too soon to make a coffee? It’s only 10.27. Five minutes since I set myself a goal of writing for as long as I can. I recall a conversation with JR during a workshop I was running in Birmingham. We talked about ‘cups of tea’. They are her distraction and her thinking time and what helps her get over the ‘dams’ - her word for the barrier to thinking.
I must carry on. I’ll promise myself a brew at the end of the page.
Autoethnography I put this into my original proposal. What a long time ago that seems yet it’s only five months. At the time I was vaguely aware that it was a way of making myself the subject of my research. It seemed like a good idea. A justifiable way of using myself as primary case study. During a conference in Sunderland, I’d just spoken about my research. A charming chap, whose role in the organisation I couldn’t quite figure out, recommended a book. I like meeting these kinds of people. We spent a couple of hours at the same conference and exchanged email addresses afterwards. I can’t remember a name and I haven’t used the emails I don’t even know what discipline he was from. Facebook flashes up a notification on the second computer screen. It’s a post by someone I admire and I can’t help but look what she’s put. Oh no, I’ve gone and replied to the post. I’ve given myself a talking to and closed my internet browser. I really, really should concentrate for as long as I can. I can hear Hal getting up and going to the shower. I’ve promised to do a few errands today. Bank, carpet shop, post office. We’re going at 1pm so that would be a good target time for writing. 10.39 - The book was called ‘The Ethnographic I’ by Carolyn Ellis. Thankfully the library at my own university (i.e. the one I work at near to home, not the one I study at 150 miles away) has a copy. I had no idea what to expect but I’m collecting relevant books at the moment, almost to the point of being overwhelmed. I was very pleasantly surprised. Ellis writes her book as a methodological novel. Another Facebook notification from same person. I’m ignoring it. I wonder if there’s a way to stop them showing. Note to self: Ask H
A pseudo-fictional narrative about an autoethnography class. Complete with characters (participants in the class) and her own narrative. This book is clever. She’s explaining autoethnography by doing it. This is the first time I’ve struggled for words this morning. My intention when I started was to make this piece a kind of autoethnographic account. A trial. Can I do this, is it interesting and relevant? Less than a chapter into the book I’ve started to put little coloured post-it notes onto the pages. This is my strategy for pointing out interesting bits of text so I can find them again. The post-its have a colour coded scheme where each one is related to a theme which I might think is important. These ones are a pale lilac. This means the things I’ve read come under the category of methods and methodologies. One of the first pieces I highlighted was an explanation. ‘Autoethnography refers to writing about the personal and its relationship to culture. It is an autobiographical genre of writing that displays multiple levels of consciousness…back and forth autoethnographers gaze: First they look through an ethnographic wide-angle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural aspects of their personal experience; then they look inward, exposing a vulnerable self that is moved by and through, refract, and resist cultural interpretations’. (Ellis 2004) That’s the formal definition that she uses in the book. The ‘vulnerable self’ bit scares me. But I’ve decided to give it a go here. I’ve already admitted to being constantly distracted by social media. The thing I’m really interested in is the connection with the personal which is so overwhelming in my ideas that I’ve been feeling traditional methods of writing don’t fit terribly well. As I’m reading this
book - which I read in the evening in bed, a time usually reserved for fiction - I can hear bits of my own story written in my voice. An idea has started to form, a thesis in the form of a novel. Somewhere between a blog, a personal diary, a story, a reflective text and a dissertation. Now I’ve written that down it sounds like a massive undertaking, especially for someone who’s not trained in writing. I realise that it’s 11.10. I’m conscious that I’m hungry (no breakfast - should know better), I haven’t spoken to H yet this morning and there’s some residual washing from yesterday that I haven’t sorted. The dishwasher also needs emptying as the kitchen counters are filling up with dirty pots and there’s some clothes that have been delivered by Debenhams that need trying on, and then probably sending back. That’s another job I can do on our jaunt around town doing errands this lunchtime.
Figure 9 Office space for writing
11.29 - I had a piece of Spanish omelette straight from the plastic box. I’d made it yesterday, I don’t know if this was breakfast or lunch. I’m back at the desk with a big bowl of fruit and yogurt. It’s protein yogurt so I’m hoping it will fill me up substantially enough to get me through to mid-
afternoon coffee and snack when we get back from our errands. Whilst I was away, I emptied the dishwasher and the tumble dryer, only to discover the clothes were still damp and needed another half an hour. The blog/novel – blovel or a blovella? Earlier this week I emailed my supervisor: We are starting to develop a relationship. It’s difficult only speaking to him once a month but now we’ve actually met face to face and exchanged a few (gentle and tentative) personal stories, I’m starting to trust what he says and find my feet. I chose him on a recommendation that he was open to different ideas of what practice-based research could be. So far I’ve found this to be accurate and, thankfully, I’m starting to feel like I’ve chosen wisely. With this in mind I floated the idea of the entirely autoethnographic study. I knew it would make him cringe. It’s actually making me feel uncomfortable. I’ve always been very verbal about autobiographic pieces. I - rather unkindly - have labelled them self-indulgent in the past. So why does this seem like a good idea now? 1. The Domestic Ritual is my own construct. It’s a very personal thing but during my tentative conversations with other people there are some parallels starting to emerge. Talking to a colleague, he described how he’s changed the medium he used when he started lecturing full time. He is a painter who went from using acrylics when he could work on his paintings for hours at a time, to working with watercolour in the evenings when he’d finished lecturing. That way he could leave mixed colours and reuse them later. It struck me that this was the way his other obligations had imposed themselves on his work. Autoethnographic method allows the researcher (me) to learn from the data they collect, compare it with their own experience and reflect and learn from these experiences. This gives a holistic
experience and doesn’t exclude the collected qualitative data. 12.10 I need a coffee. 2. My writing would be multi-layered. It would be the research with all the rigour expected from a PhD thesis, but more than that, it would be an autobiography. ‘Who cares’? I say to myself, I don’t even read autobiographies. A cultural insight but with wider relevance due to the collected data. It would also be a story of the PhD journey – Might this help future candidates?
Worries, questions, concerns? This is the phrase I use at the end of a teaching session. It’s my way of opening a discussion: It’s also permission to have a moan and get all the excuses in. So here are my moans, questions and excuses: •
•
•
This is massive. I know if I take this on I will have to learn a new way of writing. I also know that there might be some resistance from examiners, so I’ll have to be super prepared to justify the process. This means being extremely knowledgeable and anticipating objections. Can I do this? Is it important enough? The easy option would be to write more traditionally using an accepted and understandable methodological position. Can I do this? Have I got the ability to write in this demanding way? The primary focus of the research has got to be the making. It strikes me that writing in this way might be a good model for reflective thought too. But it takes ages! Is it interesting (i.e. will anyone bother to read it)? And is it important (i.e. will it contribute to cultural understanding)?
Got distracted talking to H. He’s an absolute delight at the moment and I love spending time with him. He’s bright and intelligent and willing; not a bit like you’d expect a seventeen-year-old boy. He’s finished for the summer so he gets up mid-morning and either potters about at home or goes out to see friends. We have conversations about anything. We’ve just talked about economics and underwires in the same conversation. Is it even ethical that I talk about the family within my work? I have to sign off for a while. I’d anticipated writing about the ceramic and crochet pieces I’m making in the same way as I’ve done this but, as usual, I’ve run out of time. Floodgates, Pandora’s box and can of worms – all open!
Dictating to Siri 25 July 2018 12.43 - Late start. I had promised to see my friend before we both go away. We met for a quick walk around Hollingworth Lake and a not-so-quick coffee and teacake. So now it’s afternoon and I haven’t made any inroads into the to-do list. It’s also about 28 degrees and sunny which means the garden is very tempting and the loft (where I need to go to take photographs, one thing on previously mentioned list) will be substantially warmer than that, and less than pleasurable with the photography lights on. I could use a day of practical type work which is going to make the kind of reflection I did yesterday a bit tricky. I wonder if voice notes on my phone would be a substitute? I’ll give that a go, but I suspect transcribing them might be more time consuming than actually writing. Is there such a thing as a dictaphone app which allows you to talk whilst it types? If there isn’t I’m going to invent one. I just typed into google ‘talk and type app’ Apparently, it’s a thing and I already have it. I’ll give this a go. I dictated, ‘note one’ and Siri typed ‘no one’ - this could be tiresome. Now I have to decide whether to proofread everything carefully or leave in all the mistakes for the reader’s amusement.
Transcription straight from the notes on my phone.
First thing I have a series of parsley black and white plates I need to finish these off with some copper wire and some leather card I need my big needle it’s downstairs in my knitting bag 12:58 PM shall I make a coffee whilst I’m there? 1:05 PM tried the couple wire very disappointed looks enough I’ll have to unpack and try something else this is disappointing I expected a cuppa to provide a nice contrast between the black and white porcelains which it does colour eyes but the company is just to Ben day and an even to look beautiful I’m dictating as I am wrap the copper I don’t wrapped most of it and it looks better with just a little bit of copper wrapped around I wonder if I can make the copper feature in a larger piece of fabric it makes me think whilst I’m dictating of showns reflection in action because instead of just doing the work and thinking in my head I’m working and speaking at the same time this might be a really good way of capturing my reflections I might be onto something here we all do this think I’ll try think alter alter but we don’t do it out loud just discreetly in our heads now I’m trying the letter from the long side the copper managed to threaded into the big embroidery needle wrapped it round more than twice it’s going to struggle to go through the whole and it’s too fat and overwhelms the copper from now on picking that too fat.
I’m flummoxed I really like the copper colour against the black-and-white but the copper wire just doesn’t look right so I have two alternatives, stick with the copper wire are use another medium I suppose I’ll have to try both. I’ve got another bowl I’m trying the crinkly copper wire that I’ve just retrieved from the first goal of the second. I’m making myself accept the format of the wire to see what happens I’m leaving the room and she signs it goes against everything I would usually do but like I said to my students I was trying because you never know what might happen. It’s better it’s better than the first, I don’t know if I can live with it though I’ve just noticed I’m not hungry, I’m not thirsty, I don’t need coffee. This is unusual when I’m sitting at my desk I always need coffee it must be because I’m making something. When my hands are employed I going to that distracted mode where the work is more important than I am.
And this is it proofread and changed. First thing, I have a series of porcelain black and white plates. I need to finish these off with some copper wire and some leather cord. I need my big needle, it’s downstairs in my knitting bag. 12:58 PM shall I make a coffee whilst I’m there? 1:05 PM Tried the copper wire, don’t like it, looks like I’ll have to unpick and try something else. This is disappointing, I expected the copper to provide a nice contrast between the black and white porcelains, which it does colour eyes but the company is just to Ben day and an even to look beautiful (no idea what I said here!) I’m dictating as I wrap the copper. I unwrapped most of it and it looks better with just a little bit of copper wrapped around I wonder if I can make the copper feature in a larger piece of fabric. I’ve never done this before. Thinking and speaking at the same time. Makes me think whilst I’m dictating of Schon’s ‘reflection in action’. Instead of just doing the work and thinking in my head, I’m working and speaking at the same time. This might be a really good way of capturing my reflections. I might be onto something here. We all do this cyclical thinking; Think, do, think alter, do (Kolb et al call it reflective thinking cycles) but we don’t do it out loud, just discreetly in our heads. Now I’m trying the leather thong alongside the copper. I’ve managed to thread it into the big embroidery needle and started to thread it through the holes. It’s way too fat. It looks clunky and overwhelms the copper. I’m flummoxed I really like the copper colour against the black-and-white, but the copper wire just doesn’t look right so I have two alternatives, stick with the copper wire are use another medium. I suppose I’ll have to try both. I’ve got another bowl, so I’m trying the crinkly copper wire that I’ve just retrieved from the first bowl. I’m making myself accept the wobbliness of the wire to see what happens. I’m leaving the room and she signs it goes against everything I would usually do but like I said to my students I was trying because you never know what might happen (unable to translate).It’s better it’s better than the first, I don’t know if I can live with it though. I’ve just noticed I’m not hungry, I’m not thirsty, I don’t need coffee. This is unusual when I’m sitting at my desk. I always need coffee. It must be because I’m making something. When my hands are employed I go into that distracted mode where the work is more important than I am.
Translation finished – Long winded, ineffective and the end result is tediously dull. Perhaps I am better off leaving the inside of my head where it belongs. I can’t imagine this adding anything interesting to the research
To continue in the traditional manner… See Betty Edwards, Drawing on the right side of the brain (1979) I leave the office for a couple of minutes to get the book from downstairs. I put it in my bibliography which I’m building manually the way I was taught. I’ve been warned this might come back to bite me. Should I have invested time learning a different method? 2.33PM - The time gets stolen. Another symptom of right brain activity. I have another set of verbal notes and a couple of pieces that I’m a bit more interested in. I’ve been a bit more careful with the pronunciation this time so hopefully I’ll understand what I was trying to say just a matter of a few minutes ago.
Update 3.59 - Whilst I was messing with the dictation settings earlier, I changed my Siri voice to Australian Female. I did this on purpose because I thought it would be soothing to listen to. Now I don’t know how to change it back and I appear to be stuck with Dame Edna Everage.
Birmingham Research Conference 20 August 2018 Friday was the research conference at the Birmingham City University. I have to admit to being a little bit (very) nervous. They’d billed the conference as a safe place for unsafe things to happen and I’d taken them at their word and invented a workshop which I was totally unsure would ‘work’. Anyway, it did – kind of. The premise of the workshop was that the participants considered their own domestic and creative lives and how they interacted or disrupted one another. They were to translate these thoughts onto a wet clay tile in any format they chose; a drawing, a list, a pattern….anything. Periodically I would introduce a disruption to the flow of work by imposing tasks which had to be completed. Pairing socks or wrapping presents. This is a big ask! Thankfully the participants were researchers, academics and, most importantly, open minded creatives. They got it! Each and every one was totally generous in sharing their experiences. Now I have the seemingly enormous task of figuring out what to do with all the information I have acquired. I am starting with a table of evidence. I am describing all the tiles made and trawling through the recording of the session to pick up the conversations I missed whilst I was facilitating. It’s going to take all week. I also need to make a document which I can refer to next time I roll out this workshop - Things to remember and best practices.
Next, I will photograph all the pieces, dry them and fire. The original idea was that there would be a creative outcome (an artwork) from the workshop. A scarf made from ceramic tiles….because everyone needs one of those….?? Some decisions need to be made about decoration. I am resistant to glazing. It is inelegant and distracting, however, aesthetically it will make the scarf into a better final piece. I’m going to have to figure this out. Later …. I have just endured the video and audio recording of the entire hour. This meant listening mostly to myself, and we all know how that feels. It was a very useful tool for remembering what each person said as the conversation developed. It was also useful to see the reactions to the disruptions I provided. A frustrated, ‘Aghhhhh’, from one participant as I made her put the clay down in order to wrap some oddly shaped Christmas gifts. I have also photographed all the tiles from Friday. It’s the first time I’ve looked properly since I left Birmingham. I’ve remembered other bits of conversation, all of which I’m frantically writing down as accurately as I can remember. I’m anticipating the preparation, overspill and analysis from this one short workshop to take a week. This has gone from being a short ‘practice’ into something utterly valuable and potentially beautiful.
I’m delighted!
Figure 10 Tile produced at Research workshop
Figure 11 Tile produced at Research Workshop (2)
No Wonder 25 August 2018 10.20 AM Saturday My office is upstairs and my washing machine is on the ground floor. Those stairs are well trodden! I feel like the washing machine typifies my personal domestic ritual. It’s not like cooking. Cooking must be done at a certain time and often has to be watched. It is a start to finish ritual. • • • •
box, all the butterflies stacked against one another. There is a tension between the idea of the butterfly as a gossamer winged, free flying spirit and the rigid ceramic crammed into a small space. Visually the rhythmic nature of shaking and folding of fresh smelling clothing into a basket is also referenced.
Prepare food, cook food, eat food, Clear up inevitable mess.
Washing is different. It’s more of a perpetual or cyclical endeavour. There might be various stages of the process happening at the same time and, unlike preparing food, it’s never finished. Currently the washing machine and the dryer are both on. There are also some random pieces of clean washing that are drying in the kitchen.
Figure 12 ‘No Wonder’ 2010 Angela Tait
Everyone is away except for me so there’s not a lot of washing in waiting i.e. dirty things, however I’m going to the gym in an hour so there soon will be. I think this illustrates my point about the perpetual nature of the chore.
Authors note: Currently this work only partially exists due to an unfortunate incident involving clumsy potter and a floor.
So how does this fit with or alongside or amongst my practice?
10.34 am
Sometimes this happens in a very specific way. My piece ‘No wonder’ 2010 is a series of 147 ceramic butterflies, each embossed with the name of a piece of washing that passed through my hands one day that summer. The title hints at the mundanity of the washing process but secretly stands for, ‘No wonder the fucking washing machine is always on’. The work is presented in a
I had an idea. This happens when I’m writing. It’s a stack of white mass-produced cups, the kind that a well-known Scandinavian furniture store sell for 90p each. The cups are arranged vertically in a square block resembling a screen and a projection of me pegging out washing is played onto the makeshift screen. I stop writing to draw this. 10.44 am
I’ve just been reading David Cushaway’s PhD thesis. He did his entire ceramics doctorate without using wet clay. It strikes me that this mug/screen idea fits into that expanded field. The ceramics references are there but without my regular making process. I think I’ll do this. I am a rigid kind of personality who follows ideas through one incremental step at a time. Whilst I constantly tell my own students to take risks, I am not, in general, a follower of my own rules. An amusing aside: The Ikea website lists their Vardera mug £0.95 each as, ‘Made of feldspar porcelain, which makes the mug impact resistant and durable’, please refer to my previous comment about the current state of the work, ‘No Wonder’. 11.02 am. Going to the gym. 2.50 PM - Following a rather frantic spin class (this reminds me of spin cycle and also the spinning the potter’s wheel. Is that some imagery I can use one day?) and a much more leisurely lunch, I’ve just recorded the status of today’s washing. There are 111 items in total covering all stages of the current cycle. 55 items in the washer (one load), 43 items out of the dryer and ready to be put away and 13 ‘delicates’ drying. Not a massive day, I’d estimate this as an average occurrence two or three times a week. During lunch I have quickly drawn another idea which consists of a series of extruded strips which are hung in a random but sculptural way against a wall. I vaguely wonder if I’ve time to extrude these before the current washing cycle finishes. 5.30 PM - The answer is no. There’s never time to do anything in the pottery before the next load finishes. The place seduces you with its endless opportunities for creativity and spending less than a couple of hours in there would be like going to B and Q and only buying what you went for. On the plus side, I’ve thought through some of the ideas
which have been floating around today. I’ve actually (temporarily) dismissed the two mentioned above and decided to spend tomorrow throwing 111 small but individual pieces which (in my mind) represent todays washing. These won’t have a visual reference to the original garments (although I have considered making the ones representing bras into jugs to amuse myself) and so the meaning will have to be transferred in another way. I’m wondering if process might be that carrier of meaning in this case. Can I make a connection between the process of making my tiny vessels and doing the washing? Will timings, rhythms, backwards and forward motions between parts of the making cycles provide something meaningful ………I wonder?
Throwing Marathon 27 August 2018 11.30 - Yesterday I fully intended to throw 111 small vessels as previously mentioned. This didn’t happen. Despite being completely alone at home due to holidays, work commitment and a fortuitous business trip, I was interrupted by friends and circumstances. So today is Bank Holiday Monday. I’m still alone and determined. Following a series of tortuous administrative distractions, I’m ready. I’ve been thinking about this idea and wondering what I’m looking for. I suppose my original hypothesis was that there is a kind of rhythm in my domestic work which becomes reflected in my creative practice. To measure this I will have to take the same approach to mapping the creation of a work that I took to the mapping of my dailiness. That means writing during the process. I have two options, either write with a pencil or take voice notes. Due to the extreme Northern-ness of my accent, Siri doesn’t always completely understand what I’m saying. Her misinterpretations range from bizarre to (occasionally) downright rude. So, armed with pencil and my favorite yellow legal pad, I’m off to the pottery. 11.40 AM - There’s some regular pottery admin to do. A few awkward things I made a couple of days ago which need turning. I think I’ll leave these until later to break up the throwing a little. Radio on Kettle on Lights on Heater on, heater immediately blows the pottery fuse which is frustrating, and I should probably be more worried about this than I am.
11.53AM - I wedge and prepare some clay. I’m going to throw off the hump. It’s the most economical way of producing a lot of thrown vessels at one sitting. After 20 minutes I’ve made the first ten. Well, I say twenty minutes but it’s actually quarter past 12. The actual process of throwing is quite rapid once I hit my stride. It’s the constant cleaning, washing slurry off my hands, and recycling wet clay with dry and other in between bits that take the time. 12.49PM - I’ve thrown 24. I’m learning as I go along. The dryer the thrown pieces are the more likely they will hold their shape when lifting off the hump. Too dry and they’ll drag on my fingers and spoil. This is what Schon refers to as ‘reflection in action’. Reflections which are made during the process that lead to alterations in the process to make it more productive. I have a break to turn the previously mentioned four pieces. They’re at that perfect consistency for turning but I’ve altered them after throwing so the rims aren’t straight and I have to make some clay props to help me out. After this I wash the tools, empty the wheel water, and prepare some more clay. It’s about now I start to get blasé about the throwing. This results in a fair few losses and me having to have a word with myself and force myself to regain concentration. 1.37 PM - I’ve made thirty-four and I realise I’m hungry. I have a little chuckle to myself as this is one of the things that came out of the Birmingham conference workshop. I recall someone saying he’s always hungry and this is a distraction from his creative practice. Now I’ve
thought of this I don’t know what to do with this information. 2.54 PM - Much longer lunch than usual. I ended up putting the washer on (there’s some kind of lovely poetic symmetry here as I’m making pots to represent the washing). Then I got distracted crocheting into another ceramic piece which I’m working on. Just another row to see what the developing pattern looks like. I’ve barely started again when I get a visit from a scout leader wanting some petty cash out of my treasurer’s tin. He stays half an hour as he has concerns about something going on in the group which he wants my opinion on. During this time I’m twitchy to get back to work. I end up promising to chase up some of his concerns, this is an addition to my perpetual to do list, but I resolve to think about it this afternoon during the rest of my throwing. 3.57 PM - Recommence throwing 4.16 pm - Interrupted by a phone call. 6.01 PM - I’ve had a good run. I’m up to number 92. 7.04 PM and I’ve done 114. I should do a couple more to allow for thin bottoms which might crack or other potential (and probable) mishaps in the finishing process. I have decided to try to turn all the pots. I had considered sanding the bottoms flat but I really like a nicely turned bottom and if I decide to hang them the bottoms will inevitably show. Some thoughts about what I’ll do with the pots have been swimming around this afternoon. I have decided to drill a hole in each one in order to hang it. They might not eventually be hung but in some ways the hole will render them nonfunctional anyway which is something I strive for in my work.
I’m tired, my hands are sore from washing them all the time and I am filthy! A perfunctory tidy up and I’m done for the day.
Reinventing home/Reinventing writing 1 September 2018 style much easier, but its finished state is often not as elegant. Yesterday HT and I had to go to London for the day on a mission to secure a medical certificate which would further consolidate his ambition to become a commercial airline pilot. It was a long day, the type that is unreliable and where time doesn’t play by its usual rules. There could be long episodes of ‘dead’ time alongside other rushed and frantic periods. I’d taken a book I’d been meaning to read. Reinventing home: Six working women look at their home lives.
Figure 13 Selfie on the boating lake in Regent's Park
Yesterday my thinking leapt forward again. This wasn’t so much a change in understanding or an epiphany, but a dawning realisation that some of the qualities in my writing would have to change. I currently have two styles of writing. The first, and until now most common, is the academic; third person, informative and sometimes complex. I consider myself fairly competent but it’s an arduous process. As a rough estimate 100 words takes an hour to write. This includes stopping regularly to check facts, reference passages and change the order of the text. The other kind of writing is what I’m doing now. Personal, fluid and decidedly faster. I find this
Reading currently holds an unusual place in my dailiness. Its status has been elevated from a pleasure to a necessity. It’s one of the activities which has crossed the semi-permeable membrane which separates leisure (domestic/private) activities from work, and this is still something I need to readjust to. In that vein, taking this book has helped me to validate the day (or certain parts of it) as time which will contribute to my ongoing development. An aside: It occurs to me that I’m currently sitting on a bench at a local airfield where HT is having a lesson. Here I am again, stealing precious patches of the day in order to not ‘waste’ time. I wonder if I’ve missed some spectacular flying and if I’ll get questioned about it later. The book is a series of very short texts by six working women about their relationship with the domestic. They consider everything from the precious items in their home, whose object-ness creates meaning in the lives of themselves and their families, to complex philosophical questions like the values of eating together. The common threads of these texts are in some of the moral values they explore, but also the qualities in the
way text is handled. It strikes me it’s a very female way of writing. I’m starting to see it replicated in other feminist texts. Quite apart from the formal constructs in the pieces, beginning, middle and end, there are luscious descriptions, memories, thoughts and, perhaps most prominently, emotions. They’re all written in the first person giving that emotion extra emphasis. As I’m reading, I occasionally nod or even smirk as I recognise myself in the words. Whilst I’m currently unsure how this information I’m absorbing might add to the formal part of the PhD, I’m sure there’s a message here for me. To be engaging my writing must replicate some of the qualities I’m admiring and enjoying here. How I’m going to do that I have no idea. I’m not a writer, I’m a potter, but I’ve committed to this autoethnographic style and convinced myself that there’s a necessity for these personal texts which will go alongside my practice.
The Birmingham Scarf 11 September 2018
Figure 14 Tiles from the Birmingham workshop with copper carbonate, fired to cone 6
In June I was invited to take part in a postgraduate research conference at the Birmingham City University. The conference was an opportunity for me to try out an idea which was really intended for much later in my research. This, ‘safe space for unsafe things’, was my chance to talk to other creatives and gather information about their own domestic rituals or routines and was therefore too good to miss.
The physical outcomes of the workshop were a series of tiles that had been manipulated by the participants in a way that expressed their experience of the domestic and how it impacted or influenced their creative work. My intention was always to make these tiles into a scarf. Months ago they were fired and washed with copper carbonate - to enhance the details you understand, not to decorate.
I planned a workshop which was part playing with clay and part information gathering. I got this idea from Donna Grant’s recent thesis where she invented a game which gathered data in a similar kind of way, and I went without any expectations,or indeed any clue as to whether this would be valid ‘research’ at all.
Following a couple of months of avoiding making the planned scarf, I have finally completed the piece. The procrastination was a combination of not really knowing what to do and genuine business in other areas. Finally, I have forced myself to work on the scarf; it took less than a week to finish and looks great!
I knew a student once, let’s call him J. When I met him circa 2010 he was doing his Masters in Contemporary Fine Art at the age of 82 and battling cancer. As I write, J is still very much alive….and is still fighting. He is a gentleman and made a considerable impression on me - I consider him a friend. Not only because of the above and countless other stories I could tell, but because he’d knitted a jumper for everyone he’d ever loved. Knitting has so many emotive qualities. Once an essential part of the domestic process, knitting was vital to clothe families and to economise on spending. In the Mid 20th century, handmade was a necessity for the working classes. A mother who could knit, crochet and sew could clothe her family for very little, rather than resorting to expensive shop-bought items. These skills not only applied to the necessary economic frugality of the time but stretched into the decorative and the celebratory. Good needlewomen could have regular new garments and births could be celebrated with beautiful hand knitted blankets and baby clothes. The handmade today has a very different context. Skills with textiles are scarcer. The handing down of these crafts from Mother to Daughter is a precious but less usual occurrence. Knitting is no longer a necessity but is used for a whole range of needs from those more traditional functions to political protest. A few years ago, J organised a huge textile project in the form of a 400 metre long knitted scarf which was wrapped around his residential building in Manchester. The scarf symbolised the comfort and warmth which the building gave him both physically and emotionally. J understands the strength of knitting and its new and varied meanings within a contemporary context. https://jims-scarf.co.uk/ So back to the Birmingham Scarf. It’s held together with crocheted cotton in a rather
autumnal orange/brown. Each tile is framed by the crochet which gives an unusual flexibility to the rigid stoneware. The cotton has dual purposes as both decorative and functional. It adds softness which enables the piece to be a scarf and provides the style of the garment which clearly references the contemporary handmade. The problems with the Birmingham Scarf: I have no idea how to contextualise this piece. The ideas tied up in the materials are fairly easy to untangle. Ceramics, cotton, craft, handmade, objects, thingness, comfort, garments, style, process. All these are recogniseable. The problems I have: •
•
It’s other people’s thoughts and ideas tied up in a work which I’m claiming as mine. This is fine in terms of someone else making the work. This has been going on for centuries. The main issue is that its original intention is qualitative research and the outcome is now an artwork. That crossover is messy. I need to record the learnings and outcomes from the workshop in a formal manner, not merely make it into an object which is my natural instinct. This means I have to find a way to catalogue and interpret the findings.
It appears I have opened another can of worms. I could do this in a tried and tested way. One which would fit nicely with established precedents and would have reliable outcomes. The devil on my shoulder is saying, ‘Make this easy for yourself. You can get this PhD nailed in three years and it will be perfectly fine. What have I told you about the path of least resistance?’ But I can hear the feint whisper of the angel on the other shoulder saying, ‘but you’ll never be happy or proud and sometimes you’ve just got to follow an idea down the rabbit hole.’
Figure 15 The Birmingham Scarf Angela Tait 2018
Epic Fails 14th October 2018 This week I’ve had some epic creative fails. I’m trying to be positive about these because I know that by failing I’m not playing safe. Still feels like a waste of time, and everyone knows time is my most precious commodity.
make some use of the time by employing my hands. This has more recently be almost entirely overtaken by working on my ceramics practice. I can’t even remember whether the ideas for mixed media (clay and yarn) pieces came from my evening endeavour and started to represent part of my domestic ritual or the other way around.
The Ceramic Skirt Who wouldn’t want one? This is the development of some ideas I’ve been playing with for years. I made a ceramic cushion in 2012. It’s a series of embossed clay tiles attached together with crochet. It sits in our home on a Barcelona chair (a replica, slightly broken) as a reminder that my work strays about as far from the modernist aesthetic as it is possible to get. I’m intrigued by how this piece sits between the public and the private sphere. The intimacy of the domestic space that I share with my public space, let’s call this the ‘Artworld’ for want of a more fitting description. More recently I’ve made the ceramic scarf using a similar technique. The process of making replicating the humble nature of the gifts I often give to friends and family. I have knitted and crocheted gifts periodically through my life. As a child I made my Mum small coasters from tubes of French knitting. The ends of her balls of wool from a larger project going into my ‘useful’ box and translating into little emblems of love from a seven-year-old daughter. More recently I’ve given handmade scarves, hats and gloves as parts of Christmas presents. Sitting in front of some mindless television in the last hour before bed, I
Figure 16 Yarn Bowl 2018 Stoneware and cotton, Angela Tait
During the summer I started mapping the household washing. This was a simple counting and listing exercise at first. I made a series of 114 miniature thrown vessels; one for every piece of washing on a single day in July. I know why I made these. The process of replicating the rhythm of the washing was important to explore. The end result, a series of too-small vessels, jugs and plates with no practical functional and small holes drilled in the sides. Currently these sit in neat little stacks in the studio awaiting further contemplation and inevitable installation into some, as yet, unidentified, sculptural form.
it would be photographed when it was finished. I even knew it would fit me. Saturday was the annual open event at my studio group. This is the one day a year we invite the community into our studios to nosey around, ask questions and mingle. On this occasion I usually take something to do. I can knit and talk at the same time and people like to see artists working. This year I took the ceramic pegs and the other materials I needed to construct the skirt. I began sewing and tying and threading in earnest. An hour (and several interested and interesting visitors) later I had in front of me the ugliest partmade garment you could ever encounter. The piece was naïve and thoughtless and the garment resembled a bad line-dancing outfit. Oh heck! Following unpicking, rethinking, making again, and a similar cyclical process all afternoon I was no further forward. The realisation dawned that the skirt wasn’t going to be forthcoming and some additional planning might just be required.
Figure 17 No Wonder 2018 (work in progress) Angela Tait
Later in the year I extruded a couple of hundred rough, flat stoneware pegs or tags. Some were embossed with names, ‘superking duvet cover’ or ‘sports bra’. The repetitiveness of the making, smoothing and printing process replicating the shake, hang, fold of the dozens of underpants and T-shirts a few yards away in the kitchen. Throughout this exercise I was always going to make these into a skirt. I had the plan, it was in my head and made perfect sense. I understood the colour, shape, materials and format for the skirt. I knew how I was going to make it and where
Saturday night I fell asleep thinking about the (non)skirt. I planned and re-planned and finally, amongst the leftovers of a Sunday dinner, I succumbed to the fact it wasn’t going to happen with the materials I had available. This leaves me with two strands to pursue. The first is the 200+ ceramic pieces which are now just that…pieces of ceramic. These pegs now sit alongside the 114 thrown vessels. The future life of all these pieces is currently undecided. I am bursting with questions. Is the process enough? Is the legacy (pegs, pots, plates) necessary or a redundant and irrelevant by-product of what was essentially a performance? The second thread I have to consider is the skirt. I feel like there’s still mileage in the idea of wearable ceramics. I have another idea about how I could construct this. It is entirely possible this idea will fail too. Nothing in ceramic production is
rapid and the whole process is full of opportunities to go wrong. For the time being, I am resolutely committed to getting things wrong and preparing to fail. By pushing the boundaries of what I know I am bound to overstep the mark occasionally.
The Birmingham Scarf 9th January 2019 This morning I reread the blog post from July when I’d just returned from Birmingham and had no Idea how I was going to deal with the tiles from the workshop. A massive six months later I have an outcome. Towards the end of the summer I started to construct the fired pieces into a garment. As my knitting skills are what you might describe as competent (at best) I have always be drawn to making things in straight lines. Hence, many of my relatives and friends own handmade scarves which, whilst vibrant and often finished with decorative tassels and frills, are actually quite rudimentary in their construction. The Birmingham scarf is the first creative artefact which constitutes qualitative information gathering. This pseudo-functional garment holds the conversations, frustrations and thoughts of a group of practitioners who were willing to share their experiences of how their domestic obligations interact with their creative practice. Of course the next stage is analysis of the information. I currently have a stack of books up to my chin on the desk. Social research, qualitative evaluation, demystifying postgraduate research. Just finding out the strategy for analysing the information I have seems like an insurmountable task. If I can take one lesson only from the whole of this first year of my PhD studies, it’s that everything takes time and I MUST allow myself this. No short cuts or skimping. This goes against every force in my (somewhat inclined to the path of least resistance) body. The scarf is a starting point. An idea which has the potential to become so many more. What if I
make ceramic upholstery from the next workshop, or a cape, or a series of hats with ceramic bobbles? Ideas are self-perpetuating. I have one that leads to ten more. It’s keeping focus and control which is rather more challenging.
Frustration and Moaning 4th February 2019 8.56 am - I haven’t written for so long. I have been massively busy since September. Working full time for a term and then weeks of assessment. I have, of course, been continuing to make, albeit at a slower rate than usual. Evening working has been the kind that can be done within another environment - read: splat in front of the television with family - knitting, sewing, embroidery. I have finished a fair few new pieces but neglected the research structure which surrounds the work. I have done little formal reflection, barely touched the contextual review and made only a cursory attempt to read the increasing pile of books in the office. Any PhD work has just about been maintained but now I have an annual review to write, and I need to concentrate on more than my usual daily making practice. I am in equal parts frustrated and excited by the review. Frustrated because it’s a big document which demands I order my thoughts and present some information - and excited because it demands I order my thoughts and present some information. Today I will be attempting a second draft which I hope won’t be far from the completed document. Hope!
Other things I have to do today: • • • • • • •
Make an urgent phone call Gym 1.30 Tidy up the almighty mess caused by a leaking tap in the bathroom Make turkey burgers for tea Dig up rhubarb for the new vegetable troughs down at the studio Put in a pay claim Sort an exchange between Gallery Frank and another studio group.
9.41 am Delivery man with a new book I’m writing two documents at once. This could get tangled. I have made the urgent phone call and put in the pay claim. 10.49 am Where did that time go? I just said goodbye to number 2 Tait boy. He starts late on a Monday. I have made some progress with the report. Writing is terribly slow. I tell my students I write at the rate of about 100 words an hour. I speculate this is true on the whole. Sometimes more sometimes less but this figure includes looking things up, editing, changing words around. I need coffee. I’m cold and starting to get distracted. 11.00 am - I have coffee. I also did a bit of washing up, put the washing machine on and brought the washing upstairs with me. Another job to add to the list, sort the washing. So far I haven’t taken anything else from the list, which makes the new list longer than the old one. 12.50 pm - I had a very long conversation on the telephone about teaching tomorrow. This was important but seriously ate away at my planned day. That said, I do feel like progress has been
made towards the report writing. Another hour this afternoon should see a draft in some kind of acceptable format ready to be sent to AL for feedback. In twenty mins I will go to the gym for an hour. This feeds my physical and emotional wellbeing but interrupts the day. Over the years I have decided that this is a necessary part of my dailiness and must be done. 3.15 PM - But like I said. It eats my time. Sit back down at the desk with the washing machine back on but actually very little else achieved. I have made some progress on the above list but nothing concrete as yet on the gallery exchange and the rhubarb remains in the permafrost next to the pottery.
Deproblematising gender politics 8 Feb 2019
Figure 18 quote I wrote down whilst reading in bed one evening – source lost in the mists of pre-sleep drowsiness Necessarily, a good deal of my reading recently has been from the second wave feminist explosion of literature from roughly 1970-1990. My thinking has been vacillating between the excessive amount of information advising me why, as women, I am subjugated and the fact that, actually, someone has to feed the kids. I had one of those little turning points this morning. The kind of thought that emerges and makes complete sense for a moment and then disappears before I can translate it into actual language. Mostly this happens when I’m idly pondering, on a train or up to my elbows in clay, and therefore remains an unresolved issue. Today I happen to be sitting reading at my desk and can use my reflective writing strategy to try to thrash out the vagaries into something a little more concrete. This is fundamentally about my own position which I should probably try to put into words. • •
•
I do the majority (but certainly not all) of the repetitive household chores This is because I work part time and my research is done within (and around) the home I dislike the interruptions and the demands upon my time, but I don’t think someone else should do it
• •
I don’t like housework or cooking particularly I don’t feel subjugated because of this – We all have to do things we don’t like
So this research isn’t a crusade. I’m not protesting, I’m investigating from a position of curiosity. My attitude to the domestic chore is approaching neutrality. Things have to be done, whether I’m male or female it’s just the situation. So where does this leave the feminist text lined up endlessly above my monitors; do they have a place within the research? Well of course. In short without these I wouldn’t have the opportunity to feel ambivalent about my role(s). I can hear the washing machine bleeping. Do I leave my train of thought to empty or carry on mildly irritated? Okay I went, it took 15 minutes. I did a bit of washing up, I emptied the dryer and then the washing machine and filled the dryer again. I also put the delicates on the drying rack in the kitchen. Some pots were already there. Pots and clothes together, is that a thing I can use? The two processes sharing a space like I share my time?
consciousness within some cultures. This gives a framework to the workshops. The collection of personal information through conversation and storytelling using clay as both a conduit and creative outcome. I have been pondering using a similar technique with the case studies. Can I do some kind of coconstructed interviews (Ellis 2004) which result in a ceramics project?
The Elephant in the (Head)Room
Figure 19 Drying clothes and pots together - Don't ever dry your pots over a direct heat source!
I have been thinking a great deal about expanding my practice. This, alongside the temporal nature of the investigation and the layering of the public and private worlds keeps suggesting one thing. Video
Two other things I’ve been thinking about recently which, as I have my metaphorical pen in my hand, I should really address. The first is some ideas about the collection of qualitative data and the second is the elephant in the (head)room.
How do I feel about this? Somewhere between resigned to months of learning editing software, sourcing the best equipment, and making countless experimental works….and terrified! There, I said it. It’s out there in the world. Now I suppose I must address this.
Qualitative data collection I have always planned to do this through some kind of workshops alongside a series of case study/interviews. The workshops were to be more wide ranging with several participants from whom to draw information and the case studies more focused and with depth. This is still the case, but the ideas have developed. Since the Birmingham scarf, the concept of collecting information in a more physical way is very appealing. A creative outcome working alongside the transcription of the conversations gives a layered account. It embeds stories and meaning, much like the quilt making processes which becomes part of the collective
Please leave that with me.
E’s chicken – using food as a metaphor, an excuse and a timing device 22 Feb 2019 I had a lovely conversation on Friday with EC. She’s the curator at a local gallery but she’s also a friend and we had a coffee and catch-up and made a few plans to work together in conjunction with the museum. We haven’t talked for ages and so within an hour we’d pretty much used up our annual word allocation. It was one of those conversations which doesn’t really have a linear format. It’s more complex and tangled and layered than that, a bit like a lasagne. Amongst the other ingredients we talked about my research. As is becoming usual when I describe what I’m doing, Ella started to relate my question to her own circumstances. She is a busy Mum with two jobs, a husband and an eleven-year-old son. She completely understood what I meant when I talked about the guilt of creative practice and finding temporal spaces to work. She related her own tale. On Sunday they have a roast dinner, usually chicken. Whilst Ella is preparing the dinner (i.e. the chicken is cooking) she has an hour and a half where the oven is on, but she doesn’t have a great deal to do. She steals this precious time to get out her watercolours and paint. I started thinking about this. A roast dinner is really not just about putting the chicken in and waiting, it’s a backwards and forwards dance with a complex choreography. Getting everything ready at the same time requires practice and rhythm and timing, it’s a skill. I doubt very much Ella sits down for a long period of time during this hour and a half. I imagine her concentrating for twenty minutes and then interrupting the painting
to put on the veg, baste the chicken or turn the roast potatoes over. It occurs to me that everyone has a bit of this ‘borrowed’ time or moulds their day to fit things in . Another friend with four children (two under 18 months) steals time to read articles or follow her favourite creatives on social media whilst she’s feeding the baby. I start to wonder if our time is a bit like the lasagne too. Do we overlap jobs, letting them integrate with one another in order to ‘find’ time to fulfil our need to create?
Overwhelmed 5 April 2019 10.26 am Friday That how I feel. I’ve been doing the contextual review for over a year. That’s a ridiculous amount of time for a 6000-word paper. This snail-like endeavour is a symptom of me not really knowing what I’m doing and the immense amount of reading I’ve had to do. I want to put everything into the contextual review, every delightful little snippet I encounter. This has left me with something which is virtually impossible to negotiate. Trying to tie together all these little bits is an impossible task. Now I have to go back and decide what’s important to my research and delete other things (this hurts!) I read a PhD thesis early on; I did a lot of this. I can’t really remember who it belonged to or the subject but I do remember it was slightly differently structured from the others I was reading. The writer has stated with his (maybe her) contextual review that a lot of the context was wrapped up in the other parts of the thesis, as and when it was important to some of the other of the practice-based outcomes. I like this idea very much. Embedding context into the rest of the writing to make sense of the work they’d produced. I think this is a way I could go. It feels comfortable. Recently, I’ve also had a really clunky period at work. Since September there has been uncertainty about my job, full time cover for various reasons, a new role and such. Turbulent you might call it. I need a bit of a fresh start. The contextual review is becoming a millstone. I have a lot of information in my head but I have snow globe brain again. I can’t see it clearly. I do know that
there’s lots that needs to be taken out and I also know there’s some really lovely passages which are well written and I desperately don’t want to lose. I need a break. I have decided to have a month off and concentrate on something else. That way I will have done a month’s worth of work (which will make me feel better) and I’ll have given myself some distance so I can approach the work with a new pair of eyes. I am going to work on methodologies. This is one of the things I have been asked for in time for next year’s review. I know this is a long time off but it also fits into my plans for the year and the fact I want to start gathering qualitative data this summer. This morning I’m going to a really detailed plan for how the methodology might look. We’re going away for the night and I just know IT will want to set off early afternoon. I’m conscious there’s a big pile of washing in the utility room. I might just put a load on. 10.55 Where does the time go?
Thinking on the outside 22 April 2019 I’m making a lot of things with thread. Knitting, hand tufting, crochet, embroidery. I’m embedding fibre textiles into the vessels I’m making. This renders them non-functional and enables me to develop interesting sculptural properties. My understanding for this kind of work comes from the history of the female within the home. Theory from Rozika Parker’s subversive stitch (1984) onwards. It slots into every feminist text that talks about home craft. How it’s a pious activity which blurs the lines between work and leisure time, contributes to the decorative qualities of the home and has value on a moral or domestic basis which runs in parallel (although probably underneath) the financial or economic value systems.
my reader (if there ever is one) will deal with this information and alter their view of me. I was taught to knit by my Mother and to crochet by my Grandma. I made things as a child which were small ‘gifts’ for my parents. I relate to the theoretical texts I read about craft in the home, keeping my hands busy whilst I watch the television, feeling valued (not necessarily financially but wholesomely) by having this skill which can be traced back to necessity. This whole project is underpinned by an autobiographical understanding of my own world. My practice has always come from a place of the domestic with all its implications of intimate, private space where work and leisure and family and personal histories can’t be separated.
But does it answer my research questions?
That then begs the questions:
I would suggest it doesn’t... This is problematic
Which bits of my practice specifically address the main aim of the research? I.e.
So how do I deal with this? I have been thinking about this recently. There have been a lot of thoughts floating around in my head. Sometimes I have to just sit down and thrash these out in writing. I don’t find these blovel posts terribly easy - I’d much rather be making - but they do force me to articulate in a logical way and are therefore extremely useful. Anyway, I have been thinking about the way Ossian Ward talks about interpreting meaning within art in his book ‘Ways of Seeing’ (2014). He advocates a level of interpretation which demands some knowledge of the artist. This can be their history, cultural background or work they’ve made before. I think this is where the fibre/textiles come in for me. I am a white middleclass woman living in suburban England. I feel the weight of that privilege every single day, even now I’m wondering if I should write this and how
o Is there a rhythm of dailiness which affects or disrupts creative practice? o How can this investigation be communicated through the medium of ceramics in a fine art context? So to take those questions in turn, clearly the multiple thrown vessels with the embroidered key ‘No Wonder 2018’ answer the brief. They are a direct reflection of the amount of washing I did in one day. Each pot reflects a garment, each colour relates back to a category of washing and the stage in its wash cycle. The pots are handmade by throwing. They are miniature version of functional pieces but intentionally don’t retain a functional purpose. We understand vessels. We have an intimate relationship with them in both our domestic and our public lives. We hold them in our hands and place our lips against them. They
hold our food which both sustains and entertains us. Clearly the vessel is the way to go. It’s a vital part of the reading of the work. It gives a reading of ubiquity. One that is universal and understandable by almost everyone. But what about the other works? All the pieces I’m making with fibre attachments. Sculptural quasi-vessels which have been run over by cars or ironed and reformed into rudimentary vessel-like forms and finished with colourful textile additions. Are these a reflection of the relationship between my domestic obligations and my creative practice? I’m less sure. It’s true the ceramic part of the work gets done during the day. I use my home pottery which means I’m the person ‘on site’ in the family home. This means I’m
responsible for making the evening meal (we call it tea in the NorthWest) and I’m the one who has to answer the door to numerous visitors, deliveries and workpeople coming to read metres, service boilers and fit new plug sockets. In amongst this I maintain a practice. This necessitates a continuous switching between work and home. But I question if that’s reflected within the outcomes. At this point I’m more than aware that this experimental writing I’m doing is going to be an important outcome. If process is a meaning maker, I need to talk about my process to figure out what the meaning is. Even I’m not sure if that last sentence makes sense.
Figure 20 No Wonder 2018 (finished) Stoneware and Embroidery Angela Tait
Figure 21 Untitled 2018 Thrown and Ironed black and white porcelain with embroidery Angela Tait
Posting about posts 23 April 2019 – St George’s day I’m having a conflict. I have planned and made a whole process for reflection which I’m now choosing to ignore in favour of this more informal style of writing about the things I’m making. Right at the beginning I was adamant I would use De Bono as a reflective tool. I know it works, I used it for my teaching degree when I had to reflect on 150 hours of teaching experience. I have spent time adapting the format into a tool I can use for reflecting upon ceramics made but now I’m finding it, well, a bit dull. The journal (conversational) style of writing is becoming more important and useful than the more formal process of placing information into a set format. During this kind of writing I can work things out in a really productive manner. Somehow, I’m finding I can capture those half-formed thoughts which occur to me at inopportune moments and pin them down into something solid. A bit like some people use a drawing process to work out ideas, that’s how the writing is functioning. I’m proposing a change of trajectory. Instead of the rigid process of the thinking hats I’m going to try a more fluid approach to reflective thought. I’ll be making more journal entries which will explore the way forward. They’ll talk about the work I’m making and propose ways forward but in a style I can deal with. The PhD process is like a wiggly line (I’ve stopped to draw a graph with the horizontal axis as time and the vertical as thinking and a very tangled line heading vaguely upwards). Things I’m sure about don’t always work and then other things that are seemingly nothing become important. I keep telling myself this is healthy.
Wearable ceramics 24 April 2019 11.58 am - This is very late to start working but I’ve been feeling a bit off-colour this morning. In my defense I’ve finished a tufted insert for a pot that I’ve been working on this week and I’ve made a list. My priority today is to write one of my new ‘reflective’ posts. I try to do this kind of writing in blocks of about twenty minutes because I know I’ll get distracted about then and do something else. 12.02 am - I have been making wearable ceramics. Not necklaces and earring like the ones I started making a decade ago to make money to sustain my ceramics practice, but sculptural performative pieces which render both the ceramic and the garment functionless. This started months ago with an idea for a scarf which ended in a pair of gloves. This was worn around my neck with one end attached to a cup and the other a saucer. Now you can start to imagine the problems here. The cup and saucer were made in the traditional manner (thrown with pulled handle) and then drilled through the body to make fixings for the crochet glove pieces, effectively rendering them non-functional from the start. The gloves were made attached to the ceramic pieces from the start, a clunky and awkward process, but I wanted them to be fully integrated and not to look like they’d been sewn on as an afterthought.
Figure 22 Wearable ceramics (Cup and Saucer) 2019 Angela Tait
I’m unsure if I made the right decision after this but I pulled this particular one back and remade it. When it came to the photography the scarf looked a little mean. We - the photographer and I - decided that visually it didn’t function well enough and deserved the luxury of a more generous width to the scarf bit and maybe longer ‘glove’ pieces. This piece is now two others. The ceramics have new attachments in a rather chunkier maroon wool which is a hat, scarf and glove combo and the purple cotton is now attached to a shallow bowl as a sort of separate scarf and long arm/glove piece. I really like these. They do lots of things that I want them to.
• •
There’s a tension with traditional ceramics practice. They’re made using traditional techniques, the ceramics are thrown (considered a masculine process, see Moira Vincentelli’s
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‘Women and Ceramics: Gendered Vessels (2000)’) and the attachments are hand crocheted, a process which is certainly from the female craft cannon. This is a really nice tension which also plays off against the hard/soft of the ‘sculpture’. They’re performative, both in the way that they can be imagined being made and the fact that they demand to be worn. They’re from that weird direction in Fine Art of the Rebecca Horn body extensions in that they’re totally restrictive. They’re difficult to wear and even put on by yourself – This has performative connotations on its own.
Figure 23 Wearable Ceramics 2019 Angela Tait
But:
But couldn’t I apply that to everything?
Do they really address the question? Are they reflecting the domestic ritual and if not, how could they?
If we apply the rules which according to Klapp are common to all rituals: regular recurrence, symbolic values, emotional meaning and (usually) a ‘dramatic’ group making quality there is starting to be some connection. By making in this pattern (ceramics in an integrated way during the day and ‘finishing’ in the evening) I have ritualised my way of making and therefore built meaning from process.
The answer is, I’m not quite sure. There is certainly something rhythmic about the crochet. It is repetitive in its nature and process and pattern but is that enough? At this stage I’m prepared to say that the pieces are a product of the domestic rhythm or ritual. The ceramic pieces are made during the day or at weekends when I have time in between other obligations, and the additional fibre pieces are finished in the evening in amongst the leisure time which I can do alongside spending time with the family and watching TV or during conversation.
There are things I don’t like about these. Some of the quality in the making is questionable and I’m not convinced about the fixings. Forgive the domestic metaphor but these issues need ironing out.
Figure 24 Wearable Ceramics (Red) 2019
Pulling myself together 1 June 2019 I emailed AL this week and told him I needed a kick. I have lapsed into making things I’m safe and comfortable with. They’re unique, my idea, and they’re good quality, but they’re safe. Of course, I don’t need someone to give me a kick; I did it myself. I forced myself to sit down and draw and think. I have been putting off making a video because of the technical skills which I don’t have and the performative nature of the wearable ceramics is becoming too obvious to ignore….so I made a plan: Take some short clips on the iphone. Transfer them to the computer and see what happens. Wear the wearables and take some film of those…see what they do. I have to do what I tell my students….work through ideas. I know fine well that things will come through working. I already have some plans for a set of sculptures. I am going to throw multiple small pots and then throw them to one side into a pile. I might drill holes in them for embroidery afterwards. This is possibly more in line with the idea of repetition within the home. Those tasks don’t have a permanent outcome. I am put in mind of Rachel Kneebone’s porcelain dance sculptures. Formally – and maybe even technically - they are owed a debt but in terms of concept and context there is little relevance. I also have an idea for a video. It’s a Fine Art piece, not documentary. It’s called ‘things that go round’ and It’s about – you guessed it - things which go around. Superficially a simple idea but which is underpinned by the concepts of Kristeva’s cyclical time, the seasons, repetition of tasks, skill and the
fact a potters’ wheel and a washing machine both rotate. An Aside: I’ve put the contextual review to one side. This is both wise and scary. I was bogged down by this paper which had taken me a year to put together. Now in my second year I’m realising that much of what I’ve written is only remotely relevant. I think when I go back to it in the Autumn that I’ll have to address issues of time, Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, the politics of gendered time etc…. none of which I’ve touched upon in the original text. This also leaves me with a whole lot of reading to do. I have done a quick count of the books I have purchased so far. There are about 80. Some of them barely opened. I can’t decide whether to make a plan for reading or leave the reading until the autumn and do one thing at once. I feel like individual tasks would be more productive.
Losing sight of the goal 4 June 2019 They said this would happen. I distinctly remember a conversation between myself and AL where he reinforced the practical nature of this research. Don’t lose sight of the work! I absolutely wouldn’t, I replied….and I have. The work is called, ‘Ceramics and the Domestic Ritual’. Most days it may as well be called, ‘’what is a domestic ritual?’ I’m getting more and more distracted by the theory. Currently I’m reading several sources about our experiences of temporality. It’s interesting stuff. I just found a lovely text by Miriam Glucksmann (2000) about the women who worked in the cotton industries in the post-war Northwest. I could buy the book for £25 from a well know web source or I could order it from the University Library inter-Library loan scheme and get it from the British Library for a week, which wouldn’t be long enough and would probably overlap with my holidays. But do I need it? What has it got to do with ceramics?….and therein lies the rub. I am asking myself all kinds of questions. Is it enough that I am a ceramicist and I’m responding to this theme? Or Should I be looking for the connection to ceramics in the home and negotiating that tension between my practice and the domestic context of the vessel. Or Am I already doing that implicitly by using the vessel form within the practice?
I am tending to use recognisable forms; the cup, bowl or plate to express these ideas. Eating or serving vessels which we all have an intimate domestic relationship with.
p.s. I bought the book from a reseller on (whispers) Amazon. £25.80. Books are valuable. They contain knowledge; things that other people know that I don’t.
A Haptic Conversation with some Clay n.d. She wedges; You obligingly mix the chaotic mass into a homogenous and neatly aligned whole
She throws; You create a suction bond on the static wheel, clinging hard to resist the inevitable centrifuge
She clenches; You reluctantly move to the centre with a little of your characteristic resistance
She squeezes; You rise She presses; You lower She repeats;
You acquiesce, content to be under the authorship of the confident hands
Keeping control of the questions 23 July 2019 There are skills to being a researcher, this may sound obvious, but I’m learning so much. Thankfully many of the skills overlap with my life as an ex-bank manager, educator and a Mum. The ability to organise, juggle, keep things logical, think creatively. They’re often considered soft skills, difficult to quantify and assess, but believe me, to do them well, it’s hard! One of the more specific things applicable to research is keeping your eye on the question. Of course, this research degree is practice-based and a creative practice by its very nature bends and weaves, going backwards and forward; pitch, roll and yaw. I’m calling this ‘creative drift’. The flowing from one idea to another, trying process after process, making micro decisions about texture, materials and form, getting distracted by external influences; something you read, something someone said, something you saw. These things, and countless others cause creative drift, and this is the reason I’m a year and a half into the research and not wholly making things which actually address my own (self-imposed) concerns. I keep the list of things I’ve made as a table in a word document. In the first twelve months I filled in 22 lines. These experimental pieces ranged from individual one-offs to large sets of works intended for installation. I’d estimate maybe 200 individual pieces altogether. How many of these pieces actually begin to address the research concerns. Some, a few, maybe none? But in every way these pieces had to be made. Partly the itch which must be scratched. The need to make, to think things through with your hands, to, ‘just see if it works’. But also to underpin what comes in the future. Sadly, I am not a natural creative, but I do believe creativity can be taught
(or learned). My strategy for this is tiny incremental steps. Making something, altering a tiny bit and remaking, not unlike Kolb’s model for reflective learning but with more of a three dimensional, spiral or helical forward motion. Unfortunately, this time I’ve let this happen without keeping my eyes on the prize. I’ve made to satisfy myself, I’ve allowed the creative practitioner to dominate the researcher and now the balance must be redressed and land perfectly balanced on the knife edge somewhere right between the two roles. And so, there is a task which has been on my todo list for months, I’ve been procrastinating, as deep down somewhere in my soul I think I knew it would need every ounce of thinking I possessed. It turns out my suppressed consciousness was correct. So, this morning I revisited my research questions. It took a lot of juggling of words; undo, redo, undo, cut, paste, delete. They’re better now. It felt a bit devious, like I’d started the research then manipulated to questions to fit. I have been reassured that it’s common, but the lingering doubt remains. It does leave me in a better position to judge the relevance of the work I’m making though and that is a valuable state. One of the things I am confident about is the change of title. I have become increasingly aware that I would, at some point, lose ritual from the title. It’s been problematic from the start. Too many connotations of religion and tradition. I do have theory which could support my use of the concept, but I ask myself, is it important or a little bit of a distraction? Which leaves me with an untitled PhD. I often intentionally title my work ‘untitled’. I do this for several reasons, but primarily because I want to acknowledge that I don’t want to impose my own meaning on the viewer. I daresay I will have to re-
title when someone realises what I’ve done. Possibly my next annual review. In that case I have until February to figure that out. Have I made anything yet which might begin to resemble one of the final outcomes? Ask me in three years.
Gender and the politics of time 8 July 2019 Polychronic time – doing things at once; Edward Hall (1983) also calls this female time.
‘This sense of multiplicity and coexistence of different kinds of time is reinforced by developments in the natural sciences that have overturned the Newtonian concept of natural time as invariant and objectively measurable. It also resonates with some claims about the contemporary ‘postmodern condition’, said to be characterised by fluidity, indeterminacy and the rejection of binary classifications or the idea of linear progress.’ (Hall 1989, p29)
Interesting…. this could be a better understanding of what I’m doing. Overlapping of times. When I’m knitting or sewing, I’m drawing upon the times of the past (i.e. what my grandma taught me) but I’m also overlapping with the ‘family time’ and making my work belong in the domestic world. This still speaks of a time-based medium to transmit these ideas. That video might have to be made. The book talks of post-structuralist stance of nonbinary interpretation of gender and sex (that they are social constructs and experienced differently by everyone) but goes on to admit that statistically women still hold a different cultural position. Ok, I think I just answered a question I was asked at the ICF conference this weekend. The gist of the question was ’what are you trying to communicate through the artwork and how are you going to do that?’
I think I’m trying to communicate the experience of domestic and creative time and the relationship those things have. Bloody hell, that feels like a step forward. I have been considering altering the title of my thesis and this might be it. The domestic ritual is really only a ritualised use of time.
Skip diving 31 July 2019
Figure 25 Sky 2019 Embroidery silk on found object Angela Tait
Earlier this year I salvaged something from the rubbish bin. When I say the bin, I don’t mean the nice clean indoor bin which usually holds paper and an occasional orange peel, but the slimy outdoor bin with the broken wobbly lid and the rancid smell in the summer. I’m not in the habit of garbage trawling. I’m not the kind of Rauschenberg-esque artist who lingers around skips or knocks on doors asking for broken chairs or part rolls of chicken wire, but this piece grabbed my attention as I walked past, and refused to let go. The object in question was an old satellite dish. Complete in structure but without the (frankly, quite important) ability to capture passing waves and translate them to pictures. My mind made
the leap from obligatory house furniture to embroidery canvas in an instant.
Thinking about writing about thinking 8 August 2019 It’s time to think about the next stage of my research. This is where I put my head above the parapet and come out of the relative safety of the autobiographical cocoon. Tomorrow I interview my first case study. I have asked three people who I know and trust if they will be my guinea pigs. My plan is to plan - try – think – replan – try again, in a Kolb-like reflective cycle. I am using a co-constructed interview strategy borrowed from Autoethnography, this means I have an active role as researcher and we (the researcher and the subject) try to draw out additional understanding through conversation and discussion. I’m presuming that interviewing subjects is a skill and, as I have very little experience, that I could well be a bit rubbish the first time. For this reason I’ve chosen the person I trust and know the best to go first. I’m going armed with a list of very basic questions which I hope to be able to build upon as I work through my test subjects. I’ll be audio recording. I hope to not have to transcribe each recording as I want the outcomes from the studies to be in the form of creative artefacts. I’m still going to do it though, just to be on the safe side. My plan is to take a more creative route to presenting the findings of the case studies. I aim produce a body of (loosely) ceramics-based works which will explore both the relationship between the subject’s creative practice and their domestic obligations and also (more distantly) the relationship between myself (as researcher) and them (as subject). As I’m writing this, I am realising it might be overly complicated. The way I plan to do this is as a collaborative artwork from each study. This might be made between us or conceived within the interview and
made by me in retrospect. This is up to the respondent and how much time and commitment they want to give the process. I understand I’ll have to be flexible, especially when I’m getting around to interviewing people I don’t know.
Authors note: This is an example of when my writing becomes a tool for thinking and formalising ideas. Before I started writing today I hadn’t realised the additional value of working together with a participant and how that might affect both the research outcomes and draw out questions of researcher/participant relationships.
An autobiography in 16 lines 12 August 2019
12th August 1994 There is a mildly overconfident bank clerk with the misleadingly authoritative title of ‘Area Sales Coordinator’, a role with a high profile but a mismatched salary. She loves her job. She is 23 and childless. She lives with her parents in a small village on the edge of the Pennine Hills. She is tall and blonde with long limbs which still retain the litheness of youth. Tomorrow she will be a bride
12th August 2019 There is an outwardly confident Lecturer and Artist with the misleadingly formidable title of ‘Academic Fellow’, a role with a salary which doesn’t match the perceived importance of the name. She loves her job. She is 48 and Mother to two adult boys. She lives with her husband and their youngest child in a small village on the edge of the Pennine Hills. She is tall and blonde with long heavy limbs which are strong but bare the signs and shapes of impending middle age. Tomorrow they will celebrate their silver wedding anniversary.
To-do list 9 August 2019 I’ve had the same to do list for over a decade, admittedly it runs to several volumes. Always the same Moleskine hard cover A5 with squared paper. Occasionally I go rogue and buy a red one but, apart from those occasions, it’s my little black book. I could do this on my phone; goodness knows I use it for everything else, but there’s something about a paper list. There is a satisfaction in jubilantly crossing out completed actions and adding additional tasks in small gaps with an arrow from the primary subject. The book starts on the second full page never the first. There’s a preciousness about a first page that makes me leave it. It’s like the beginning of a sketchbook which you don’t want to ‘spoil’. I describe this to my students as the ‘white sheet shits’. Start at the end I tell them; It doesn’t matter what order you draw in, just draw! From the second page the double spreads are divided into columns using slightly wonky hand drawn lines. The columns have titles; PhD, Angela, Salford, ATIC all currently feature, but sometimes one list blends into another when I can’t quite decide where something belongs. There is a rudimentary priority system, a star against the things which are urgent. There’s also a scheme for back burner items which simply involves ignoring them until they become urgent and get promoted to the star list. When the pages get too cluttered each remaining item on the page is transposed onto the next. A clean, clear list which is easy to read and navigate. The problem with a clean page is that everything has yet to be done. I sometimes combat this by adding things I have already done, just so I can have the satisfaction of ticking them off. Is the to-do list an important part of my research? It is one of the places where the public/private
dichotomy overlaps; the washing sits alongside applications to be written and invoices to be sent. I’ve used the list in my work before. Porcelain lists finished with blanket stitch details and decorative tassels featured in a body of work briefly last year. They had a certain elegance about them. Giving permanence to that which is infinitely disposable, often written on the back of an envelope or even a hand, but fundamental to the organisation of a life. I feel like the humble list might make a recurring motif within my practice and research.
I Remember 15 August 2019
Figure 26 Yarn bowl 2019 Thrown and drilled stoneware with crochet skirt Angela Tait
I remember… Sitting on my Grandma’s knee, her arms wrapped around my skinny four or five yearold body as she gently guided my soft - clumsy but willing - hands to crochet a floppy necklace from the leftover scrappy ends of her balls of wool. No pattern, just the inside couple of rows of a doily or granny square attached to a single stitch chain and tied loving around my neck. I know the gestures were gentle and loving even though I’m not entirely sure that the memory is a real one or a story mythologised into personal legend by maternal storytelling. I can’t feel the pressure of my scrawny thighs against an apron over older legs, or even picture a room where this
might have taken place. I don’t get sudden recollections from long forgotten smells and I’m not even sure I can visualise a face, yet… I can crochet. There is no other conceivable lineage for this skill. My Mum can knit, so there’s no question where this aspect of my (admittedly limited) repertoire of domestic craft skills originated; but she can’t crochet – she was shown many times but just couldn’t grasp it apparently. I’m left confused and a little tangled, but regardless of the origin of this knowledge or the identity of my teacher, I’m grateful for my introduction into this rich and rewarding technique.
Rhubarb 18 August 2019 The rampant rhubarb, it’s a thug Seemed like a good idea Growing fruit Healthy, cheap, organic Stew but bitterness bites, add sugar.
The process comforts waggle, pull, satisfying pop Hack the Jurassic leaves Rolling chop, knife tip on the board Give away to grateful friends
My favourite coffee cups in the order I would choose them 19 August 2019 Morning coffee is the first delight of my day, especially if served in one of my two favourite cups. My first choice would always be the clean white porcelain vessel which holds plenty of energy giving, hot, frothy liquid. This was a gift from a friend, someone who knows me well. Outwardly it sports images of the hungry caterpillar and all the things he ate before his alchemical transformation. The inside reveals a sunshine as you sip; the dawning of a new day. If the metamorphosising insect isn’t available, I would choose another porcelain piece. Purchased two years ago at the British Ceramics Biennial, this is a disappointingly generic commercial vessel with almost enough fragility to be considered elegant. Its saving grace is the design by Manchester potter and professor Stephen Dixon. His naïve-looking but glorious drawings ‘medals for peace’ are printed around the cup. I feel a little cheated by the mass-produced cup, but I’m content to drink with the comfort of a positive political message and a tenuous relationship to someone I admire.
Don’t Forget 23rd August 2019 Today I was tenderly kissed goodbye with a coffee and a list of don’t forgets: •
•
•
Don’t forget the electrician will be here in ten minutes…he’ll need access to the gas pipe Don’t forget the carpet man is coming at 11…. please remember to ask him about the machine. Don’t forget it says in the diary you’re seeing M this afternoon
The perpetual problem about working from home, the perception that it’s not real work.
Secretly I know that I’ll also be interrupted at least once by a delivery. I ordered a book yesterday, ostensibly in the name of research (as in it’s about ceramics) but more because I wanted it. I don’t mention this as it’s not the first one this week. But, it does mean I’ll inevitably have to get up and answer the door… And then open the package… And then flick through… Might as well make a coffee whilst I’m up, and drink whilst flicking.
I rise knowing at least five other people will come and go from the house today. They’re all people I like, but still, they’re in my space and demanding of my time in their own way; and they’ll all want coffee. Coffee, my lifeblood and my biggest distraction, whether making for myself or for others. My excuse and my disruption.
I could make a coffee cup for everyone who creates a rift in my workflow today? • •
• • • • •
Husband: Excessive organiser, brings me coffee in bed D (Builder) Kind and thorough … never says no to coffee, used to have two sugars but now has none, likes a biscuit. S (Gas man) – He had to go into bedroom to turn off boiler. I hadn’t made bed. P (carpet man) – What did I have to remember to ask him? M (goddaughter) Has had operation to reduce boobs, have to visit Postman – A welcome distraction today. J (Cleaner) Indispensable, likes a chat
Maintenance takes all the fucking time 12 September 2019 ‘Maintenance is a drag, it takes all the fucking time’ (Mierle Ladermann Ukeles 1969)
…And she did hers without the privilege of fifty further years of technological advancements. So now, with a washing machine, tumble dryer, microwave and dishwasher it’s still a burden. This morning I had two stolen hours as I’m meeting students at a gallery at 11am. I had nothing to do…until I got to the kitchen to make my coffee. The sink was full of dishes and the washing machine had its customary companion, the floppy cloth mountain. Coffee made, breakfast prepared, a quick wash up, washing machine on and bin emptied.
An idea: What amount of creative practice goes on in an hour and nine minutes? Next week I’m doing a short studio residency at the university where I teach. Two days in the students’ Fine Art studio. A teaching and learning opportunity. A chance for our undergraduates to see how a someone with a professional practice works. Personally, I think this is inspired and I wish it had been my idea. Out of the academic team of four I’m going first. My practice isn’t easy to transport 20 miles, but I’m determined to take my studio into their studio. This means Saturday spent shipping clay and the wheel and a host of other bits and pieces, but I’m using this as an opportunity to test some ideas. Maybe one of those ideas could be a 69 minute performance?
Twenty-three minutes. Washing up and doing the laundry are the two least rewarding tasks. How much time every day do they take? And are they ever finished? The first question; I could answer this. A phone stopwatch (another benefit of technology) and a piece of paper. Even with some quick and dirty calculations. 23 minutes three times a day = 1 hour nine minutes a day, just on washing up and keeping our clothes clean. The second question; No. I have a sister mountain in a basket in my room, and the bedclothes definitely need changing. H is in bed and will shortly rise for a crumby breakfast.
I have run out of time. My two hours lasted about 34 minutes in the end. I’ve sent a few emails and made a (very overdue) phone call and written about the above. Has my research moved forward? No. not at all…please refer to the opening line!
Feedback 17 November 2019 I opened the supervisor comments on my draft contextual review.
I’m sitting at my desk with big fat wet tears leaking uninvited down my face and onto my knee.
I am put in mind of the stages of grief which just tore through my body at warp speed:
Denial – ‘It’s not my fault, I haven’t been guided well enough, I’ve never done this before, it’s someone else’s fault, I haven’t got time’. Anger – ‘Aghhhhhhhhhh, fuck the world, I’m giving up, I don’t need a PhD, I could be doing my own thing at 4.45 on a Sunday evening’ Bargaining – I’ll work harder if I can just make progress. Depression – the pummelled and bruised ego that wrote the second line.
I recognise a softening of my breathing and the tightness of the skin on my face from dry saltiness.
Acceptance – I’m already there… I have a half-baked plan in my head for rectifying everything .
Time runs away 28 September 2019
Time runs away There’s been a gap, a temporal hiatus… maybe not a hiatus but a slackening. The desire to research hasn’t gone away, but, like our experience of time, the process expands and contracts to fit within our regular existence. The necessity to engage with other aspects of life have perpetuated the slowing down. However, a distracted summer has allowed space for some of my idea snowflakes to settle.
But now the conkers are falling and 2020 looms heavy.
Case study one 2 October 2019 I walked into the gallery fully prepared as is my wont. I had a list of questions and a cup full of confidence. This was my first ‘tester’ case study. A friend, a colleague and a fellow collaborator. Someone I have known and worked with over a period of time. My cup appears to leak. Despite an underlying friendship, talking about domestic affairs – who does the washing in your house? – was fair more uncomfortable than I had imagined. Thank goodness this wasn’t a stranger. Eventually one of us broke the tension with, ‘well this is fucking awkward, isn’t it?’ We settled upon something neutral and somewhat safer: the postman. Living in a house with two (more or less) millennials and doing a PhD myself (which demands a lot of - absolutely necessary – book purchasing), the postman is always bringing parcels. I vacillate between answering the door, smiling and thanking the kind delivery person and swearing furiously because I’ve missed them, through the blink of an eye or a desperate toilet break, and have to make arrangements to collect. It turns out this isn’t only my frustration as case study number one confirms.
Time and Patchworks 9 December 2019 9.50 AM - Admittedly a late start. In my defence I’ve got the washing machine on, cleaned up the kitchen a bit, emptied the dish washer, made breakfast and arrived – determined but minorly frazzled – at my desk, remembering as I walk through the door that the entire surface is covered with prints taken from a peacock feather and in various stages of having gold and silver gilt applied. This work has to be submitted in four days for an exhibition entirely unconnected with my research. Mentally I search my calendar for a gap in the week to finish these. It’s either today or an evening after work. I chose today. I have been thinking about time again and the division between my domestic work and my ‘work/work’. The underpinning principle of my entire PhD breaks down work which goes on in the home; my home. In its simplest form it’s a binary distinction. There’s the domestic work that is for the maintenance of the house, the family or for my own human needs and then ‘work’ work is my professional life. Of course, as with most things, these positions aren’t as polarised as they seem. Today the kiln man is coming. This is obviously my work tool, but the distraction of his arrival, my polite, ‘would you like a cup of tea?’ the trailing to the pottery and then courteously making my excuse to leave him to it. That’s more in line with a visit from a friendly neighbour (who all think I don’t work because they see me during the week). These overlaps happen all the time. So much so I don’t even think about the transition. I’ve been marking (coincidentally mostly at home) something we call at the university ‘patchwork’
essays. A series of short texts set to the first-year undergraduates to introduce them to academic writing. I’m starting to consider the distribution of my time a little bit like a patchwork. Each individual patch (or task) with its own pattern, rhythm and history but all fitted together to make a cohesive whole of a day. There’s a quote in my contextual review about the distribution of time which I think illustrates my feelings about this: ‘Each day is a tapestry, threads of broccoli, promotion, couches, children, politics, shopping, building, planting, thinking interweave in intimate connection with the insistent cycles of birth existence and death’. (Mertzger 1977) It strikes me there’s an artwork in this idea somewhere. 10.09 I really need a coffee. I do a deal with myself; make a time plan for 2020 in advance of my supervisory meeting at 1pm and then make the coffee. 10.42 Plan made; coffee also made. Washing machine hasn’t quite finished. Answered a couple of work emails - actual lecturing ones, I always say I’ll only do them the days I actually get paid for, but who even does that? My kiln man is due 11-11.30. I look for a half hour job but can’t really see anything, they’re all either ten minutes or two hours worth, so I’m going to read through the notes I have for my meeting this afternoon and listen for the washing machine. 18.27 Tired, grubby and, as usual, frustrated that the day hasn’t been as productive as it might have
been. That said, the kiln is fixed, filled and firing. It’s absolutely packed to the lid with most of the things I’ve made over the last month or so. There are some little pieces I made yesterday on the top for super-quick drying too (never, ever put things on top of your kiln to dry!) I’ve done three loads of washing (ongoing), planned our tea, done some additions to the peacock prints during the day and had a meeting by skype with both my supervisors. That sounds a fair amount written down, perhaps it’s the frustration of having more things on the ‘to-do’ list at the end of the day than the beginning.
But what if…? 5 November 2019 Yesterday I met another artist. A lady… me in ten years? We talked, I liked her immediately. She knew some people I did and, as we weighed one another up, we swapped basic information about our practice. She told me she’d completed an MPhil in 2004. AT: An MPhil? Why not a PhD? NF (New Friend): They wouldn’t give it to me. AT: Funding? NF: No, I was on the PhD track but I said something daft at my viva and they awarded me an MPhil.
Since last night I’ve been processing this information.
All that work for an MPhil, I don’t want one of those, is that failure? I’d be devastated, I say daft things all the time, I’d have to tell people when they ask; my family, my colleagues and the postman who always asks how I’m doing, I wouldn’t get to put Dr on my cheque book like IT wants me to, I’ve paid for this with my own money, what a waste, and all that time, hundreds and hundreds of hours…
I felt sure I had this in me and now I don’t know.
Time to reflect and project 12 January 2020 Sunday 8.42 AM - Today everything and nothing happens. Google calendar is drawing a blank, but my internal to-do list is bulging and tangled. The holiday washing needs finishing. As usual there are pieces at every stage of the washing cycle, from the sad baskets of worn pieces with their inside out sleeves and the socks tucked inside trouser legs, to the neatly folded architectural towers waiting to be put away. There’s also the ‘nearly washing’. Things we’re wearing, bedclothes we’re using, and towels hung in bathrooms and kitchens, all awaiting the inevitable. I stop to draw a diagram of this cycle and cut some fruit for breakfast. 9.07 AM - The house is starting to buzz with the family going about their business. I feel a short pang of guilt about sitting in the office writing. Should I be contributing to their industriousness and is my research sufficient for that? I am going back to work in the morning after the Christmas break. This means I need to plan my day for tomorrow. It’s technically the intersemester break and so, whereas there will be virtually no students, the staff team will be massively busy with assessments and planning the coming term. I must pack my bag and consult the diary. I like to have a plan before I roll up at the university, so even though it’s Sunday, a couple of hours of my day will inevitably belong to my (paid) job. I’m treasurer for the local scout association. Have I mentioned that before? It’s one of those jobs which has peaks and troughs. Nothing to do for a couple of weeks and then a batch of emails asking me to pay invoices, Akela wanting me to chase up missing subs - all done electronically these days,
no eight-year-olds bringing in a sticky 10p piece in a sweaty hand - and gift aid applications to HMRC. Anyway, after a break there’s always a handful of these tasks to do. On top of these public and private tasks I need to refocus on the research. I haven’t touched this for weeks. I feel like this is a healthy break, time for ideas to settle and space for things to develop. I’ve realised I’ve made the whole PhD thing difficult for myself, and, almost two years in I have at least 15 little strands of research. Clearly this is not a manageable or sustainable strategy! I must be stricter with myself and seek out the important things. 9.47 AM – The washing machine beeps and my mind immediately switches. I go downstairs and do the necessary, making a coffee whilst I’m there. That’s three before ten o’clock. I should probably make the next one a decaf. 9.58 AM - My first plan today is to make a list, partly for organisational purposes, but additionally for the comfort it provides. My annual review is due in about 6-8 weeks and I’ll have to travel to the North East to justify the research and present it in a way which is accessible and logical. This is six or seven weeks which don’t really take the research forward but do provide an opportunity to reflect and project. This fits comfortably with the new year when we all do a little bit of that. It’s very tempting to look back and see what I was writing about in January 2019 but my mind spaghetti needs untangling and I have just made pledge (see a few lines above) to be more focused, so that particular pleasure should be set aside for the future.
Thinking in straight lines – Condensing the research n.d.
An email to my supervisor 7th February 2020 Title: Contextual Review Hi Hope you're well and the sun is out. Fine here but makes little difference from behind my desk...rolls eyes. I am well and truly sick of this. It's like living at Hogwarts, every day I wake up and the research has shifted and lots of the stuff I've written is out of date and I don't know where to find the new stuff. Anyway, I've made something new. I have broken down the review into place, work, time and representation. It feels thinner than before but I'm hoping it's just more succinct. I have made some reference to where the theory has come from and why I'm using these sources. I've concentrated on the vessel more but primarily through my understanding of it because it's specific to this work (i.e. I'm using it as a universally understood, accessible object/thing which spans the private/public divide). I've also started to talk about Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis and how artists have used it. I imagine this will be a substantial bit of the text in the end. I can't see this as an independent chapter. I anticipate a lot of it embedded into either other chapters which talk about the work that I'm making in order to contextualise the particular pieces and some of it to belong in the Blovel writing when I'm writing the more reflective pieces where I analyse the making and process. I'd really like to get this sent off to A next weekend - you know I like to do things ahead of time. Could you have a read? As always, tell me if it's shit... It's what we used to call in the 90s a 'dynamic document' which just means that if it's a bit wrong it can be changed before doing too much damage.
Speak soon. Ax
Thinking about making a film 16 Feb 2020 The washing machine has become hearth and home, an animated version of the maternal kitchen, a symbolic restatement of women’s role, preserving order by ceaseless unrewarding repetition (Graves quoted in Kirkham 1996) Rereading Jane Graves’ text, The Washing Machine; Mother’s not herself today I am motivated to try to express some of the ideas which surround the film I want to make. I suppose I’ve been procrastinating. Putting off forming the actual language which will start to draw my ideas together. The film is called ‘things that go ‘round’ (working title) and it is intended to somehow put together public and private rhythms through using the cyclical rotation of the washing machine and the potter’s wheel. I know what the film will look like. It will have a broken narrative which flits between the two machines. It will be beautiful and the story will be slightly abstracted i.e. it will have a vagueness which leads the viewer to not quite know what’s going on. Some bits will certainly be in black and white and time will not necessarily flow in its conventional way, it will undoubtably speed up and slow down and move in circles. So, there’s a concept and an ambition, but little in the way of technical skill. I have never made a video. I can’t film shorts or work editing software. I am also acutely aware that film making is a craft and my first attempts will likely be crude and unsophisticated. AL has suggested I use a series of photographs. There is no reason time must be represented by a time-based medium. He even gave me examples, but I remained unconvinced.
Now I have a decision. Do I commit a big chunk of time to making this film or do I look for another way?
A Letter to M 2nd March 2020 Dear M It really was a pleasure to meet you this weekend. I don’t know what you’re like with all your students, but you made me feel good about the research I’m doing, and I needed that! Confession time: All the way through our meeting, all the times I nodded or made those little noises assuring you I knew what you meant – it was all a bit of an act. When you asked about the methodology and I rambled about what I was doing, you were kind enough to verbally guide me onto the correct track and give some suggestions. When you talked about the way this research might affect my teaching, I genuinely didn’t see how it would, does or could. Of course, I didn’t say that out loud because that might be an admission of my insecurity. So, I spent the hour diligently writing down the references you threw at me. I couldn’t always tell the names you were saying so I wrote them phonetically and hoped Amazon would understand enough of the transcribed information to find the correct books. I did understand you wanted me to be experimental in the way I presented my thesis. I was hoping for permission to do this but didn’t expect it to come from your direction. I have an idea about embedding the texts I’m writing, but I honestly don’t know if I have the writing experience to weave these in, so they suit both my creative aims and academic demands of the doctorate. Also I’m aware it’s ‘only a PhD’ and not a lifetime’s work. I also came away with the idea you wanted me to think about the wider implications of the research. The social - what’s the word? – context – where this work fits? So now we’ve returned from the NorthEast and I have three new books on my desk. All political (small p) and social texts about the world and how it functions, ones you recommended and - somewhat surprisingly - I was able to order from my garbled notes. They’re now forming part of the architectural sculpture of reading which props up certain bits of my home office but being on the top of the piles have a good chance of at least getting started. I wonder if this is another one of those blind alleys which I must abandon because it makes the research into a beast with too many heads? On a more constructive note, this weekend we took the opportunity to visit the Baltic to see the Judy Chicago show. We’ve never even been to Newcastle before and have meant to for years. The first observation is the building itself. An imposing legacy of a manufacturing age restored and gentrified (dragging the surrounding city along) into an art venue. Inside there were two average sized exhibitions in white walled rooms. I find this tension between the white cube and the post-industrial architecture frustrating. Why can’t we let the art talk to the building? I also found the place a bit like a reverse TARDIS; much smaller on the inside. When it came to the work I was actually blown away and I didn’t expect to be. Yes, the paintings are pretty in their Georgia O’keefe- esque suggestiveness, but the embedded (and often explicit) narratives are delightfully honest and bursting with humanity. I always quote Tracy Emin as the birthplace of confessional art (not from a position of admiration particularly, but acceptance and in the knowledge that my students will a) have heard of her and B) understand the concept because it’s so obvious), but this is both earlier and more elegant. Yes, it’s essentialist, but that’s a symptom of the time,
and frankly, these experiences are universal. Birth and death, ambition and doubt - we all feel them. It strikes me that the writing I’m doing comes from this precedent. I have been talking about the writing sitting alongside the practice; not explanatory, more exploratory. What if the writing was set aside from the thesis, not as an appendix but as a piece by itself, or what if it became the whole thesis. Am I pushing this too far? I suppose all the questions will work themselves out in the end. I’m hoping next time I see you I have moved on and started to answer some, or at least formalised what the questions should be.
As you said, ‘it’s only a PhD’.
Very best wishes
Angela
Social Distancing 18 March 2020 10.38am and I’m afraid… Well, maybe not afraid, but disconcerted, unsettled, a little perturbed. The ground beneath my feet feels unstable, a bit like one of those fairground attractions with the sliding floors and wonky mirrors. Yesterday the university I work for cancelled most of the face-to-face teaching due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. I walked out of the building with as much of my desk as I could fit in my rucksack; my laptop, some vital paperwork, a print I’d swapped with a colleague and as much of the library as I could carry. I abandoned my favourite mug, watered the plants and left, wondering if we’d be back in September complete with a cohort of shiny new undergraduates or if the whole place would be opened up in fifty years like a giant time capsule. So now as I write, the financial markets are in freefall and social media is divided between predictions of the apocalypse, people wanting virtual validation of their integrity for checking on elderly neighbours and, satirical – dark, but amusing - memes. Fake news abounds and the capacity for human lunacy is astonishing. I’m trying to take the wide view with as much logical pragmatism as I can muster, applying a degree of criticality to everything I read. That said, I did panic buy three packets of biscuits yesterday in the supermarket, but who doesn’t need a Jammie Wagon Wheel in a time of crisis? Maybe there’s an opportunity here? Social distancing, closing of organisations and banning of gatherings of people slightly plays to the hands of someone who is researching themselves within the home. Time; it’s the thing I’m observing and my least abundant commodity – usually. So maybe, possibly, I can work with this? I’m currently reading Carl Honore’s ‘In Praise of Slow’
– ironically in gaps in the day and alongside about five other books - but this seems like a fitting time. Instead of binging on Netflix and Amazon Prime, this could be space for humanity to breathe and reflect. Can we deny speed for a while and regroup, come back stronger? 11.26am I hear the washing machine bleep and stop to change soggy towels over to the dryer. It’s still cold here and more than a little damp outside. It will be weeks before the washing can be hung outside, so for a little while longer the washer will spin and the dryer will tumble in their rhythmic dance of the utilities. This grounds me. I come back to my desk with a Tupperware of pineapple, it’s a little bit brown in places but has the overripe sweetness I need mid-morning. 11.45 Rereading the above I realise I’ve just played out another facet of the human condition. In time of uncertainty we reach for utopian solutions – I’m thinking the two world wars and Modernism – but I also realise I’m a glass half full kind of girl. On the train on my way home I hatched a plan; I feel the need to document events as they unfold. What if I keep a diary? Not the traditional written kind, but one made of objects – a cup(?) - every day for as long as necessary. The global context is larger than I can deal with. We could lose people we love; some already have. Jobs, businesses, livelihoods will inevitably be damaged and the effects of this level of disruption might rumble on for years. But what about the minutiae? How will we remember that? The actual lived experience of a global event plotted as it unravels. If nothing else, it will give me something to focus on during what promises to be a challenging time. I’m starting today. My new year’s resolutions have historically lasted on average three to four days,
so I’m sceptical about my own ability to maintain momentum. Nevertheless, here goes…
COVID-19 day 10 27 March 2020 10.11am - Beds stripped, washing machine on, healthy breakfast of watermelon and yogurt and two cups of life sustaining hot, frothy, caffeine nectar. We’ve had three or four days of unseasonable sunshine; the cities are quiet and the canals in Venice are crystal clear. The Earth is breathing. The environmentalists feel a tiny seed of hope in their chest whilst the bankers wring their hands. Nothing is usual, yet everything is. Life continues; food is still bought, cooked and consumed. Work is still happening but without any notion what the near future might hold. Hence, research goes on. I must think about the film I want to make. I’ve been putting off the inevitable. I know I have taken on a lot; learning new software, figuring out the aesthetic considerations and researching to place the work in a context. 10.29 - Texting between the family, my mind switches backwards and forward. It takes a few minutes and now I lose my train of thought and can’t quite capture it again. 10.40 - Oh yes, the film – It is a series of clips, both domestic tasks and ceramics practice. It uses the visual motif of rotation. The washing machine, the potter’s wheel, stirring a pan of soup. There will be indicators of time through a soundtrack and the slowing down and speeding up of the non-linear narrative. 11.01 - I stop for a meeting 11.47 - The washing machine is due to finish again, my phone is pinging away and I my concentration is shot. The Prime Minister has been diagnosed with the virus and the sun is still shining.
My writing is disjointed and feels dull – I give up.
Kate Davis - Weight 2014 8 April 2020
Figure 27 Talky Toaster from Red Dwarf
A film: a tense amalgamation of seemingly generic 1960s monochrome domestic imagery overlaid with the language of Fine Art - almost. The visuals are born from a film about Barbara Hepworth, the language, a mordant play on housework as an artform.
The sound is sufficient, a spoken poem to which I can attach my own visual narrative. This is a language I understand. It drifts over me with a warming familiarity and then jars physically against my teeth when the word sculpture is replaced with plate.
‘The mass, inner tension and rhythm of this kitchen’ – my mind draws a mental map of my cultural kitchen references- Martha Rosler’s film pointing to Judy Chicago’s dinner party and the Talky Toaster from Red Dwarf. I ponder the more assertive 1960s/70s work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles and her Maintenance Art Manifesto and wonder if she’s seen this and if, like me, she has to stop halfway through to answer the door.
This work asks us to question our value systems. The confused narrative of the languages of sculpture applied to the mundanity of the domestic home. But I don’t want my housework to be poetry; it is dull and endless and it fragments my day. The moment the crumbs are swept away they reappear. There is nothing elegant or poetic about the consistent demand – or is there? Can I admit to a certain satisfaction in the rhythm of folding? All those neat little piles ready to be distributed into different corners of the home. An element of delight at the flappy drying clothes on the line and the knowledge of the smell I will encounter in a couple of short hours’ time.
And what is this weight of which the title speaks? The weight of a plate in the hand or the emotional burden of the feminine. Housework mostly isn’t difficult or strenuous, but it is necessary and it is the thief of time. Does time have a mass or volume? If it does it is fluid and not subject to the regular rules of the physics of ‘things’. I find throughout the film I am less interested in the visuals and more in the poetry of the piece.
12.20am I stop to make a sandwich (boiled ham and crisps) and whilst I’m in the vicinity I wash a few pots and empty (and refill) the washing
machine and have a moment to ponder. What I have just described as a ‘delight’ is more than offset by the frustration of the daily chore, stealing the time I have set aside for writing. I eat at my desk and the crisps shatter falling down the gaps in my keyboard. It takes a few seconds to gather my thoughts. I am put in mind of something Lisa Baraitser talks about in Maternal Encounters – The Ethics of Interruption (2009). She describes the damaging effects of being at the mercy of ‘a command’ for care (p75). She also talks about this experience ‘forcing a kind of thinking and feeling outside of her usual repertoire’. The segmenting of the day around cooking and washing is a little bit like this. As my mind switches from one mode to another, I often experience a kind of lag where I can carry on thinking about the writing I’m doing whilst undertaking the chores that almost ‘do themselves’ using decades of muscle memory. It is in this gap I can be in two places at the same time. An overlap in consciousnesses – sometime productive, often not. I watch the film again, well, more listening this time. This work is no less a satire than Private Eye or Hogarth’s etchings. The use of irony in the tangled prose and the received pronunciation of the 1950s BBC English voices is both grating and humorous. I try to be amused more than resentful.
Diaries 9th May 2020 I had one when I was a child. I seem to recall it was a birthday present from a well-meaning relative. It was pink and had a flimsy but decorative lock and tiny key. I think I wrote in it twice. The first day in my best handwriting and the second a bit less carefully. By day three I didn’t really see the point and by day four it was forgotten. I’m not usually one for memories, especially not the mundane and everyday. It is said the queen writes a diary and has done since she was a child. Oh the stories they could tell! Does the monarch even have mundane? I have been wondering if she mediates what she writes in the knowledge that these might one day become public documents, or if they’re genuinely honest accounts of her feelings and experience? The clay diary is a bit like this. I am using the overarching term diary as it’s universally understandable, but actually it’s a version of events which is limited by a number of factors. The first is my knowledge that the collection is intended for public display. This has a huge influence on the subjects, quality and forms I use. I am aware I’ll be judged on my ability to make, the variety of ideas, and also what I think is important, so this is never going to be the repository of my innermost feelings and emotions – even if I could process them accurately in the most surreal of contexts. Like most artworks it has its own rules which have become consolidated through the process. Originally I anticipated a daily cup. I have already established the importance of the vessel to this research, but a cup is personal. I drink coffee, no, I rely upon coffee. That hot liquid is my wake-up companion, my regular distraction when I need a break and the conduit when meeting friends – even virtually. The first couple of days were more cup-like than since. 50 days later the idea of a
vessel is more abstract and subject to deviation. There has been a spectrum from the traditional thrown cup with a pulled handle to an occasional slab-built piece and the outrageously thrown and destroyed. There is even a missing day. A piece of paper with day 33 written on and a distinct clay print, but no other evidence of an object. What happened on day 33? Who knows? Did it even happen? Days are the same, one runs into another with no distinction between a Wednesday and a weekend. I’m starting to think about the clay diary as more akin to Judy Chicago’s autobiographical works, My Accident (1986) and Autobiography of a year (1993-94) and the difference is intent. My childhood diary was secret, private, intimate, a place for speculating about childhood crushes and developing friendships. Well, not mine obviously, I doubt there was anything even remotely meaningful, heartfelt or even interesting in my two days of good intentions. The clay diary is different from this sort of intimate and private document. My clay diary is an artwork which, from conception, expands beyond that into the public realm. It is also object based and so brings its own meaning from the physicality of the ceramic objects. These sit in the overlap between the domestic and the artworld. Clearly recognisable as linked with the kitchen through their form and size but explicitly excluded because of their non-functionality and place of exhibition in the gallery or through social media. So this leaves me with a pseudo-personal document which sits right in the overlap that I am constantly seeking; the place where public and private meet. An object-based artwork with both a visual and conceptual relationship to time and rhythm through its dailiness.
Internal dialogues 15 May 2020 According to Facebook - the most reliable of information sources(?) – not everyone has an internal dialogue. Imagine that! Not rehearsing what you will say when you make an awkward telephone call or replaying a thousand times what you wish you’d said during an interview or confrontation. I find myself constructing sentences in my head more and more as the PhD progresses. During another activity like cooking soup or drying my hair, I’ll be thinking around a subject that is important. At the moment it’s how I’m going to contextualise the clay diary. My thoughts float about making these little connections, they’re not linear, more like a cloud or a web with multiple lines and points of intersection. Often difficult to grasp or just out of reach: What do I know about diaries? The queen writes one – but that’s not like mine What’s the difference? What about diaries in art? Well we don’t call them diaries, we might call them autobiographical art, or confessional art – like Judy Chicago’s accident or Tracy Emin’s tent, What about Chris Drury’s medicine wheel which is in the Leeds Museum where he collected an item every day for a year and mounted them on a handmade structure- is that the same? That’s about objects, my diary is about objects - objects which hold meaning and tell stories. As I write it down I find I’m able to clarify the thoughts and bring partial order to the cloud. The writing is painstaking but worthwhile. It’s my way of organising. Several things recently have perpetuated the dialogue; one is walking. Since lockdown, exercise
has been limited to cycling, running and walking. I’m not a fan of any of those but I am committed to exercise for my mental and physical wellbeing, so walking has become a habit. There’s not much else to do whilst walking but think, especially when every day I must come up with a new and unique reflection on my own or the wider world for the clay diary. Often, I’ll have an idea that I want to express but not always. Today I was lost, everything is the same, typing, emails, watering the plants, getting deliveries, cooking, washing. I’ve tackled a lot of those subjects in the clay diary already (days 12, 19, 35, 36 etc). Anything happening in the news? Not really, places starting to unlock a little bit, people being heroes and idiots (this was early, day five). I have promised to make a couple of dozen paper porcelain chippy forks for an ongoing project with a collaborator. That’s it – Whilst I’m making them, I’ll make a cup with an embedded chippy fork. I throw a vessel shape and leave it to dry whilst I go for my daily walk and this is where the thinking starts to happen. The work comes from a happening which is very personal. There are probably few people in the world making porcelain chippy forks today – although you never know – but what else do I know about chippy forks? They feel horrid in your mouth The chippy isn’t open - everyone is missing a chippy tea Some places where we’d usually eat in are doing take-out. This is the only way we can have a different dining experience and also a subtle way we can come together as a community and support one another.
So that’s today’s story told. The meaning in that little wooden object, from the visceral and personal to the social and communal. This seems to be how the clay diary is playing out. Each piece a part of a whole, A note in the soundtrack of a turbulent movement whilst also maintaining an independent story of its own.
Time during lockdown 4 June 2020 10.15 – I’ve just arrived at my desk. I would usually have been sitting here for two hours. The washer would be on and I’d have finished my emails and my first two coffees. Today the washer is on, I’ve absorbed my caffeine fix and I finished my emails – In bed. Things are different now. There’s overlap between the public facing Angela and her private self which threatens to get unhealthy. It’s way too easy to let university work seep into my intimate spaces. I’ve already addressed certain strategies for dividing up the work and home life. I am only working on lecturing in half days to avoid the endless hours of typing which leave me in a foul mood and unable to function effectively. Yet still I am reading essays at weekends and answering student emails from my phone in the middle of binge-watching Peter Kay’s Car Share. Our experience of time has changed. It has condensed into a 24-hour period which repeats cyclically and ad infinitum. Days tick by as we sit back and barely notice. We’re passive observers of a new experience where Wednesday is like a weekend and next week is a repetition of this one. We have adopted new habits; some good – like eating together because the gym is closed and the boys can’t see their friends. Some not so good, like working from bed and the increase in daytime fridge visits. My time reference has shrunk. I am finding it difficult to look back with the knowledge that what we enjoyed, the privilege we took for granted, might not return for a long time. It’s also hard to project forward because planning seems futile. We are painfully aware that plans change and morph, and what was relevant yesterday might very well have to be rejigged tomorrow. There’s an old Jewish saying, “Mann
Tracht, Un Gott Lacht” - ‘Man plans, God laughs’. We say this to each other regularly at the moment. It always brings a wry smile of understanding and often breaks tension when one of us is frustrated by something out of our control. 10.36 – I should really empty the washing machine. It’s a bit early for another coffee (Did I even say that?) I’m trying to drink more water in lockdown but, despite good intentions, my beverages of choice remain coffee and wine. I have been thinking about the changing of the seasons. Not as in getting towards autumn and the frantic excess of Christmas, but the days getting warmer and the longest day which is fast approaching. It occurs to me that I am living … 10.48 – I stopped to answer an email on my university laptop. A student working with air drying clay at home wanting to know how to stop it warping as it dries. …It occurs to me I’m experiencing life in a way that is usually conceptualised as a female temporal experience. A cyclical form where days have their own rhythm but remain similar and we have an overriding understanding of the seasons and coming and going of the sun, the moon, the warmth and the winter. I still have a small relationship with a linear experience of time. I am planning for a return to the university in September. The planning is more severe than usual. Less like planning and more like writing from scratch. The trouble with this is that ‘planned for’ future is uncertain. A niggling doubt remains that my (our) careful, thoughtful, documents might be obsolete before they ever have the chance to be tested. 10.58 – The washing machine bleeps.
It brings to mind a text by Matthew Taunton (2016) about the keeping of time in Modernist Literature. It talks about Big Ben chiming throughout Virginia Wolfe’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and how the hour being chimed is irrevocable; but it isn’t is it? What has gone before we can’t retrieve, but tomorrow the same hour will chime, in some ways indistinguishable from today. Just as in one hour and 3 minutes the washing machine will sounds its electronic demand and my consciousness will be disrupted again by a trip downstairs and probably some more coffee.
Dwelltime 7 June 2020 Published in Dwelltime Time ticks by it always does, It never wants to wait for us, It always wants to race us there, And then it’s gone, but why, and where? (The Sloth’s Shoes Jeanne Willis) Even before we locked down, it was clear we were about to experience something life-altering. I walked out of the university building where I am a lecturer on the 17th March 2020 with as much of my desk as I could fit in my rucksack; a laptop, some vital paperwork, a print I’d swapped with a colleague and as much of the library as I could carry. I abandoned my favourite mug, watered the plants and left, wondering if we’d be back in September complete with a new cohort of shiny young undergraduates or if the whole place would be opened up in fifty years like a giant time capsule. The next day I started the COVID clay diary. I had a vague notion that I would make a cup every day to document my own experience and some of the wider social, political and cultural happenings. As I write we’re on day 81. I’ve just opened my last bag of clay - I allocated 50 kilos of a creamy coloured, slightly speckled stoneware – and I plan to stop on the 15th June (day 90) when some children will be invited back to school and nonessential shops can start to reopen. I have made dozens of vessels; some resemble cups, others are unrecognisable, like the one I ran over with my bike because the way we exercise has changed. Many are thrown on the potters’ wheel, others built from slabs with embossed detail. On day 48 I made the ‘ode to denim’ when I realised that I’d worn the same two pairs of shorts for two months straight. A pair of jeans
were rolled over the clay to leave a relief pattern complete with pocket detail and belt loops and the slab was used to construct a rudimentary vessel shape. This piece was finished with a wash of manganese to bring out the details. Some are part glazed from a limited palette and a rare few have some gold lustre detail or fired on decals. There is narrative, abstraction, metaphor and some subtle art history references. Since the 17th March, time has been difficult to understand. Looking back, lockdown seems like somewhere between a heartbeat and an eternity. In one way we’ve lost a whole season. The summer is here, the baby birds have fledged and the blossom has gone. replaced by tiny fruits ready to swell. What happened to spring and those rituals we associate with it? Easter holidays, degree shows and the end of the university year. Viewed differently we’ve been at home forever. Our old routines have morphed into new rituals which have become so ingrained we are almost institutionalised by them. My time has narrowed. A 24-hour cycle is pretty much on repeat. I see the same people, work in the same place and eat the regular three meals (plus snacks). Looking back before lockdown is disconcerting. I struggle to feel nostalgia for hugging friends and traveling to work on the sweaty packed train, because we currently have no way to know when the old normal might return. But if looking back is awkward, projecting
forward is virtually impossible. We don’t yet know if every child can go to school in September or when our next holiday might be. Will we be able to have Christmas dinner with our loved ones or will that be a facsimile this year mediated by a screen and an increasingly popular meetings app? As the diary grows I start to reflect and the early entries seem like another world. Day two was called the ‘Pandictionary’ and considered the new language we were being introduced to; Social distancing, panic buying and stimulus packages. Today it seems ludicrous that people were stockpiling toilet roll and pasta - it seemed bonkers at the time to me anyway - and that social distancing was a new concept. Some of the pieces have new significance as time trundles along its narrow track. On the 18th April, day 32, I made a gravy jug wearing a tiny facemask. There simply wasn’t enough protective equipment for our caring staff in the hospitals and the care homes. Everyone blamed everyone else, and the issue dominated the daily news conference for several days. Nearly 50 days later and I have made a couple of dozen masks from reclaimed fabric (my mother’s old shorts mostly) and it has just been announced that masks will be compulsory on public transport. Artists have adopted the mask to make political or satirical comments and wearing in public is commonplace. It seems even the concept of time through my diary is fluid. What should be a robust daily measure, like a clock or a calendar, is a flexible and ever moving beast within which meanings are not yet settled. This will finish; humanity is resilient and some patches of the old normal will resume. For now the timing is uncertain and so I plod, one foot in front of the other through the days, mostly smiling, but on the inside trying to process the nonsense in a wibbly wobbly world where everything we know is like a ball of slime dripping through a sieve.
Back on campus 23rd September 2020 Remember: • • • • • • • •
Phone Purse Laptop Car keys Diary Mask Lunch Hand sanitiser
Today I went back to campus for the first time since lockdown. The list of things I have to take to work has also expanded by two and we are currently advised not to use public transport so my car keys replace my train pass, which is good really because I’m entirely unsure where that might be. I arrive at my building on the university campus without significant incident and enter through the back door as I have hundreds of times before. All seems reasonably normal, if a little empty. From my corner in the atrium there are no obvious signs that things have changed. Yet as I make my way to the sixth floor there are little tell-tale hints that all is not as it was. I am almost always the first in my department and enjoy the privilege of having the place to myself for a short time. Today however it all feels a bit like an episode from Dr Who. New signs warning me I can only traverse the building in one direction. Squirty units, once only seen in communal toilets, display notices begging me to rub their deceptively inert looking gel over my hands. More disconcertingly than this, I can see a handful of people across the building wearing masks. I put my hand to my face (before remembering it is socially impolite to touch one’s face these days) to check, but even before that I know I’ve been wandering around without a mask
and delve in my bag to retrieve it before I’m sprung. Regardless of the slightly sci-fi-ness of the situation it feels great to be back and I can feel the rhythm of the day comforting me, like when I change from the summer to the winter duvet and slip into bed that first night. I spend the day working, talking, flipping on and off my paper mask as I go between office, corridor and studio. Nothing is functioning like it should but I’m so relieved to be back even the notquiterightness of the situation doesn’t dampen the spirits. I drive back home later, radio on and with a feeling of having achieved something rather intangible and moved forward a little. As I walk through the door at home and resume my position in the world of my family, the transition from public to private hits me. Not like walking through the wall at platform 9 and three quarters, more like things going into soft focus for a few minutes and not quite belonging in one space or another. I have to transition. I change my clothes and remove my id card, put my work bag away, take my laptop out and set it up in the office. This micro-ritual occurs in the overlap between public and private and with the change of clothes comes my change of status and for the
first time all day I consider domestic issues, like have I got a clean pair of socks and what shall we have for tea? Someone presses a cup of coffee into my hand and this evokes a feeling form a couple of hours before when someone else did exactly the same. Admittedly, this one is hot and frothy and made from expensive beans and its earlier distant (estranged) cousin was instant and appeared to have been filled from the warm tap. Still the relationship is sufficient. I belong in both places and so does my coffee. It is indiscriminate and bridges the gap between two worlds rather more elegantly than I do.
My Postman calls me Doctor 8th July 2020 9.21am He does! ‘Morning Doctor’ he says as he leaves another smallish book-shaped package on my doorstep. He knows what they contain. He knows partly because he’s a postie and they can tell these things, and partly because we once had a conversation which went like this:
before their school run at 3.15. I broke off midsentence and played out the exact scenario I have just been describing. This happens frequently, a couple of times a week at least, sometimes more during lockdown. After this, it usually takes me a few seconds to regain my concentration. Where was I?
Postie: ‘Why do you get so many parcels?’
Oh yes, conflict in the public/private continuum.
‘I’m studying’ I told him, ‘and I have a home studio so I buy a lot of materials’.
The deliverer confronts this from an equal but opposite direction. He moves from place to place, his public role continuously punctuated by tiny snippets of the private each time a door is opened and a physical and verbal exchange made. This leaves me with many a question to ponder: Does he cross the threshold or simply glimpse the other side? In other words, where is the border between the public and the private world?
Now that sounds fairly normal to me, but the postie was perplexed. Pottery and study didn’t go together in his head – which is reasonable I suppose. He’s a nice chap; he always asks how we are, and more recently how the study is going. Sometimes he has a grumble about the state of his red van, a legacy of the last postie who used it he bemoans. We might make a somewhat parochial exchange about the weather or trade some equally banal trivia. A perfectly normal and explicitly domestic exchange from my perspective. But here there is a collision in the public/private world of two people. From my perspective, I am thrust from the ‘public’ world of work I was absorbed in, whether that was making ceramics, answering emails or writing proposals. On the journey from my chair I adapt. In seconds I am the anonymous house dweller, opening the door with bare feet and a cheery… 9.57 am ….and there it was. In a perfectly timed coincidence, the doorbell rang. The kind of ring followed by a frantic knock which - not so subtly informs you this is someone with a white van full of new irons and holiday flipflops to be delivered
Life: the thief of time 4th October 2020 10.23 Sunday I’m at the beginning of writing up my thesis. Two and a half years of thinking, reading and making has left a tangle of ideas in my head and random notes in a semi-structured order (which I can’t even remember the rules to) all over the office and studio. The process ahead feels like untangling an errant kitten from a room-sized ball of wool. Every single thread is a different gauge and length and knotted around others and it’s a moving beast because of the kitten who gets more frantic or playful depending upon the day. There is probably a logical way to deal with this, but that’s the thing about being a learner researcher – you have to figure out your logic by yourself. For the time being I’m moving forward with glacial slowness. A few words added and some removed in a process reminiscent of a fourdimensional puzzle. It’s an arduous and lumpy process with unequal amounts of triumphs and frustrations. 10.34 I take a phone call about the images my photographer took last week – I may be some time. 19.45 ….and once again life is the thief of time.
Rhythmanalysis: Building a methodology in reverse 18 October 2020 Sunday 10.27am I know I’ve spoken about this before, but I’m pretty sure practice-based PhDs do not follow a simple linear format. I’m wondering if any research actually does? Take one of my research strands – Rhythmanalysis. More and more as I progress, this is becoming relevant, yet two and half years ago I had no idea it would be adopted into my methodology – how could I have? This is not an exact science, indeed, it’s not a science at all.
10.38 AM Phone rings
11.44 AM Rhythmanalysis: Not, on the face of it, a natural or most logical fit for this enquiry. A Marxist philosophy about understanding urban spaces hence the reason it appears, almost accidentally, a good way into the research. I’ll admit it was a while before I even understood that time (well, really how we experience time) was an essential part of the study. Having trawled through the usual suspects; Bergsons ‘duree’, Julia Kristeva’s rather essentialist and gendered understanding of cyclical and linear time, even a rather heated and frustrating discussion with the Tait boys about quantum physics and time, a listing in a bibliography caught my eye. Henri Lefebvre, The Critique of Everyday Life. Around then I was buying a couple of books a week. Odd texts which I found referenced in books and papers. The whole web of theory I was uncovering was starting to prove increasingly vast and unmanageable. I now believe I had to do this
wide investigation in order to find the correct focus for the depth which was to come. After a consultation with wiki (please don’t ever tell my students) I purchased a paperback version of Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis and added it to the most appropriate pile on the floor in my office. It’s not the easiest read. For starters it’s a translation from French to English so some of the language is clunky and a bit disjointed. Secondly, I’m an artist; I don’t even claim to have a rudimentary understanding of the forms or language of philosophy – How could I, it’s another lifetime’s work? Despite the barriers, some of what I read started to seep into my consciousness. The idea of the rhythmanalist using their body to understand and record movement. The amalgamation of space and time as two conjoined concepts which could be investigated together. There was definitely something going on here which could be applied. I watched a video by Dawn Lyons, a Reader in Sociology at the University of Kent. This is a tip I also acquired from the younger Taits. They get a great deal of their information from YouTube. Whilst I’m sure a good deal of this is teenageboytrivia like dropping caravans from cranes, they also use it for understanding intricate issues for their studies (see my above reference to the complexities of the quantum world). This particular film was a lecture about how Lyons had used Rhythmanalysis to understand the workings of Billingsgate Fish Market. Ultimately she produced a timelapse film of the day which looked, felt and could be conceptualised as an artwork as well as a sociological study. 13.01 PM The above text has been painful and marred by distractions, only one of which was someone
else’s imposition on my time. I have wandered away from my desk a handful of times. I have visited the fridge, the window (on the pretext of having – perhaps - heard something) and the toilet (twice). I have answered some work emails and looked up a potential Christmas present on Amazon. I’ve check Facebook and Instagram, but drew the line at Pinterest.
It’s not every day the writing flows.
How quickly we adapt 24th October 2020 This week I have constructed the majority of my installation in the Window Gallery at the University of Salford. When I arrive to set up, someone has cut a big hole in the wall to access a toilet which was leaking in the next room. I question the logic of accessing the tank via a gallery which is on 24hour show to the world rather than go from the other side where the toilet actually is? I’m still scratching my head about this.
manage to throw 57 small vessels and peg them to the lines. I start to thread the ribbons and even get an Instagram post which (on the face of it) appears to show an actual installation emerging. Day two of my endeavour is Friday. By now I’ve figured out a couple of shortcuts. As I sit and throw my little pots off the hump it occurs to me that I’ve just done that thing. You know what I mean? When you figure out a way to do something which is just slightly easier than the way you’ve been doing things before. I believe they’re sometimes called lifehacks, but I think of them as micro time economies. Like when you put on the kettle and then empty the washer whilst it’s boiling and get something out of the freezer on the way back. Friday I make all the tiny pots before I start to construct. I then cut the ribbon, pin all the clothes pegs to my apron and then - and only then - crawl under the existing work and start to engage in the rhythm of peg, peg, peg, thread, thread, thread. This way I spend much less time negotiating the gallery, which by now resembles something from the krypton factor – both the mental and physical agility rounds!
Figure 28 Window Gallery, Salford 2020 This discovery pretty much sets the scene for the rest of the task. Impossible risk assessments, no video camera because the student who borrowed it previously hasn’t returned it on time, temperamental lights which appear to work using the force, grumpy academics at the end of their tether and a space which I’m effectively turning into an obstacle course for myself. Despite each path through the gallery getting more and more like a scene from ninja warrior, my achievements for day one are reasonable. I
By the end of the day I’ve completed the throwing of the 114 ‘smalls’, they’re all pinned to the lines and the holes are cut ready to accept the colourful streamers at my next earliest opportunity. I’ve run out of ribbon, I’m fairly grubby and my hands resemble raisins because they’ve been in water all day. On the plus side, my economical behaviour seems to have spared my 49-year-old back and the lights are temporarily behaving. There’s still a hole in the gallery.
Figure 29 Installation in progress day 1, November 2020
Untangling thoughts 25th October 2020 I just spoke to my favourite and most reliable critical friend. We have worked together for a decade and often use one another as a sounding board and a safe space to moan. We sometimes describe what we’ve been doing and thinking about. Inevitably this results in us being forced to explain the inner workings of our research in words which are understandable to someone on the outside. This is proving invaluable! Today I needed to find the right language to explain what I was doing with the alternative form of the thesis. Halfway through my bumbling along, I realised I’d constructed a description I’d previously been unable to write down. Between the two of us we made a reasonable attempt at reconstructing my words and I now have another 128 words of the almighty four-dimensional puzzle that is my thesis. Only another 38000 to go.
Work in progress show 11 November 2020
Figure 30 Gallery Frank, Work in Progress show 2020
1.37pm - So, big news – there’s a vaccine, or a couple of vaccines. They’ve been rushed through testing at warp-speed and are almost ready for rollout. This, of course, has set social media alight with speculation. On the flip side we’re right in the middle of the long anticipated second wave, the hospitals are perilously close to capacity we’re six days into a further nationwide lockdown. Some businesses
are again suffering severe financial hardship and Christmas looms like a predictable spectre just weeks away. 1.58 pm - I’m sitting in the middle of my show, Works in Progress at the beautiful Gallery Frank just outside Manchester on the edge of the gloriously November-bleak Pennine hills. I say exhibition, but it might better be described as an exposition or, more unkindly, a colourful jumble
sale. In the gallery are most of the works made in the first couple of years of my PhD research. On a rough count, maybe 500+ individual objects exploring ideas from the quirky to the downright ridiculous. There are small thrown vessels pegged to washing lines, wearable ceramics, and pots I have literally run over with my car (to clarify, this is whilst they’re wet, not post-firing).
In 2018 I made a series of works I called yarn bowls. They are thrown stoneware pieces with coloured crochet additions which render them totally non-functional. They’re also not understandable as decoration in a traditional sense, so they don’t fit at all into any of the traditional understanding of ceramics.
The purpose of this show is not specifically to ‘show’. This is fortunate because of the restrictive circumstances we find ourselves in. I couldn’t have visitors even if I wanted to. My primary purpose for putting together all the things in the same place is rather more selfish and insular. I want to sit in the middle of – like I’m doing now – and think. I thought I had a pretty good idea of what I’d made and what I was thinking at the time, I have endless documents, images, reflective texts as part of my ‘process’. But even as I started to unpack box after crate after carton, I can start to see other stories emerge. There are threads of thinking which have only occurred to me very recently. The last month or so I’ve been searching for a new title for my thesis. During the ‘throwing words about’ conversations with myself the word stories has raised its head more than a few times. At first I tried to dismiss this as an issue on the periphery, but it’s been demanding more attention than any of the other more outlying themes. What if this is the crux of everything I’ve done and the ideas of the domestic, temporality and the public/private world are just incidental themes? Stories run like invisible threads through the finished works. Now, months or years after making, some pieces have inherited further meanings both from their history or from mine. Now, together in the same room, I can also identify a path through the work which is difficult to fathom at a distance. Let me explain…
Figure 31Yarn Bowls Circa 2018/19 Angela Tait
At the time I was conscious of the double meaning of the title and the ability of a work of art to ‘spin a yarn’ but I didn’t realise the significance of the works in a more elongated narrative. The yarn bowls would subsequently evolve into wearable ceramics where the additions became gloves and hats and scarves, thrusting both the garments and the ceramics further into a world of confused dysfunctionality
Figure 32 Wearable Ceramics, Porcelain and Cotton 2019 Angela Tait
Later still the idea of soft fibre additions to the rigid stoneware vessels converged with another line of thinking and became the work No Wonder; a series of 114 tiny thrown vessels with complex embroidery thread additions which related to data I’d collected from my domestic chores.
The Great Grandchild of No Wonder is the performance and installation ‘Smalls 2020’. A hybrid idea which tells the story of my experience of doing the washing in the gaps between my public working life.
Figure 33 No Wonder 2019, Stoneware and embroidery thread, Angela Tait
Figure 34 Smalls, 2020. Performance/Installation Angela Tait
3.28 pm I’m still in the gallery and getting cold. I have had several delightful distractions in the form of resident artists popping in for a chat. Topics of conversation have gone from art to Covid to philosophy to Covid to social media to mental illness and, again, Covid. Sometimes we’ve even talked about the array of brightly coloured works which are screaming for attention around us. These conversations almost always revolve around a story of some kind. Me explaining what my thought process was for driving over newly thrown pots, or why it’s important that I make soft furnishings out of hard ceramic. I’ve talked about metaphor and autobiography and the difference between story and ritual. As I speak, I regularly find I’m describing things in a way which makes them easier to understand. As I search for ‘better’ or more accessible description I sometimes stumble upon language which I hadn’t been able to grasp properly, and this helps me to slot another file in my cerebral cabinet. 3.54 pm – My fingers can no longer be relied upon. I have to stop typing and go home. I remembered I left some barbeque pulled pork in the slow cooker and it might have bypassed optimum eating consistency. Nevertheless, a productive and enlightening couple of hours which, whilst not exactly straightening all my wrinkled thoughts, has helped clarify a few matters.
Putting everything in its place 27 December 2020 3.16PM - The strangest Christmas on record is over. If it was a crayon it would be the medium grey one and someone would have trodden on it breaking it into unusable pieces and grinding immovable greasy crumbs into the carpet.
No wonder I’m fucking confused.
I finished work for the break over a week ago and have been endlessly procrastinating since. I know I need to get on with the thesis, but I also know I have to untangle all the messy thoughts into something linear, logical and understandable. Not an easy prospect when I don’t fully understand myself.
The Blovel is both a method for collecting data, a part of the creative practice (and the reflection and contextualising of the work), an outcome and forms part of the alternative thesis.
I’m currently writing the Methodology chapter. I thought this might be a good (and simple) place to start. But now I’m realising that I have to set out the complicated relationship between myself, the practice and the subject I’m investigating – which all appear to be the same thing. It’s like this: 1. I am the researcher, which makes me also the practice ‘doer’ (Artist in other words). 2. Because this is an autoethnographic study, I’m also the subject – i.e. the person or cultural group being investigated. 3. The research is trying to understand how a creative practitioner experiences working alongside their domestic obligations. This means that the practice is also part of the ‘subject’ too. I think this means: • • •
The researcher is also the subject The subject is the researcher and the practice (and the domestic) The practice is the research method and the subject and the outcomes
This is further complicated by the alternative format of the thesis.
The thesis doesn’t just set out the way that the research answers the questions, but is also – in part – an answer to one of the questions. It is also part of the ‘work’ which is being investigated. 4.23 pm Asda came and delivered another kitchenful of snacky and treaty things. None of which when put together would make a balanced meal. I am perpetually full. 5.17 pm I have tried drawing the roles and outcomes via a diagram in an attempt at a visual overview of the thesis. This has thus far been unsuccessful, but I think it’s probably the best way to describe what is going on here and worth another dose of drawing.
Reflections on the Blovel 12 January 2020 7.47 am - I always start the new year with good intentions; usually food and drink related resolutions which last days and sometimes weeks. I can’t remember a time when a resolution has become habit – but still. This year I have a mammoth task. I have to write a 40000-word thesis, and what’s more, it has to make sense. Sitting at my desk in my tiny office at home has become the default position during the COVID crisis. I teach from here, I research here and I even socialise here. It’s draining! So over the Christmas break I hatched a plan. I’m going to break this immense undertaking into manageable chunks. An hour a day; maybe a little more on my days off. I also have an end date for writing which is this Christmas (give or take) but I’ve no way of calculating if my hourly patches will add up to fit the amount of work. The first thing I’ve done is read through all the Blovel posts; every one. I thought it would be useful to have an overview. I’ve never done this before – which seems remiss now - but the experience was enlightening. By reading in a consecutive manner I have been able to pull out some of the themes which I hadn’t noticed were themes. It also gave me the opportunity to map the thesis in my head. There is already a skeleton which exists as a word document; a series of headings with notes and an occasional fully formed sentence. During the readthrough I added thoughts and bits of Blovel text to the framework in appropriate places; putting a bit of meat on the bones so to speak. The reading leaves me with thinking to do.
This is the time-consuming bit; I made some notes: Starting with the thorny issue - sometimes my writing is as boring as all hell. One day I was trying to economise by dictating to siri and wrote long post about it. I can now see that it’s virtually impossible to read and as dull as the repetition of days in lockdown. I had a little mental argy-bargy with myself. Should I leave in the post or remove it? I’ve decided to leave it for now. I’m allowed to fail occasionally, and I did commit to being honest in the texts – even if it does make me look a bit daft. Another difficulty from the read through is the disjointedness. The fragmented texts are written sporadically, as and when the time I have available coincides with me having something to say. This sometimes results in a text where ideas kind of fall off cliffs. They make an appearance and then are never mentioned again. Even whilst I was reading, I realised this was a true and accurate reflection of both the PhD process and a creative one. It reads a bit like a foundation course sketchbook (a good one, not the kind with a neat module title page at the front, a spider diagram on the second page and 98 other untouched, pristine, white sheets) with ideas lying around all over the place and which gradually ambles its way to a conclusion via blind alleys and rabbit holes of experimental bonkersness. So now I’ve considered the glaring concerns within the texts, I should probably interrogate the more interesting points. There are several themes which continuously recur. They make the text (when read in one long stretch) appear a little repetitive. This said, they do support one of the aims of the Blovel which is to gather data.
The first thing that strikes me is the rapid switches from one state to another. This is more aggressive than I anticipated when it’s translated to words. The writing jolts in a staccato rhythm; backwards and forwards between the outwardly calm or engrossed worker to the slightly frazzled and irritated housewife who answers the door or attends to the demand from one of various buzzers and timers that punctuate the day. The electronic bleep of the washing machine interrupts the day with rhythmic regularity and I leave my public world and attend to its demand, often taking the opportunity to water the little pot plant on the stairs on the way past. After the task I resume my position in the pottery or at my desk and take a few moments to gather my thoughts after the temporal whiplash of the interruption. I recall reading a text early in my research. It spoke of the way women’s daily consciousness is like a tapestry of experiences. The quote contains a list, of which I can only remember broccoli, but a similar list jumps out of the Blovel posts. Possibly a patchwork rather than a tapestry – maybe a collage even. There are the things I do for public work. Occurring primarily in either the studio or the office they are almost always punctuated by disruptions. Sometimes these are planned (like the sure and certain knowledge the washing machine will bleep) and some are spontaneous (like the doorbell ringing to signal another delivery of car shampoo or socks). My day consists of a series of overlaps and rapid changes in state from Mother to Artist to Housewife to Cook to Treasurer to Daughter and often two or more states overlap. The next thing I notice is my reliance on food and coffee. In the never-ending repetition of days we currently inhabit, sometimes the fridge is both friend and comforter, and the enemy of the waistline. Coffee: Well that’s different! In some ways coffee is the crux of this entire investigation. The use of the vessel right from the start is based loosely upon the coffee cup – the comfort, the conduit between both people and place. The object which makes an unnoticed transition
between the public and the private and is equally at home in either. An image pops into my head. It’s Boris Johnson on breakfast news taking a tray of tea out to the reporters outside his house. It must be before COVID (little did any of us know) because he clunkily handed out the steaming brews to the waiting press. The mismatched cups a reflection of the cupboard in every house in the land that contains the comical birthday gifts and freebies. I suspect most folks watching the article could lay claim to having a direct replica of at least one of those mugs; the mint aero one with the sloping sides which came with easter eggs a few years ago or the one with crooked lettering which says, ‘World’s Best Dad’ (replace name of relative until you have a matching mug). I digress, oh yes, coffee, puts me in mind of a book someone gave me, ‘The Book of Cups’ (1990). It’s a little gem which looks deceptively like one of those publications you’d pick up for a couple of quid from a big pile in the motorway service station, but is actually a lovely survey of the humble cup by the well know writer on craft, Garth Clark. He begins by introducing the cup as the, ‘drone of the ceramics world’ and then goes on to completely discredit his own theory by showing interpretations of the unpretentious vessel which range from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Figure 35 Illustration from Garth Clark's Book of Cups (Look and Learn / Elgar Collection) Date unknown
Altogether I wonder if the whole Blovel makes sense at all. I occupy an odd position as both writer and reader, so I don’t have the objective distance necessary to figure this out and it’s not the kind of thing you ask someone else to do for you. The text is at times rambling, repetitive and dull but then occasionally interesting and funny. Would anyone actually read it start to finish? I question why they would want to. As I read I hear my own voice, personal, chatty, meandering. No not my own actual voice but more like my internal dialogue – a diary – isn’t that how this whole thing started?
Zoomy Cups 6 February 2021 One day, what seems an eternity ago during lockdown one, I made a cup which had decals of the new kinds of apps and software we were using to stay in touch. The cup was fairly unremarkable compared with some if its more outrageous companions, it’s a standard shape with slightly overfired decals which have faded a little. It would certainly function as a practical piece should that ever be necessary.
Figure 36 Day 60 of the COVID Clay Diary Thrown Stoneware with high firing decals Months later we are still using Teams and Zoom – although House Party hasn’t been mentioned recently (the MySpace or BetaMax of the online meeting world?) Still, our relationship with these platforms has changed. We are both more and less comfortable with the ‘meetings from your spare bedroom’ culture. More because it’s a system we’ve adopted, learned and accepted as necessary and less because of that necessity and the frustrations it enforces upon us. This week I’ve been teaching online; lectures, tutorials and staff meetings. I’ve also been to an
online symposium where I presented my research methodology to a group of other researchers, and yesterday I was interviewed for a film which is going in an exhibition in the spring. All these events happened in my office, just off the landing, opposite the bedroom. The video conference has become my public face and this shift in working practice brings an opportunity to test my theory of the vessel and its place in both the public and private worlds. If you’ve been reading the Blovel chronologically, you’ll know I have an affinity with coffee, I would go as far as saying reliance, but draw the line at addiction. This means that my online presence is often accompanied by a cup. I’ve been observing this phenomenon, trying to figure out the new etiquette for this fresh way of working. It seems perfectly acceptable to drink whilst talking – even with someone you barely know, it’s the ‘new normal’ equivalent of going for coffee or making a drink and taking it into a meeting. This said, the type of vessel has become more personal in nature. It’s not unusual to see a mug with a photograph of your colleagues children on last year’s holiday in an online work meeting, although I don’t ever recall something quite so intimate in the university offices, where the cup of choice tends to be last year’s secret Santa gift or reflect a football allegiance. It occurs to me this new way we work has accepted the vessel very much as I have set out from the start. The cup sits unobtrusively in its universal position, flitting easily and unnoticed between the public and the private domain, but this time it’s actually the same vessel. I make a drink, I walk up the stairs and log on. I check my hair in the sneaky video preview, and I connect with the outside world. The cup I cradle in my hands – my image beamed into similar set-ups all
over the country - comes straight from the kitchen cupboard, the one with too many cups for the space and not one single matching pair. The cupboard above the kettle, filled with old birthday gifts with cheeky slogans and mugs which came free with various random purchases. I do slightly mediate which one I chose. I wouldn’t, for example, use the cup with the wholly inappropriate text which was given to one of the boys one Christmas whilst at high school. That one sits, unused at the back of the cupboard because we daren’t take it to the charity shop and it feels wrong to throw perfectly serviceable things away. I’ve said before I favour certain coffee cups and always chose my two faves (in order) if they’re available. But apart from this slight anomaly, the choice of cup is random. It strikes me there’s an opportunity here for an entire research project. Collecting, analysing and developing a way to present the findings as an artwork would be fun, but tangential to the actual subject which I must keep at the forefront of my practice. For the time being I resolve to be a passive observer of this trend, and I’ve also just nipped downstairs to remove the offending cup and hide it somewhere less obvious, just in case my Mother-in-Law takes it upon herself to make her own brew one day.
A Colour Manifesto 10 March 2021
Colour must be fun, vibrant, obvious and tear your eyes out at a glance Colours should ping and ting and zing It should ring and sing Pop and shock and rock Fluorescent and neon is fine Pinks and reds and greens of all kinds Purples and blues and oranges, like Joseph’s coat Turquoise and yellow – together, yes please Sometimes it infuriates like a stubborn itch but it’s never drab Subtle doesn’t belong
On exposing the truth 15th May 2021 I’m limping towards the end of a four-year endeavour. I feel a bit like Bruce Willis in Die Hard complete with bloody vest and several limbs hanging off, but with the baddie’s gun dangling from one filthy hand and a steely look in my eye. Ok, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s been a slog. Last time I spoke to AL he said something which really resonated. He told me the PhD was ‘honest’. He said it like that was unusual; pondering this I realise it is different in a way I hadn’t acknowledged. I have read plenty of theses, all of them have a similar professionalism where the grubbiness of the process is polished into a nicely ‘academicised’ finale. The voice of the researcher, whilst often visible, is mediated through a lens which separates the process from the ‘experience’ of undertaking the process. This is usually reserved for private conversations in small groups of researchers in the library, or more recently online. Dear Reader, with me you’re getting the whole messy caboodle. You know a great deal about me, you’ve met my little family and you know I cry big snotty tears when I hit a hurdle. #plottwist – everyone does! The reality of completing this process is grim. There is a constant niggle at the base of your brain – for four years!!! A conflict between wanting to go for a walk or stay in bed a bit longer and knowing there’s stuff to be done. It’s a guilt I can’t imagine being free of. I KNOW everyone deals with this, they tell me, it’s almost universally understood in the multiple forums and relationships I try (unsuccessfully) to keep up with. Other things happen all the time but are glossed over by the end result. Pretty much everyone I’ve spoken to alters their research
questions and the trajectory of their investigation during the process. I did this in spades. Hands-up, I didn’t have a clue what I was investigating until I was thigh deep. I didn’t know what research methods were, never mind being able to choose several. Practice-based research is a slow burn, it zigs and zags like a huge four-dimensional jigsaw with extra pieces from another one and lots of the originals correct ones missing.