Photos and Videos

Jenny Holzer, Edinburgh

In Photos and Videos on 26 April 2010 with no comments

The bit at the bot­tom is a marked-off area which I totally did not go into in order to invest­ig­ate how this was con­struc­ted. And I cer­tainly wasn’t tak­ing any pho­to­graphs. Phew.

Liv­ing with someone who makes LEDs do things for fun, I wasn’t overly blown away by this, but the raw data, pas­ted on the wall, was much more interesting.

The book of revelations

In Photos and Videos on 1 April 2010 with no comments

It is spring! I know this because I spent the after­noon sit­ting in a sun­beam in the Botan­ics, feed­ing cashew nuts to squir­rels and won­der­ing who all of the other people in the Botan­ics at 3pm on a week­day were.

(Admit­tedly, it snowed a little when I was on the bus home, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count against spring.)

Contact sheet

In Photos and Videos on 11 February 2010 with Comments Off

Spotlight

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 17 November 2009 with Comments Off

LED lights from Pound­stretcher, con­ver­ted from bat­tery to plug powered by Al. Now I just need to get my hands on some very small bal­loons and Bal­loon Light Pro­ject 2.0 can begin.

Transition

In NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 15 November 2009 with 1 comment

It turns out that I’m ter­rible at this blog­ging every day thing, although I have been keep­ing to my photo a day res­ol­u­tion. I apo­lo­gise for the lack of post­ing, but I have been too busy — oh, you know - leav­ing the house to write every day. Oh yeah. After almost six weeks of feel­ing a little like death warmed up and then rap­idly cooled down to shivery before being boiled up once more, I’m able to get up and out most days. This week the plan is to build up to leav­ing the house and work­ing in any given day. Don’t get too jeal­ous all at once, now.

I am real­ising, though, that in some strange way I prob­ably needed the last six weeks of com­plete body break­down. I stopped. For the first time in years, everything ground to a com­plete halt — even brain activ­ity seemed to stop for a while. Every so often a Big Thought would push its way through the fog, but with time to con­tem­plate I actu­ally man­aged to get some­where with my think­ing. There’s a few things I’m a lot closer to being able to let go of now, just because I had no choice but to work through them before hav­ing another nap (to get over the exer­tion of think­ing!), so recov­er­ing from it all almost feels like a renewal in some way; an emer­ging. I’ve real­ised how blocked my head had become, and while I’m no clearer just yet on where I want to go, it feels like some­thing I’m able to think about now instead of the messy tangle of before.

Part of my frus­tra­tion is in real­ising that I’m strug­gling to express myself in any way — some­where between thought ini­ti­ation and expres­sion, some­thing gets blocked, and noth­ing — writ­ten or spoken — comes out feel­ing authen­tic. I’ve always felt divided in some way — I’m not wholly aca­demic or nat­ur­ally artistic, not entirely cyn­ical but not fully optim­istic, even not badly ill but still not very well — and it almost feels like that’s where the con­flict lies, like I’m strug­gling to work out how to straddle all of the ele­ments yet remain a cohes­ive per­son. I don’t think I’m man­aging it at all at the moment, but I’m start­ing to fig­ure out that work­ing that out a little is prob­ably the key to work­ing out everything else, like what I want to do with myself and where I want to go.

(And this is the part where I would nor­mally insert a pithy joke about how lousy I am. But I am not going to let myself do that — although you have no idea how hard that feels, being Queen of all Humour is the Best Defence — I’m just going to let this lie for a bit. Let it go out there into the uni­verse and maybe help my brain to start work­ing on it all. We’ll see.)

In the shade

In Hamster, NaBloPoMo, Photos and Videos on 12 November 2009 with 1 comment