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Praxis - Lab Module, show & tell. Regular constructive group/individual feedback. Independent collaboration. Alloted time to create, explore, and devise. 80% of grade is practical - idea is to continue developing final Sem B piece into Sem C for M05. Reflective diary to go alongside this.

Concepts - Talks with an array of artists and creatives about their process, business practices, and journeys in terms of art and creativity. Assessment will be in the form of an ACE proposal which conceptually backs up your project in Praxis. Presentation (20%) with essay to go into more detail about project, funding, ideas, etc...

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This morning we had a little tour of the BBC studios (sort of) and got to see some of the facilities that Marjon has to offer in terms of recording, greenscreens, and tech suites.

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PIG

Make something out of nothing. One hour. Go.

While playing around and grabbing crap from the props cupboards, we began to find things that made interesting noises such as the typewriter, the bed frame, a broken mop handle on a table leg... We were just making noise, and then Gracy and Meg started throwing this massive disco ball around to the clanging. Harry was sampling and creating noises while I was moving the lights around, and we settled on pink. I still don't know how we got onto the subject of pigs but Harry sampled Meg and Rowan oinking, which led to a weird Animal Farm slash ACAB slash murder-y romance-esque performance from everyone. Rowan had a mannequin that she was dragging around, I was clattering away, Meg and Gracy were playing catch.. It was chaos but it was so so fun!

Some of the feedback we got:

Time

Duration as a playground

The past is the future

Rowan's weird love affair with the doll... Intriguing.

Sci-fi and mechanical - dystopic

Cohesive and connected

Factory-like

Immersion of task-based theatre

No concern for meaning

Self-reflective of today's world

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This week we opted out of a session with Charlie Eaton to work on a collaborative piece about homes and housing, going off of the work that was created last week. This is a document with our notes and little spots of research from this session and a few others that we did outside of uni time.

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Before this session, Harry and I have been playing around with the idea of homes and housing. I had written a poem over the holidays and we wanted to add some visuals to the soundtrack we had created using it.

Like flies to dead things,

student landlords thrive

in clean white offices,

selling mouldy greyscale dives

Eight hundred pounds per month,

Six beds, one bath,

and a tiny lounge-kitchen

with mice in the gaff.

Report any problems

on our super simple app!

Oh your ceiling is caving in?

Sorry about that.

We'll send someone 'round

between four and four-o-one,

with a lick of paint and gaffer tape.

Look at that! Job done.

We had found an old Overhead Projector and wanted to use it to create the visuals. We gathered some twigs and leaves to make a house, and I drew a simplistic house on a piece of clear plastic to layer over it. I gently removed each piece of wood from the picture and slowly removed the image afterwards. I'm sad that we didn't get a video!

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Making a home into a house

Potential groundwork to have created a castle

Concept was clear regardless of the poem

The process of sound and image curation made us curious about the conversation between artists

Why build newbuilds if it's just going to look shit and be poor quality when we have perfectly good homes that just need TLC.

It felt sinister, like a horror movie

Deconstruction of fantasy

Add furrther layers onto the projection

Consider vocals vs soundscape

Play with the pace of disintergration

Question the relevancy of something or nothing

Beauty in the materials used

Sounded like robotic answering machine - autogenerated politeness

Ruthless destruction - brutalist architecture

Pupetry

Three little pigs

Explore the outcomes of a clash

Complimentary mediums

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Our praxis session was put on hold today due to the issues with the theatre room. Instead, we had an interesting talk/conversation with Pip Gunning from The Theatre Royal!

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This session was with Tom from the library, who is also a music coordinator. We learnt about the origins of Marjon and experimental music. It was a nice way to collaboratively create music, and to interact with the Arts Health & Wellbeing course without having to worry about making mistakes or ruining the 'song'. It was a very relaxed way of creating music, and it was inspiring to listen to Tom talk so passionately about his craft.

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Before this week, I had rewatched a documentary called 'Dreams of a Life' about a woman named Joyce Carol Vincent who passed away in her home in the early 2000s. Her body was not discovered until 3 years after she died, and the documentary was made to memorialise her and give her the respect that she missed out on in life.

I had traced a few scenes from the documentary, including one where the biohazard team are cleaning her flat up for the next tenants. I found this image to be quite striking and did some freewriting about the flat. I then used this freewriting in the session to create a sound piece with Harry, which was further developed after Sharon encouraged Meg and me to work together. We elected to become the biohazard cleaners, inspired by the image and the idea of satisfying rug cleaning videos washing away the memories and dirt. We created a durational piece, emphasising the big picture with Meg's use of larger tools versus the small details with my use of a toothbrush.

It was really enjoyable to collaborate with Meg, her ideas are fantastic and I hope we can work together on something in the future.

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We made soup.

Okay, we didn't just make soup.. We had a session based on GobSquad's performance Handle With Care, which is about community cooking and growing together.

We had some lovely discussions with the MA Arts Health and Wellbeing cohort about what art means to us, our practices and their practices, and how they're finding their degree so far.. All the while preparing ingredients for the soup! It was a very warm and casual environment, but we also had some in-depth discussions about our feelings, emotional and physical health, and what they both mean to us. It was fascinating to get to know everyone more. Afterwards, we danced and laughed and chatted.

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While I didn't feel like this session was something I benefited from, it was still interesting to learn about Alex's career and current business strategies!

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Our session with Melanie-Jame Wolf was unfortunately cancelled this morning, but this allowed for Sharon to run a meditation freewriting and assessment-prep session. We discussed the roof situation and moved on to doing some meditative exercises and periodic freewriting.

From this freewriting, we partnered up and began to develop some art from it. Myself and Meg were together. We read our pieces back to each other and then decided to draw things based on our writing (inspired by my projections from my project). Since our freewriting was so similar, we read both out and showed our art on the projector when appropriate!

Rowan and Caitlin did an exercise that I later took inspiration from where they gave each other words based on their writing and drew how they felt upon reading/hearing the word. For example, Caitlin wrote 'crossroads' and Rowan drew a post with signs going in different directions. Rowan wrote 'tree' and Caitlin drew a forest.

Kay and Harry worked together as well. Harry scored Kay's freewriting, where she spoke a lot about self-confidence and self-assurance. On a day when we all felt so disheartened about the future of The Quad and the Arts at Marjon, it was reaffirming to hear someone talk so positively about themselves.

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This is where I was able to fully develop my script and nail down the images! While I missed going in and getting feedback from Sharon, Judy, and my peers, it was a positive experience to refine my own creative practice and follow Pip's advice of developing the art of critiquing one's own work. I reached a point early on where I felt the script was finished, which is when I performed it to my friends outside of the industry for some honest feedback with a different perspective. I then used this feedback to further edit and nit-pick until I was happier than before.

I love working on my own, but it's also important that I am able to step back and realise when I've gotten too attached to what I've made. Art, for me, is about creating something personal yet relatable and meaningful.

This project has really sparked something in me where I feel so motivated to continue with it after university, which is why I have put myself forward to partake in a performance festival with the University of Plymouth - MayFest 2024.

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This afternoon, we showed a little of the work-in-progress to Judy. I spent the workshop time discussing my plans for the upcoming assessments and creating some images for the projector. As part of my WIP demonstration, I decided to go through some of the images I had developed and explain the backstory and reasoning for them existing within my piece.

The one I am showing in this photograph is of Anubis, an ancient Egyptian God of the human body after death. It is believed that he was the inventor of embalming and mummification and that he was by their loved ones' sides throughout their passing and journey to the afterlife.

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Detailed yet simplistic

Looking up and lying down felt as if we were in a coffin

Passion for the gap between present day and ancient history of death rituals is clear

Peace. A final resting place..

Anubis seemed caring and gentle in the way you described and illustrated him.

Holding of the gaze

Mobility of the projector

Conversational

Guiding and archealogical

Felt more of a review than an extract of a performance

Forced to look at it by looking up

Colours felt like stained glass

Movement vs still felt important when changing and adjusting

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This session was spent freewriting more about my friend Sam who had recently passed, and how I wanted to be more involved in my own funeral planning. It was interesting to research the different funeral types and differences between UK and other death practices around the world.

I've been listening to and reading this book by death practitioner Caitlin Doughty called Smoke Gets In Your Eyes & Other Lessons from the Crematory, which I highly recommend if you have a morbid fascination with this kind of thing!

Her work has been inspiring throughout this journey and I take comfort in knowing that there are people in the death industry who are of a similar mindset to me in terms of what I want to do with my body after death, and that it's likely these wishes will be accounted for or granted.

I read this freewriting, as well as some other pieces I had written previously, with Harry accompanying me with music. It was nice to have someone improvising sound over my words, but I'm not sure it fit the tone I was going for. Because of this, I was unable to do my projections at the same time, though this meant I was able to get feedback on just the writing.

This session pushed me to confirm my place in the MayFest 2024 festival.

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A few years ago, I wrote a short poem about a worm and how I thought it would feel to be one. In this session, I further developed that into a monologue which I then read to the cohort as part of the lab review at the end.

I also showed some of the images I had been working on, which have since been scrapped for being too on the nose. (Joyce's body outline, worms in the ground, rats, etc)

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Felt bad for the worm, sorry for it almost

Worm and Joyce's stories interlink

Recent and personal

Casual

Worms are forgotten

Texture of images is realistic

Feels like a courtroom drawing

Constrast between beauty and decaying

Wet and slimy, cold and rotting

Worm burrowing down into the earth vs Joyce melting into the sofa

Peel back the layers of these stories

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I re-wrote this freewriting into my script for Send Him My Love, fully integrating a piece of freewriting about Joyce Carol Vincent and my own views on death and memorialisation.

By combing these three pieces, I've been able to start to piece together a story about grief which is reflective of my journey and experiences with grief throughout my life. Having spoken to others, it feels reflective of their processes too.

I like the idea of my piece resonating with people, even if it's just a little sentence that makes someone feel connected and seen. I'd like the audience to recognise that grief is non-linear and that we are able to forge our own path through death and how we deal with it.

The thing about grief is that life gets in the way of processing it, but that's part of the process too. Learning to move on but look back fondly is important, and I feel as if I can help people understand this better with my work.

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Starting with the worm, then the bench, then Joyce felt significant

Puts life into perspective

Music felt casual and surreal

It was like watching a talkshow or listening to a podcast

Missed the projector

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I had a catch-up with Sharon about my work, and how the project is going. It was insightful to get some feedback on my drawing and process before the assessment, and this allowed me to do some finishing touches beforehand.

Being able to explain the reasoning behind my work is something I find exciting, and I enjoy it a lot. I love being able to share my process with people and I highly encourage people to magpie it, as it's how we all get to where we are as artists! Nothing is original!

The night before, I had watched a documentary called 'The Bridge' which is about the Golden Gate Bridge in Chicago, the number one suicide spot in the world. Below are the notes I took during the documentary.

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Contrast between sightseers peering over the edge and jumpers assessing the drop.

Children climbing up railings to get a better view while adults climb over to throw themselves off.

Catching suicide on video seems invasive

Interview with kite surfer who almost died after a jumper fell close to his board. Harrowing and traumatising. Impact of suicide on bystanders and family.

Lowest point of someone's life vs high point of adrenaline with diving.

Bridge overlooks Alcatraz - notorious for being almost inescapable. Juxtaposition to lack of suicide prevention on bridge.

Man on railings stood facing traffic, spread his arms and fell into the water below. Liberating.

Vanishing. Two unrecovered bodies.

Employees of the bridge and tourists last people to see them.

"It happens all the time.."

Interviewing families of jumpers seems invasive yet I want to hear more.

Family witnessed jumper smiling and laughing loudly as she went over the edge

"A glorious waty to draw attention to oneself!"

Incredible pain to think the water below would be better than continuing to suffer

An act of freedom and release

Parents fully understand the pain that their child was going through through the death of that child

Experiencing suicidal ideation

Felt the suicide was eventual

Unable to really help

Third attempt at suicide, thoroughly researching others who had done the same at the bridge

They were fully prepared to die and let their parents know.

Drivers honking to stop them

Nervous, joking to tourists it's a long way down

State of disconnect from filmmakers to jumpers

The regret of being halfway down and unable to stop

The miracle of living through it

Seven seconds to fall. Seven seconds to change your mind and try to save yourself.

Loving the idea of being famous for jumping

Friend of jumper felt angry and yet relieved to know that they were free of mental distress

"I don't have answers for why he did it, just a bunch of anecdotes."

"I don't know why he jumped. Maybe he wanted to fly."

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The Bridge (2006) | WatchDocumentaries.com

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Documentary about one of the world’s most popular suicide spots, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Filmed over the course of a year, it captures a number of suicides and features interviews with the friends and family of some of the people identified to have jumped from the bridge.

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Drawing of flowers left at Sheila Seleoane’s door by a well-wisher after police discovered her skeletal remains in February 2022 

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Drawing of flowers left at Sheila Seleoane’s door by a well-wisher after police discovered her skeletal remains in February 2022 

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https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/womans-home-infested-maggots-lived-29615901

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt21dU5Pu8g

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Headstones, inspired by ones in the cemetery

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Headstones, inspired by ones in the cemetery

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Taken from my recent scratch night at MayFest 2024

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Demolition, from the picture of a demolition site

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Demolition, from the picture of a demolition site