this is just to say

OH MY ENGLAND

New work (some photos are here already, more will be after the opening) showing October 2nd through November 15th at Lee Rosy's Teashop (17 Broad Street, Nottingham, NG1 3AJ). These are prints, drawings, assemblages, and paper constructions about my experience of England and Englishness (a quality I sense but cannot delineate) and "England".

Magpies, foxes, cups of tea, terrace houses; chimney pots shaped like chess queens; railway stations (no matter how small the town) with Victorian details; yellow and grey light in the afternoon; gorse, vetch, horses running alongside the motorway; cooling towers of a power station in the distance.

And masked adventures, which aren't necessarily English.

I had work in two shows at a gallery here in Nottingham this summer and was selected as one of six people to show work in Spring 2009, so I'm thinking about that and about a show at the Hand&Heart.

Making all the work for the show really made me miss having my business. I know in part this is a kind of escapism (my other daydream at this moment is opening a cake shop) from dissertation work. But I loved making new things, working on packaging, and the thrill when people actually liked things enough to buy them.

I'm going to put a few things online in November after the show is open, for a couple of weeks--prints and paper constructions and some postcards like the one above, maybe more if I have time. I don't have time to make things to sell like I did (and I don't really want to, even if I think about it nostalgically).

etching

In January I found the Leicester Print Workshop and since then I've been going pretty much once a week to make prints. I needed a place I could go (and work to do) that divorced me cleanly from the sitting-in-front-of-the-computer part of writing my dissertation.

When I was taking printmaking classes before I really preferred lithography to the other processes, but since I've begun working here, I've been making etchings (click for description of the process)--prints that are created when a piece of metal that's been etched by acid is inked and then run through a press, in contact with paper. (So these prints are different to commercially produced prints in terms of the actual process--commercial prints will for the most part be offset-printed, which is a larger-scale or commercial form of lithography, or printed on a very high-quality computer printer, from scans of work.) Most of these are in my prints set on flickr (here), and many will be in a show I have coming up in October here in Nottingham. Not these, though!

I've been working and reworking an image of a beehive I made in January, and the twelve prints in the photographs here are the fourth 'state' I've printed it in. About a month ago I found pikaland, a really great illustration and design blog. The author, Amy Ng, runs something called the Pikapackage that's a way for people to buy a selection of small pieces of art and illustration at an affordable price, and offers artists & illustrators some more exposure for their work. These 12 prints ("Hive, state D") are my submission for the October Pikapackage, which launches during the first week of October (details will be on Amy's site).

Etchings on Fabriano Rosaspina paper, with chine collée.

(patisserie)

There has been some more prowling.

I cut my hair.

I love to learn Portuguese by reading this blog...and to think about all the baking I'd like to do.

My birthday is coming up...maybe a cake like this one.

We still don't have internet at home, but I have a trapeze in my room.

Light posts, like mousse, for a while...I have a little show coming up and have to get ready.

And I'll have work online for sale from November 15 'til December 1.

moving house

(The last time I will see this view will be this week.)

Our new house is a little terrace house facing southeast, and the attic bedroom (where I make things at two long tables under a skylight) has light from east and west. It's bright all day, even in the rain (which is good, since it's raining every day here at the moment--downpouring).

And there is a trapeze. (What was the name of the mouse who lived in the museum and had the trapeze, Mom?) And I bought new sheets: purple, yellow-green, and white.

Now my frilly yellow umbrella and I are going to head home from school. No internet in the new place means not much here until next week.

Oh, and I bought a press.

the jargon of authenticity

"Its language is a trademark of societalized chosenness, noble and homey at once--sublanguage as superior language.... While the jargon overflows with the pretense of deep human emotion, it is just as standardized as the world that it officially negates; the reason for this lies partly in its mass success, partly in the fact that it posits its message automatically, through its mere nature. Thus the jargon bars the message from the experience which is to ensoul it. The jargon has at its disposal a modest number of words which are received promptly as signals" (Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, Routledge 2003, p. 3; my emphasis).

How often I find myself using and reading the same words. Lovely. Wonderful. Sweet. I'm tired of them, but it takes work to find alternates--the words I need to mean what I really mean, instead of words that will do to hold a place.

My friend Jirka was bemused by the English tendency to say things are 'lovely'. The word for lovely in Czech, rozkosne (I can't put in the diacritical marks on this computer, but they're above the s and the e) is really only used when things are...well, lovely. Not for a view that, on further investigation, proves itself to be fairly average. Not for an insipid design that's nevertheless popular. And I like this, despite my own tendency to overuse words like 'lovely' (visiting friends this weekend, I winced to realise how often I used the word 'nice'). I like the respect it gives each word. It acknowledges that words have discrete uses, implications, and connotations, and it quietly expects their users to be aware of those differences and to use the words well.

I suppose it also requires a level of thoughtfulness in interaction that isn't always in place. I'm thinking especially of the way I interact and observe others interacting online. This 'jargon of authenticity' we adopt and propagate--which is linguistic to begin with but also reproduces itself in an assimilist style of image production, the consumption of certain kinds of things in certain ways, and a cult of personality (which seems to be the root cause of some kerfluffle when people writing online who have a following of sorts either 'leave' or change or reveal things not to be as perhaps originally thought)--is a way of being-together that is based on the surface of things and seems, in the end, rather more closely tied to patterns of consumption (ones I think many makers and writers hope to avoid or escape) than I'd like.

I'd rather my work (be it writing, drawing, prints, or myself) be, after consideration, called puzzling, mysterious, bizarre, uncanny, or weird--or charming, delightful, sensitive, or touching--than simply 'lovely,' which at this point I can't trust as a meaningful utterance. Adorno, writing about a particular jargon of authenticity, is clearly dealing with functions of language that do much more than dictate the way a relatively small number of people interact in a virtual environment; he was concerned with how the ideas of authenticity were implicated in the rise of the Third Reich, for instance. But the slippage of language away from itself and into symbolic roles that a social structure determines for it is worrisome, if only for "the increasing pressure it exerts on individuals to define themselves through consumption" and the way it can promulgate a "compulsion to shut off one’s capacity for empathy"(Daniel, Jamie. "Adorno as Antidote," In These Times, 9 March 2005. Online, accessed 2 Sept. 2008).

I think it's clear that my calling something 'lovely' or 'sweet' is in no way the same kind of thing as the linguistic substitutions that fascism calls for (doublespeak or buzzwords or whatever you like to call it). But I do worry about this tendency I observe in myself to engage superficially instead of taking the time to figure out what I mean and to say it in the specific words it requires (which, yes, sometimes might be 'lovely' or 'sweet' or any other of a number of words I still find overused).

--

I want to point out that Adorno (whose theory I am using liberally, having only just begun to read it) was no an uncomplicated figure. He was implicated in many of the structures he critiqued and theorized. I acknowledge, too, my own complicity with and participation in many of the things I have written on above.