Personal
It's been too long, I don't know how to address this blog, this place. What style was I writing in before hand, or was it just messy? I think it was probably a bit .. uncollected, uncurated. I can't decide if I want this to be personal or not. I'm back living in Dublin, and it's been a bit weird coming back. The plan is to leave again at the end of February, 3 months from now.
Let's see what I make in the meantime.
I wrote this piece as a note in my phone at the end of February/beginning of March on my way home from a climbing session. In it I try to explain the wonderful happy/calm feeling that climbing leaves me with sometimes after a session. Climbing is not the only activity that triggers this mental state - being creative in general sends me this happiness, but climbing is definitely the most frequent thing to do so.
Being on an unofficial climbing break has made me revisit this note to myself. It's in a very rough-and-ready state, but might as well share it, and maybe rewrite it in a more legible state some time in the future.
Although it's close to 10:30pm, and I'm on my way home from a short climbing session, I feel like I've finally woken up in what feels like days - weeks even. I am not a nighttime person, so when I get this "buzz" I'm always slightly afraid to go home incase I fall asleep again. I just want to keep floating on this natural endorphin high, breathing in the cooling air as I cycle. It's beautifully relaxing, highly calming, mentally freeing, creatively pulsing. All of the ideas I've had vague thoughts about I actually start chewing through - but I'm also happy to just enjoy the feeling of be alone.
I've never asked if other people get this, but I assume they must. It's not a moment I really want to drag other people into. I don't know if it's even possible to achieve this tranquility if there are other people around to disturb the quiet. It's at moments like this where I let go of my inner demons for a while and just love being. Is this what meditating is supposed to achieve every day? Because when I try that my inner monologue just doesn't shut up and I often end up more stressed than when I began that exercise. Or is it that I've just finished physical exercise and so I'm enjoying the post-mini-workout endorphin lift? Is that why I see people at those empty glowing gyms at 2am sprinting on the thread mill, facing the window like the were tying to outrun a lion, or jump into the night?
But I could swear I've experienced this calm in other situations - walking home after too many hours waitressing, and a magical calm carries my burnt out feet to my door step.
It's annoying that I get such beautiful moments late at night, making me want to go and create something - which is not what my sleeping housemates will appreciate. I don't want to talk to anyone, but conversation is inevitable when you don't live alone.
The cold is finally pushing through my jumper, and rain is starting to hit my face. It's probably time to relinquish my canal bench and finish my cycle home.
Thanks climbing, for giving me these moments of extreme peaceful clarity.
A slice of tourist shots from a trip to Paris I forgot I went on
Above is a photo I made during my final year of college. I borrowed a camera from the stores so I could try my hand at some medium sized navel-gazing. It had been a long time since I had shot in that format, and wound on that kind of film - which as you can see, I didn't get quite right. So I ended up with a couple of oddly (and one that turned out to be unusable) exposed rolls.
Looking at those rolls, and 35mm that I've shot since then, it's clear to me that I've been wandering without a purpose for quite a while.
But I didn't start writing this entry with the aim of discussing the possible listlessness of recent work. That's only happened because I decided to use this image as the header or introduction to this piece.
I've come to ... I've forgotten.
I've developed an interesting problem. Since finishing college I have lost my attention span. I spend hours flicking from one social media to the other, reloading and rescrolling through the same feeds. Ask me to read a real body of text, that isn't some horrible clickbait infested mess and I cannot concentrate. Two sentences in and my mind has stopped focusing on the text - instead I have music lyrics, book plots, random celebrity gossip, and trash shouting over my inner monologue reading voice.
I currently have four different journal drafts simply because I get half way through writing something and my mind moves on, not willing to work through that awkward sentence I need to phrase.
Having now admitted and assessed my problem, it is time to start working. Over the last few weeks of December, I am going to start re-writing my thesis "The Poetics and Politics of Imagery: National Geographic's misrepresentation of non-Western countries through Instagram." And! Actually, I would love to finish reading Edward Said's Orientalism. But the two of these go hand in hand.
And now for an image to break up my words. I've typed more than planned. Apologies if I have shown this image before - it is from the same roll as the photograph above.
I think it is time to finally get around to the title of this piece, "Life after college: the big decisions?". I graduated with a first class honours 24 days ago. This was as far as I had planned in my life. Up until now, it's been easy. I've followed the general path I've been planning since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. No one warned me how scary it would be reaching the end of it. Lots of parts of me want to run away to somewhere beautiful (New Zealand has been the fixation for about a year, but really anywhere far away qualifies) and kind of postpone or completely cancel this idea of making "big decisions".
"Are you going to do a Masters?"
"Where are you working now?"
"What's the life plan?"
"How's the boyfriend? You've been going out a long time now."
I have been asked these questions a lot. My unfocused mind mentioned above has also been using these questions to distract me from actually living, and so I feel like I've been bombarded with this since the summer. Change feels like it is definitely needed, but committing to something has become difficult.
Do these "big decisions" even exist, or is it just me asking myself these questions while I figure out what is actually supposed to happen? Eh. Life, aye?
Recently, I spent an afternoon holding an awkward hat to my head, and carrying around a piece of paper that proves I went to college and did something there. Here are some 35mm shots from Graduation Night.
Last weekend it was my birthday (yay!) and wanted to try something new.
Kayaking has been on the list for a while, so took a three hour guided tour from Bullock harbour.
Not being someone who normally does water sports, or just cool enough, I don't own a waterproof camera. I was scared of destroying any of my nice cameras, so I just brought a small 35mm disposable one. I sometimes forget how nice they can turn out (Although as you will see below, there was a bit of camera shake ... and not all my horizons are straight).
Collecting the final frames take two
When people come and look at my graduate exhibition I - not quite worry - but wonder if they know how much work and time and thinking went into these small prints sitting quietly on the wall. My piece certainly isn't a large one, and while I try to ignore the thoughts that "size doesn't matter", I know to people who don't normally look at images it often does.
With this post, I want to share more of what when into making a piece for exhibition, and the costs that are incurred by the artist. We are told, as students, that throwing money at a project is not what will get you the grade. There is some truth in that. There definitely needs to be a concept. But once you have that concept, it is indirectly expected that some money throwing should probably be part of it.
My graduation exhibition piece cost:
Printing ----- €250 ----- Printed myself using college facilities.
Framing ----- €405 ---- Framed in Hang Tough. Not without complication, but otherwise fine.
Hanging ----- €30 ---- Screws, mounting board, etc.
In my search for information on funding and affording gallery space, I've come across these PDFs - "The Costs and Funding of Exhibitions" and "Business to Arts: Private Investment in Arts and Culture Survey Report".
Nothing in Stone
Nothing in Stone is an exhibition I'm organising with 13 of my fellow photography graduates.
Gallery Space in Dublin
In my opinion, Dublin is lacking in low cost/affordable art spaces/spaces interested in showing student work. The largest space I have been able to find is Steambox on School St. in Dublin 8. Recently I found a new site called Fill it (currently still in it's 'beta' stage) which allows people to rent out currently empty space in the same style as Air BnB (in fact the website feels exactly the same). While I am really excited to see where this goes, at the moment the spaces on it are a little too expensive for not enough space.
What am I paying:
For 13days I am paying €500 for gallery space, with an additional €140 deposit.
Sponsorship?
Sponsorship is hard to come by. Not impossible. Just hard.
For a show I'm currently organising I spent an evening sending out emails to companies I thought most likely to sponsor a small art event. I didn't hear back from a single one. However, every exhibition that I have been involved in has been sponsored in some way by local shops or places that one of the artists works.
Current sponsorship:
€200 from Tiger. Huge thanks to Tiger and Hue Hale for organising this.
Promotion
Now that there is only one month left before opening, promoting the event will start. Posters, pice lists, websites, there are some many things we would love to do.
Recently, I put work on a wall and had people come look at it.
It felt a lot more stressful than that sentence makes it out to be.
The largest and final project of my course is to create a body of work for exhibition. For my piece, I walked from my home in Dublin to my mother's home in Tipperary over the Easter period. The whole walk took about six days, and roughly two hundred and forty kilometres. When you're walking it's hard to keep track.
Stylistically, I would like to say the images I made while one this walk stand half way between a documentary piece and a contemporary fine art photographic work.
While walking I was certainly thinking about my connection to and impression of Ireland. I've been away quite a bit recently and wanted to spend some time just outside in the place I'm supposed to be from. Did I get that connection - I don't know. But I certainly want to spend more time outdoors again.
