after the summer

Nearly two months since my last post! The holidays flew past and now I'm back at work. Amelia started school last week. I don't know where the last 4 years went, never mind the last couple of months. 

I am trying to assess what I achieved during my research leave before the summer. Need to go back and take another look at the 'High Gabble' rough cut. I think I will use mostly still images rather than video. Pick up shots are out of the question as Mum and Dad finally completed on the sale of the house a couple of weeks ago. I am pretty sure I have enough material to make something. I also want to use some of the photographs, scribblings, bits and pieces that we rescued(?) from the house on the last visit. I am still working my way through bags and boxes stacked in my office. It is very strange looking at all these fragments of the past and I have found Mum's refusal, even anger, about wanting to have, or look at, any of this stuff, very difficult to deal with. It feels like I'm on a very lonely journey which one would normally make after the death of a parent. But perhaps the death has already taken place. Mum is so changed and different to the woman that I see smiling in many of those photos. Yet in some ways she is so much better than this time last year. I just wish she would show some sign of affection towards her grandchildren and give some indication that she enjoys life. These type of expressions are very rarely, if ever, forthcoming. It's so sad. For me, for her and for Sam and Amelia. Dad seems oblivious! 

Anyway, I digress...

I also hope to finalise arrangements with Goldsmiths for the Exposures archive, but this is something else that I need child-free time to sort out. I do not feel ready to talk to Sam about my old work yet, although I hope I can at some point in the future. Goldsmiths have asked us to make an inventory of everything we have so I will put this together over the next few weeks and then meet them with Grace Lau hopefully sometime in October. 

So - not huge progress, but small steps. One can only do so much in 12.5 days! But this year I should be able to up this time considerably in the half of the week I am not lecturing. From November when Amelia starts full time, I hope to properly reassess my aims and objectives to reach a clearer methodology as regards my research.