my school - the wall

femadlib K

Alex Brew contacted me through the Exposures archive project at Goldsmiths. She is a member of a group of women artists who describe themselves as 'feminist activists'. Check out the links to some fabulous artists' work on their blog http://femadlibkolektiv.blogspot.com/ I recently screened two of my mid-90s films for their fundraising cafe and party. Unfortunately I couldn't get up to London for either of these events, but hope they were successful.

the last 2 months....

I can't believe I haven't written anything since 8th November. A friend and I were walking near Frensham Pond last week and she mentioned she had found my blog! Didn't think anyone read it so that was bit of a shock... and a wake up call to get a bit more active in here. 

We had flu round the family twice before Christmas so that knocked us out a bit. Now we have finally finished our family festivities - starting with Sam's birthday party at the beginning of December and Amelia and Mark both in last 10 days, with Christmas and New Year sandwiched in the middle. The season of cake, cake and more cake and a rapidly expanding waistline! 

Exposures meeting with Goldsmiths just before Christmas was cancelled because all the staff had flu so Grace and I are finally taking the archive to the library this Tuesday. I started the 'my school' project on Wednesday with a Y2 DFSA student, Luke, assisting. I have also applied for a teaching fellowship at UCA as the project seems to fit the bill for such an award.  It should help the University to further its Widening Participation Scheme and will further my own research objectives of wanting to make work with the local community, particularly in terms of trying to establish creative projects with young people. I should know whether I have been successful by the end of next week. 

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.

update on exposures archive

Good news! It seems that the Womens' Art Library at Goldsmiths are very interested in our archive material. We hope to meet in September when everyone returns from vacation. I think we should be able to get a really good collection of photographs, press cuttings and video together for them.  

cs3, final cut and research

I've spent my last two official research days following a tutorial for PhotoShop CS3. There are some new additions and changes that look quite interesting so I look forward to getting the update in the near future to try out some of these features. Last week I spent some time in Final Cut Pro trying out some ideas with the HD video I shot at my parents house. I put together some good visual sequences over a conversation between myself and the estate agent. Ultimately I think I will include many of the digitial stills that I shot as these allow for a more contemplative consideration of the piece. Trying to figure out how to change the aspect ratio of these to match the 16:9 of the video. I will be visiting my parents house for the last time next Saturday and intend to take my stills camera again. The British Heart Foundation are clearing a couple of lorry loads from the house but I am not sure that I will have the emotional or physical creative space to get to grips with any more video over there.

research profile and demo of work

The following links to my UCCA research page

http://www.ucreative.ac.uk/index.cfm?articleid=9596

The link below is to a pilot project for academics and artists to upload their work to web. My 3 screen HD video piece, living room, takes ages to download and only works on pcs. reconnection loads quickly, but is likely to only work on pcs too. Will be trying to resolve this for Mac users in the near future.

http://kultur-demo.eprints.org/view/creators/Gunn,_Rosie.html

exposures archive

A couple of months back I was looking through materials generated by the Women Photo Men and Men Review Women photo workshops that we used to run at Exposures after chatting to Steve Littman about future my research direction. There are many interesting photographs and the testimonials of participants are very poignant. I wondered whether there was any scope for a book or website to publish the material so it could be accessed by students or researchers interested in gender studies. Also there seems to be a resurgance of media interest in the definition of masculinity and the reluctance of some men to see their bodies as desirable.

To try to decide what to do with this material, I contacted dear friends and colleagues, Grace Lau and Robin Shaw, and they came to lunch yesterday. It was so lovely to see them. Nearly 5 years since I saw Grace and probably over 10 since Robin and I met up. After lots of catch up chat about our current projects and interests we started to look through the material. It is fairly certain that we would have a problem with releases if we tried to publish many of the images and it would be difficult to contact the models and participants since so much time has passed. None of us has the inclination or the time to take this on. We have decided to see whether the Womens' Library at London Metropolitan University or the Womens' Art Library at Goldsmiths would be interested in adding the materials to their collection.

high gabble

One of the first in the series of stills I shot at my parents' home last Monday.

research time and technical hitches

This week I have been trying to get up and running with the Mac. I wanted to capture the HD video I shot with the Sony Z1 into Final Cut Pro. What a nightmare. I spent most of Tuesday trying various codecs but couldn't get device control. Steve Littman came over on Wednesday and discovered that the Mac needed to install various updates from the web but because it has been given a student spec I do not have priviledges to do that. He managed to get the password so by Thursday I was able to begin capture. Unfortunately I still don't have proper device control to set in and out points, so I have had to capture the video as big long takes that I will have to make into subclips. Looking at what I have shot, I am not sure there is much I can do with it. I prefer the digital stills that I shot at my parents house. I think I was so overcome by the emotion of being there and having to engage with the practical issues, that I didn't really permit myself the time for creative reflection as I hoped I would do.

high gabble

Last November my parents moved to sheltered accommodation near me in Farnham leaving the family home in Chigwell, Essex after 35 years. Two weeks after moving my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer and spent several months on a psychiatric ward before having a ‘successful’ mastectomy in February 2008 and then returning to the psychiatric ward. She was discharged at the beginning of this month. She and my father are now beginning to think about selling the family home. I am taking cameras to the house in early June to photograph and film what remains. I am not sure what will emerge from this undertaking but the working title of the work ‘High Gabble’ - courtesy of my dear Auntie Renee now deceased - is a play on the name of the house, ‘High Gable’, and is a pretty accurate reflection on my mother’s highly emotional mood swings throughout my own childhood.

There is much is the media about a deficit of funds to care for the growing elderly population. There is much in the media about a deficit of funds to treat the mentally ill. This work will hopefully engage in a thoughtful way with these debates.

some photographs

living room

This three screen high definition video artwork is a family portrait of types. It is a rather claustrophobic and chaotic piece that pretty accurately reflects the dominance that the children have in our shared space over the holiday period. This is a stage in a much larger body of work that I have been developing around images of childhood that, I hope, show something other than ‘innocence’. Since the late 90s I have been interested in my son’s games, words, songs and drawings and have made other work around these themes. Recently my daughter is also becoming part of this work.

Good job my kids like performing. They have both seen the piece and given it the thumbs up. That’s great because I think the dialogue I have with my kids about the work I make is really important. I continue to ponder the implications of featuring my children in artwork that I might exhibit publicly and want to include them as part of a playful process in it’s development. I hope they regard the resulting images as representing celebration, desire, passionate attachment as well as difficulty, trouble and tension. Already I am aware that Sam’s view of what I make changes rapidly with the passage of time and this is something that I hope to look at in future work.

living room

This is an experiment in posting an image - a still from the 3 screen HD video work made for the National Review of live art. I hope to try to post some video in the near future.