nearly two months later...

Degree show over, student work marked and verified.

School photo project finished. Wall printed onto vinyl banner material and went up on sports day. Looks great and feedback has been wonderful.

SATs results fantastic. Well done Sam!

Inductions days went well at Weydon but Sam is not is a class with most of his friends. Seems that they didn't ask to be with him!

Leavers stuff seemed to go on for about two weeks. School finished two days ago with copious tears shed by the girls whilst private tears shed by my boy - not because he is leaving - because he has been excluded from various events. My heart is breaking for him. Why has this happened to him so regularly? Is it just because he doesn't play sport? Are the other kids jealous of him? It does seem that there may have been some malicious back stabbing going on. It's hard to believe that kids this young can be so cruel. Only two of the nine or ten people that came to his party in December have invited him back to theirs. Don't the parents tell them that it is polite to return invitations?

Hopefully the big big big school (that seems so scarily big!) will provide a larger pool of potential pals and he'll meet some people with more mature ideas about friendship!

so much to blog about...

I don't know where to start...

First - the job - all fine with my 0.5 on DFSA but everything around me is changing. KR has become a Professor, LW has had her full time post reduced to 0.6 and SL, the course leader, has to have a second interview for his own job. The animation team have gone on management courses! So goodness knows where or when we will have some clue about how the course will shape up in the future.

Secondly - the school project. I will be finishing printing with Y5 tomorrow. They have made some lovely images that don't seem to duplicate those made by Y6 too much. There will be plenty of variety in the outcome. I have put together some A0 grids of 16 images and I am getting quotes to print and mount eight of these to construct the final image wall. Work with Y4 begins after Easter, but I may have to ask Luke to deliver the introductory presentation as I will be in Florida...

Which brings me on to the final bloggable item. Holiday. Yippee! We just booked a cheap fly/drive to Orlando. Disney World here we come. I swore I wouldn't go again after visiting the Paris one a couple of years ago. I hate the artificial, consumer driven, tackiness of the whole experience. But the kids (and Mark?) love it. I look forward to chilling by the beach for the second week.

And one more thing to add... Google found our old friend Alexis S for us! She owns a cafe that sounds incredibly cool, hip and trendy in Miami http://www.lunastarcafe.com/ Hope we get to visit or meet up with her.

will I still have a job?

I had an email yesterday to say that Digital Film and Screen Arts will be grouped with Animation under one Course Leader who will be appointed on Monday 16th March and that we will all have meetings to discuss the new course structure. Today I found out my meeting will be the following day. It therefore seems likely that there must already be a decision about who will be doing what and it seems quite possible that some jobs will go. I have heard unofficially that I am 'at risk' but no one has officially notified me in those terms yet. We are left to 'read between the lines.'  This is very upsetting and stressful for everyone and the UCA hierarchy do not seem to show much concern for the academic workforce by letting the speculation continue for more than a week after this announcement.

On a more positive note, I can't imagine why I would have been awarded a Teaching Fellowship if the plan was to get rid of me. Also I am multi skilled and therefore adaptable. Perhaps I could be redeployed to another course if the worse does come to the worse. It would be such a shame because DFSA is a damn good course and I would be so sad to see it close or leave it - but I must keep my job somehow. I moved here to do it and can't imagine life here without being part of the university.

half term break - for school anyway!

As usual I had to work during half term but did manage to get a few days of fun with the kids. On Wednesday I took A to see The Sound Of Music, Thursday we had a lazy day and Friday we went for a walk with friends in the forest in the lovely sunshine. I found out that Monday 23rd was an inset day - shock horror! Great to have such good friends that helped out with the children as again, I had to work.

Saturday was a gardening day. We dug the vegetable patch and started to plan what we will grow this year. Tried to get the kids interested in it but with no luck. So much for family fun with the Farnham Food Initiative... I would love to join but only if the whole family was up for it. Can't seem to persuade them in the pleasures of growing our own... if it was cocoa beans to make chocolate - that would be another matter!

On Sunday we went to London - skateboarding on Portabello Rd, farmers' market at Salusbury School, Queens Park and Camden Market. A has a t-shirt from cyperpunk shop - Dog Save The Queen.

freeeeezing weather

University closed. School closed. Road into Rowledge impassable, blocked with skidded cars that can't get up the hill. That's our last two days. But what fun we've had in the deepest snow I've seen for ages. They say it was like this in 1991 but I reckon Mark and I were in India or somewhere because I don't remember it. We have built snowmen, been sledging, spent far too long in the pub, walked in the forest, had log fires and generally chilled out. It's so strange to have a couple of unexpected days with the family and no plans to do chores, visits or whatever. It is almost better than a holiday!

I'm a bit worried about the students losing a couple of days lectures but I am sure we will make up time somewhere down the line and I have been posting announcements into Blackboard that I hope they will read and act on - including a project to make a photograph a snowman!

do I have time for a second life?

After going to the presentation yesterday, I felt very enthusiastic about the potential of Second Life as a tool for teaching and learning. So finally, against all the odds, I have got myself an avatar and have spent my first evening exploring. First I went to a 'mall' where newbies like myself were meant to be able to find more out - but quite how one went about this was not clear. I read a bit about changing my appearance and tweaked it a bit - taller, slimmer - as I would like in my first life. Hot places to visit were not particularly interesting and not many people were around. All a bit lonely and boring really. So I decided to visit ucreative island - also empty. There was an 'interactive whiteboard' so I tried to interact with it and ended up losing control of my avatar to a little blue blob for no apparent reason other than to move it up, down, left and right!! What was that all about? Very disappointing, but I was probably missing something - what? There was also no instructions about how to get my movements back to normal which impeded my explorations for the rest of the evening and resulted in me flying sideways through a rainforest!! Great graphics but they crashed my computer.

The Uni is thinking about starting a new degree in computer gaming and it is possible that I would be asked to teach on this course - so I feel I should persevere with this in an attempt to carve out a relevant area of expertise. Reckon I'll have to ask my son to help me with the basics as I can't see how I will have time to complete the learning curve in tutorials. I don't particularly want to start building and so on, but I am very interested in Second Life's potential to pilot new methods of teaching, communicating with students and colleagues at other campuses, showing student work, disseminating research and so on. Coincidentally the Guardian Education ran a short piece about this today.

'performance' development review

Aha! Just realised it is my 'performance' that is being reviewed rather than my personal development needs! A misunderstanding of the meaning of the acronym.

personal development review

Can the use of a Mac and software be regarded as 'training'? Yes, there is a great deal to be gained from having a project in progress and finding out what you need to do to achieve specific needs - but does this equate with 'proper' training. I don't think so. We need to subscribe to an online or DVD training package that will update us with new versions of software as we introduce them at UCA. And we need to be given the time during working hours to use this package. I need to document this in my pdr which, at the moment, seems totally focussed on what I can do for the course/UCA, rather than any form of personal development for myself.

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.

equal ops for mums at work

Just doing an e-learning module on Diversity in the Workplace which links to this:
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,2259070,00.html

It seems that we face in-built discrimination at interviews, never mind facing up to the emotional push and pull that takes place between employer and family once we get the job. I suppose I can see the pitfalls for small companies - perhaps they need more government support.

Assessments and Research

I'm on campus at UCCA every day this week. Two days of first year assessments and three days of third year assessments. I love this time of year - it's like going to a film festival for a whole week! It's great to see that most of the students that I taught two years ago have matured and produced some outstanding films, interactive artwork, multiscreen installations and so on as their graduation work. There are definitely some undergraduates to watch over the next couple of years too. Next week will be formal marking and feedback.

This busy work schedule has meant calling on favours from friends to look after the children. We will reward ourselves with some 'family time' at half term when we go camping in Cornwall - let's hope we have good weather. After the external examiners have reported and the Progression Board is over, then hopefully I will get a few weeks research leave. I have already booked out a high definition video camera with a view to making some work at my parents house which will probably have to be sold sometime soon.

Sacrificial Motherhood?

I discovered a current research project being undertaken at the University of Brighton by Annie (Hsiao-Ching) Wang. The title of her investigation is The Creativity of Motherhood: Self-Representation over a Time of Growth in Contemporary Taiwan. Her project is more focussed on self portraiture than my own work. She suggests that self-representation is the most important element in announcing the self-determination of the mother to inhabit the world of images. She says ‘By doing so, I attempt to challenge the great number of stereotypical images of the selfless mother.’ Three of her five research questions are again about self-representation: how do I use self-representation to express my own experience of motherhood? What are the conventional codes of representation used to depict motherhood in visual art? How do contemporary women artists use self-representation to represent their motherhood? It seems that Wang’s project, then, is quite different to my own – not only because she is interested in contradicting the stereotypes in her own Taiwanese society – but also because it seems that she proposes to make images of herself as mother in order to counter the stereotype of sacrificial motherhood.

Having said this, sacrificial motherhood is my reality. Putting my needs first is very rarely possible. My existence is pretty much determined by the needs of others - not just children, but partner, parents, friends, employers, students – the list goes on. As an artist I am driven to document this in order to survive it and I strive to make sense of it in my work. I have to negotiate with my family for it to be possible for me to make any artwork at all. By definition the work has to be made by intuition, impulse and expediency. As I write this my daughter wakes up and I have to stop!! See what I mean? My practice has to reflect this by being fluid and flexible. A neat and well articulated methodology may firstly set me up to fail the objectives and secondly stifle creative outcomes. That is my fear.

research and working from home

Despite two 10 year olds 'wrestling' on the Wii behind me I have managed to complete student feedback on the recent digital imaging project so I will hopefully be ahead of myself at the end of the semester. This is around the time my 'official' research time will start, so it's important to try to clear the decks if I am actually to achieve anything in 10 days.

Last year I spent most of my off campus research time in June and July looking for sheltered accommodation for my mother and father who subsequently moved into the area in November. My mother has been ill in hospital almost ever since and is due to be discharged next week. Balancing work and research with family and home has been quite a major challenge since about this time last year. I haven't managed to make a research presentation at UCCA, but figure that is probably OK since I made two presentations the previous year. I also achieved an 'output' ahead of taking my research leave. I made a three screen high definition video work 'living room' that was shown at the National Review of Live Art, Tramway, Glasgow and subsequently travelled to Thessalonika for the Strange Screen Festival.

Anyway - the pressure is on to achieve another output soon. I have thought about going back to an archive of old work created pre-family to publish a book or create a website, but I am not sure my heart is in this project. I want to move on and devote precious time to projects that are more relevant to my life as it is now.