-
Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 10 May 2020
‘Literature is the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness’, said author Garth Greenwell. The author of a new book, ‘Cleanness’ which I have yet to read, as I am currently rereading his debut ‘What belongs to you’, a book that has served Greenwell, so well. It’s not the subject that draws me as much as the equisite literature that soaks every line. However, I believe good art can be the most powerful means we have for communicating consciousness. The kind of art that worms its way into a person’s being, art that imbues our lives, illuminating our innermost thoughts with eloquence, compassion. Art teaches us to be more…
-
Mobile Photography & Art Flickr and Instagram Showcase 3 May 2020
I would ponder many of us are presently negotiating the past and reimagining the future in this current knotty dissonance. I continue spending my time performing love by work. It’s a time of radical reinterpretation, one where each deeply personal meditation enables me to explore how time changes our relationship to place, other people and to ourselves. My visceral journey continues with an observation of an ekphrastic body of work and experience, built over the past thirty years, where anything other than art that is intellectually and aesthetically exciting, is abhorred. We rail against the impotence of travel but I can personally dispel the pernicious myth that time travel is…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 5 April 2020
Influenced by Susan Sontag, Maggie Nelson and Elaine Scarry, ‘The Art of the Body’ by Alexander Allison has perhaps been my fastest read yet. Not that there’s any race with reading, but sometimes, it’s so impossible for me to put a book down, that even when making dinner, I’ll prop a book open and this is what happened to me during this further week of lock down 2020. ‘The Art of the Body’ is a book about a woman, Janet, who cares a lot. She cares about what people think of her, she cares about the opportunities she’s wasted, she cares about the hurt she’s caused. But Janet is also…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 29 March 2020
It is a glorious spring day outside, there was a beautiful dawn chorus emitting from the garden birds this morning, the flowering bushes are starting to blossom. There’s a cold east wind but the piercing sun heats up our glass roofed conservatory, where I am writing this column with so much warmth, I envisage I am basking on a warm coastline, cocktail in hand. Of course, the realisation that Coronovirus was going to be a very serious problem came to me several weeks ago. My husband was interviewing a photographer in Northern Italy, before the lockdown, but after the schools had closed. He spoke about all the teenagers hanging around,…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 22 March 2020
22 March 2020, Mother’s Day, England, “fear educates our care for each other – we fear a sick person might be made sicker, or that a person’s life might be made even more miserable and we do whatever we can to protect them because we have a fear a version of human life in which everyone lives only for themselves. I am not the least bit afraidd of this fear, for fear is a vital and necessary part of life“, observed poet Anne Boyer. This week, like many of us, I’ve immersed myself in art, both written and visual. I found myself, once more, drawn to Bleak House by Charles…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 15 March 2020
“Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.” ―E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops and the first book that I immediately reread thrice, when I was thirteen. It was the first book that interrupted my thought processes enough to relieve me of outside pressures. It was transient, like a…
-
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 8 March 2020
Clive James the prolific Austrialian author, poet and broadcaster died late last year. I’ve always been a fan of his work, he made his name as a television critic, essayist and wit but he started as a poet and just over five years ago he was diagnosed with leukaemia, emphysema and kidney failure – he described it as ‘the lot’ and he ended as a poet. There’s a particular story I remember reading about James, it goes like this… One time he was going through a creative dry spell. He had written a play for the London stage and it bombed spectacularly. Not only did it ruin his family financially…
-
Mobile Photography & Art Showcase – 23 February 2020
Sally Brampton (founding editor of Elle magazine, UK – who killed herself after health professionals ‘missed opportunities to offer her help’, in 2016) said in her memoir on depression: “We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval: ‘He fought so hard.’ And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.” And so, this week, my thoughts have been with the local family of a 15 year old boy from my daughters school who killed himself.…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 16 February 2020
Fatigue with the stress of life, current news, financial worries, sickness, broken relationships, abuse, wreak havoc. As I shot my (medicinal) drug needle miraculously through my fingernail instead of my thigh this week, I know and it hurts but there’s also something called ‘compassion fatigue’ in relation to photography. It is so called when people view vast quantites of shocking images, perhaps photojournalism from a warzone for example and they become muted, to the visual atrocities before their eyes. From as early as the 1980’s ‘compassion fatigue’ was also known as ‘Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder’, essentially it developed from an excess of compassion. David Campbell, Director of Programs and Outreach…
-
Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 2 February 2020
“Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties“, writes Erich Fromm, one of the most prescient thinkers of the 20th century. Love and creativity play a huge part of my life and it is physical. Love of art, the art of loving, irrational, intellectual, obsessive, insightful. Professor Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at the University College London, proved in a series of pioneering brain-mapping experiments that viewing art triggers a surge of dopamine, the feel-good chemicial, into the orbito-frontal cortex of the brain, resulting in feelings of intense pleasure, the same part of the brain that is excited, when we fall for someone, romantically. For all of us associated with…
