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Mobile Photography and Art Flickr/Instagram Showcase – 17 May 2020
Art therapy has the power to relieve trauma and I believe it should be used widely to help survivors rebuild their lives. There seems to be a general consensus that more should be done to end slavery and trafficking but still it is an area of criminal activity that appears to be on the rise, even as we now find ourselves in lockdown. Art therapy itself covers various forms, drawing, photography, painting, but it’s still not widely implemented in a role of healing for victims. This is a disparity that some aid organisations are not embracing, I wonder if it is because some donors are unprepared to invest in this,…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 9 February 2020
“I’m with Edvard Munch, who said photography can’t compete with painting, because it can’t deal with heaven or hell”, said David Hockney in today’s Sunday Times. I’m inclined to disagree with this and of course, I can point to this weeks showcase to support my case. Our musical choice matches perfectly, love, loss and the nature of reality. Heaven and hell? Oh yes, having lived full lives, if we cannot cure mortality, should we at least die trying…? The one thing humans have to save them of the depths of despair is humour and like many I have a strong one, Hockney does too “Do you know why laughter is…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 8 December 2019
The life of an artist encompasses many avenues, one perhaps that I am frequently reminded of is the need for solitude, to create. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre said ‘hell is other people‘. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I disagree with this sentiment, like many, it depends on the company. Orson Welles said ‘we’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone’, I disagree, I was fully present when my three children were born, I’ve never lived alone and nor would wish to and I’d be surprised if I die alone. I have experienced a death of a loved one, who died alone but many of the deaths I have experienced, have…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 24 November 2019 –
I live in a built up area, as you might imagine, but when I stopped off at a petrol station, in the dark and pouring rain, to fill my car up this week, I was silenced into hushed awe. I lined up a pump, got out and opened the filler cap, whilst the blond captivating man, not disimilar in looks to the iconic Kurt Cobain, in the oposite pump was reaching a crescendo as he squeezed his pump into the fill spout. As first it was an unnerving experience, all the punters filling up their cars were hushed, as if in a theatre, all polite, near silence, no one stopped…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 17 November 2019
I was delighted this week to learn that 45 year old Ivorian artist, Joana Choumali has become the first African photographer to scoop the Prix Pictet prize, winning with a series of embroidered photographs responding to the trauma of terrorist attacks in Ivory Coast in 2016. The series is entitled ‘Ca va aller‘ – meaning – ‘it will be ok‘, a reference to stoical reaction to adversity that she said permeated Ivorian culture. Her images were printed onto canvas and then later embroidered with stitches directly onto the surface. Combining photographic imagery with fabric and therefore, creating ‘conceptual portraits‘. She created this work ‘as a need to process the pain‘.…
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Mobile Photography & Art – Flickr/Instagram Group Showcase – 10 November 2019
Many people write to me each week and I love it. Sometimes, I am asked for advice, sometimes I’m asked about me. This week a few times, it was mostly the latter. I was asked, ‘how do you keep coming up with ideas?’, ‘where do they generate from?‘ and then ‘how do you deal with a creative rut?‘. I think the latter was the hardest because the first two I answered with ‘I’m constantly gathering ideas, things that I see each day, people I meet, observations that I make, judgements (I hate to say), but they all encapsulate and become the images and ideas that I’ve been having for the…
