The PhD Guilt Baby

The Guilt Baby

I am resurrecting this blog after quite a long hiatus to help me keep focused on my PhD. For those of you who know me, you will know that I am a workaholic and find my PhD a difficult beast.

A PhD is a very interesting life choice. This year I will finish after trying to truck through it during sickness, troubled family members and a enforced artistic hiatus in order to travel to Iceland for a residency and create some other works. In Iceland I gained the insight into why I need to finish this PhD. I am a finisher. I finish things that I start and therefore I will finish my PhD. It is also a fantastic opportunity and I am learning how to love it.

I was talking with a friend / mentor yesterday and it was an incredibly useful exercise. I know everyone says it helps to talk but I actually did it and this conversation really hit home. We talked about the feelings you have while you complete your PhD. The stress and the frustration, the highs and lows. I brought up my guilt baby that I had been carrying around for about 3.5 years and found out I wasn't the only parent out there. Other people give birth to PhD guilt babies and they cart them around as well. 

 

 

A PhD guilt baby is a little creature that wakes you up every morning saying "why aren't you working on your phd today?" It is very active at social events suggesting "you should be working". It is particularly rampant when you sit down to watch a movie or to read an unrelated book, "you realise you could use your time more effectively don't you?"  It can be a strange beast and I have been told that it won't leave you for a while. Even once you hand in your final piece, it will still chatter at you from time to time. 

The only times I escape from the guilt is when I am working on my PhD or when I am making with my hands. Such as silversmithing, or leatherworking. This mindfulness in the activity at hand is more enlivening and replenishing than sleep. Maybe this is when the guilt baby slumbers.

So I am going to treat the guilt baby like a real one and factor in feeding times, and sleep and play time. 

I will feed the baby with productivity to quieten it.

I will put it to sleep by doing something mindful each day. 

I will allow it to play by acknowledging it's presence but not letting it distract me from other activities.

I wanted to openly acknowledge this because often your PhD is about pretending that you are on top of it all the time. When in actual fact you are in a state of constant questioning. Which is like having a concentrated, focused existential crisis that you have to factor in time to try and decode each day. 

on that note I will leave you with a new love of mine, Ann Hamilton. 

 

She makes INCREDIBLE installations. I will post about her in the coming days. 

In the meantime I am focusing on figuring out what my final installation will be this year. A week spent nutting things out. This is the part I really enjoy. I will post photos of the process as it evolves.

Sarah out.

the 3rd and 4th Space

I have been contemplating my ideal working space. As I am theatre trained - naturally I move towards a blank black space as this is where I eventually install my works. However, this time in Iceland in a visual arts set up with space and place in mind has got me thinking differently. Rather than my journals consisting of frustration - they now note ideas such as

"I've been pondering this idea of S.E.A.S (the title of the NES festival) - the sea - lapping at the shore like a lazy dog. Boats seems to mean so much here. I saw an old boat in the paddock lying on the side. I want to make a futile attempt to take it back to the sea. Balloons tied to one side to set it right and take it back. Futile I know. but maybe that's the beauty of it. Maybe that's the beauty of everything. Poetry, art, love, life - a futile but heart warming attempt to bring things to where we envisage them. I don't mean futile in a harsh sense - but more a small, considered attempt that invariably will not come to fruition but we try, none the less, for the pleasure of poetic action"

So - potentially my space where I move, create, work and put together needs to be a studio of mess and clutter than I construct in and move the finished products into place in the theatre. I want to start organising a studio space as soon as I get back to Brisbane. Melody, the director of NES (and a good friend), called the space you go between work and home your '3rd space' - the space you go to escape and I think this studio is my third place. I go here for entertainment and release. Actually -  I have been rolling around these ideas of spaces in my mind - considering my spaces and where I exist and I am thinking that this could actually be a fourth space?

Potentially we have four 'spaces' in which we exist.

1st  Space          -  Home
2nd Space         -  Work
3rd Space          -  Elsewhere (coffee house, cinema, park, pub) that is completely removed 1 and 2.
4th Space          -  Studio Space (for experimentation with the ideas that boil down from existence in                                the 1st, 2nd and 3rd space. Maybe the 4th space is what makes an artist what                                        they are. It's the point of distillation, where all the ideas from the 3 dominant
                             spaces filter down and trickle into some kind of expression of existence.

I think to have the space to let things organise and unpack themselves is this 4th space. Since having a dedicated space for these things I have started to journal and draw for the first time in years. Here is my offering from my fourth place. The first image I have drawn in many, many years. 

I'm curious to know about other people's 4th space and where it is / why it is / what it is. Please feel free to comment below. 

The battles of site

Site specific

Falling in love with a difficult site is like falling in love with someone that is already taken. You know in all sensible thoughts that it should not happen - you list all the problems involved and the shit fight that will happen, but despite this you can't help but stare longingly at it and want to mold it into something workable, something achievable, something more magnificent than anything before. I am in Iceland currently, in a little town called Skagastrond, and am currently looking sites to stage a floating dinner (like pictured below) and, of course, have fallen in love with a very difficult space.

It is an old coal chimney stack that used to power the town fishing factory. It looks quite ugly from outside. And is dirty as all hell inside.

But the view upwards is so beautiful. And the brickwork is stunning.

And so I want to make it work, more than anything else. I would build the table inside as the opening is 50cm wide and the inside is 3m in diametre.  I would clean up the floor and dig deep to see if there is a brick or concrete bottom underneath the muck. I would see if I can run power from afar and talk with the town electrician about lighting solutions. I would make it warm and inviting and a dinner for 5 or so people.

There are two other spaces to visit today - the church and 'fellsborg' which is a function space. They make more 'sense' and are user friendly but how my heart aches to make an incredible experience in a chimney stack. And if we go with the definition of site specific as being 'an artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning' - then this feels more true to a) creating an experience specifically in the space, rather than finding a space to suit a 100% formulated experience (more like a 'venue') and b) this is a part of the old town and it feels like this responds more to the history of the town, and enlivening unexpected spaces.

I'll keep you posted either way :-)

I am in love

I have been slack. But I am here now. My day started badly with that old tiredness-that-you-can't-shake feeling and an overactive brain that wouldn't stay focused on the task at hand. So I brokered a deal, "if you do these two boring things, the afternoon can be spent tumbling through the internet looking for inspiration". It conceded and away I went. And I fell back in love. He's a Norwegian artist that goes by the name of Rune Gineriussen. He creates installations in nature using foreign, man made objects. A lot of the time these objects create a relationship, for example - two chairs staring out to sea.

Or they mimic other living things like crabs as seen here below

 

I think my favourite thing about Rune, and why I am in love with him is the poetry in his art. The fact that he creates fantasy in real life. Takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary. That's most evident in his work with lamps in the forest. 

Artworks like this give me the same feeling as beautiful images like the spiders that have coated the trees in Pakistan in wake of the flooding, pictured below.

at any rate, go check out more of Rune Guneriussen at his website http://www.runeguneriussen.no/index.html
The only thing I wish I could change about his work is that, much like Andy Goldsworthy, the work they create is so remote it is usually only seen through photography. I would love to wander through the forest of lamps at night and see the colours shine of the snow. Can you imagine walking through a forest at night and seeing a light from afar, going to investigate, and finding that? I think it would be the same kind of magic that reading Narnia gave you when you were a kid.

I have an obsession with abandoned buildings and post apocalyptic literature. Last night I was walking through West End and said to my friend "Gee the floods were awesome!" and then realised how insensitive that statement was. So many people lost loved ones, their homes, were displaced, lost sentimental possessions. I was fortunate. My propensity to live on hills served me well. I attempted to explain why I loved the flood. The flood to me, in a snapshot moment was tearing down ann street in the valley, on that hill as you head off the story bridge and towards the city. I'd had a couple beers and was tearing down a 5 lane road at midnight and it was dark - no lights and deserted, not a single car, not a single soul except for me and Alister. And I remember yelling out with pure adrenalin filled joy and thinking "remember this moment. This is a snapshot of youth." And I have held that moment with me. So every time I think of the flood I remember the view of my hands on the handle bars of my bike and this swelling feeling of excitement and adrenaline in my chest. This was as close to post apocalyptic literature as I could get. Well I COULD get a lot closer. However, this was nice, safe, strange adventure.

So ... I don't know why I felt a need to write this. I wanted to update this blog. I will now leave you with one of my favourite images of all time.

Paris flooded 1910, books spilled onto the streets

I don't like drafts

I don't like writing drafts. I have never liked writing drafts. Until I came to honours I got through everything in life by researching and researching and then writing it all in 3 hours and handing it in without a second glance.

The process of fixing words is just not my forte. I like writing them. I enjoy spewing them onto the page very much but the action of trawling back through? I find this excruciatingly frustrating. I find peeling labels off things more thrilling.

I don't know what it is about me. But I simply like the immediacy of the first act. If it's not right then that's okay. Disregard it. Write something new.

This is a failed system. One I have to ignore because it simply does not work in the world of research.

I am also a hopelessly restless human being. Always have been and always will. I find sitting still a challenge.

So, despite having a similar relationship to editing as most people do to the sound of fingernails on chalkboard - off I go again. Luckily I am built with an internal headmaster who screeches at me and tells me to get back to work.

Other wise I would never edit a thing.

Seizure - a crystal filled house in London

An artwork by Roger Hiorns set in an old apartment in London. Commissioned by Artangel, this artwork interupts an abandoned space, turning it into a site of crystalined beauty. Hiorns poured 75,000 litres of copper sulphate into an old apartment and let the artwork grow. The result drew hundreds of people a day on a pilgrimage across the city to visit this strange crystal wonderland. Hiorns is interested in sculpture that is self driven and grows in its own form. Seizure was inspired by the cathedrals he spent so much time in during his childhood as a choirboy. For him the structure of the crystal mirrors the architecture of the cathedrals.

 crystals

Aerial view of a bathtub

More details about the artwork and the work of arts commissioning body artangel can be found here



http://www.artangel.org.uk/projects/2008/seizure

thanks.