Blog posts - page 8
2021 in Review: Who knows anything anymore?
31 Dec 2021 year in review
Yet again, I sit down to summarize the year gone by and yet again I find myself struggling for words. It has been another year of chaos and contradiction, of pandemic and freedom, of confusion and connection. As I write, I am ill with COVID 19, somewhat inevitably being hit by omicron. Of course, I am lucky enough to be vaccinated, so I have avoided the worst of it. I started the year in lockdown and end it in isolation. Inbetween have been moments of connection and moments of joy. Looking back over my previous posts (2016,
Uncertain Art
01 Nov 2021 art
I’ve been thinking about The Green Knight ever since I saw it a month ago. The film is a hypnotic blend of English myth, dream like strangeness and stiking imagery.1 . What has kept me returning to the film in my head is how little it explains for the audience. There is a clear quest with monsters and talking animals, but within this framework it resists easy interpretation. There’s no simple explanation of what the different perspectives mean or why Gaiwan is on the quest. Instead, it leaves the meaning up to the audience.
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Cartography
21 Sep 2021 poetry
I draw a square, to represent a former tobacco warehouse,
converted by the council into offices, where I worked
for a charity. On my desk, a spider plant strained
towards the distant, narrow window. In pencil I sketch
two parallel lines to scale to show the road I would walk
every day, listening to podcasts I now can’t remember,
past the tower blocks being torn down to make way for unaffordable flats,
past all the independent boutiques selling so many
house plants and minimalist vases that used to be...
Art as Play
19 Aug 2021 creativity
I’ve spent a lot of this year consciously learning what was previously unconscious. I lost faith in my writing, so I took a lot of workshops and attempted to figure out exactly what I am doing. For about five years, I’ve been writing poetry and still feel a certain level of imposter syndrome, not really knowing what I am doing. Taking workshops has been an attempt to relearn what I already know on some level, while also attempting to implement the rules of poetry so I can do it ‘properly’ (whatever that means.)
