23rd January
I’ve lost the plot now with this fucking blog. Before Christmas it was all so disciplined but since returning I have found it increasingly difficult to maintain the blog. However, the blog (“Practice in Context”) does now seem to go hand in hand with my actual practice, one influencing the other and vice-versa.

My practice is also taking a hit concerning the level of productivity. The plaster bullet is ready but John the technician is away all week and he needs to take me through the fibre glassing stage. My metal cast bullets are ready to cast but the equipment has failed. My computer work needs doing but my hard drive has given up the ghost, all that’s left for me is to read and to make baseball bats.

I carried out experiments using lazertran yesterday and decided that this was the way forward for now. The seven sins will be represented by seven baseball bats on a rack. What the rack will be constructed of I do not yet know. Books cast in resin or some such thing. The lazertran enables me to intricately decorate the baseball bats. Simon later told me of an artist he had seen over Christmas in Holland or Belgian. w Brian Jungen makes bats and also stencills words into them (more research is required) We also had a conversation about situation Leeds. I told him to check out the plaster bullet in the casting room.


Brian Jungen


I had a meeting this morning with the rest of the year. Just a catch up really. I think everyone is suffering the same winter blues. My blues have been made much worse by my own stupid behaviour.

I went to see my grandparents on Friday for my Grandmas birthday I then stayed with my parents and went out for a few sherbets with my dad. I got him talking about the pit and said I would have to record his memories before they had disappeared. He said I need my mum’s fathers as he worked underground before mechanisation.

“In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal miners working. It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an intellectual and as a superior person generally. For it is brought home to you at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweet their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.” (29)

A statement that can be applied to almost all manual labourers.

My Grandfather goes in for an op next week; I do hope we get a chance to do it... I was pissed when we got home and still a little delicate in the morning when driving my parents to the airport in Liverpool. Following the airport trip I drove down the road into Liverpool itself to visit Rob and Linda. Rob was flush with a new job at a big up and coming internet company "Head of mobile communications" and all the money that comes with that sort of title. The Porsche 911 is already booked.

Rob and Linda married several years ago in NYC. I stayed over by myself after the wedding and once I had done most of the museums and galleries as well as going to a game at The Garden, I ended up in a bar drinking with some guy who worked on the set of “The Soprano’s”. The following morning I was trying to walk off my hangover in the Park when it started to rain heavily. I ran out of the park across the street and into the Guggenheim, which I had yet to visit. This was my introduction to the “Chremaster Cycles” by Mathew Barney.


“Barnys visual language is Protean: drawing and film unite to engender photography and sculpture, which in turn produce more drawing and film, in an incestuous intermingling of materials that defies any hierarchy of artistic mediums.” (30)
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Barny's show had a profound influence over my practice. Whilst not dealing with the same or even similar subject matter, I never the less found his method of working and displaying incredibly interesting. Witnessing the show inside the Guggenheim made me realise the importance of the building or environment in which the work is situated effecting how the viewer approaches and reads the work. I also found the grandly theatrical nature of the show very appetising, placing the viewer inside the work. The disused church (St Marks) is therefore an integral part of my work. The Phenomenological experience of encountering the repeated casts inside the Church and what this means to each individual viewer. The Social/ institutional is about the congregation or the lack of. The local community as part of wider society or individual constituent. The discursive element asks questions about faith, science, hierarchies of power and belief. What is the piece saying? Greenberg would have classed it as “Theatre” and not art. But this does not bother me.

Rob and Linda had guests staying and nagged me to stay also. After several hours I gave in. A quick trip to the pub to watch the Hammers was followed by their guest’s arrival, introductions dinner and then the other. By the time the Ricky Hatton fight had come on I had lost my sight and was only conscious of someone’s breath on my neck throughout the night until 7 in the morning. I woke the following afternoon, confused and somewhat distressed. I placed on my shoes, thanked my hosts and glided back across the Pennines, a nice trip if not a little dangerous at points. I sorted the house out and then went down the pub to watch the Arsenal Man U game. Great game and I needed the drink to quieten my mind. I went home and slept roughly until the following morning.

Fuck me! My mouth was in shreds and blisters and I could hardly open it for the self induced grinding lock jaw. My ears now rang and fizzed making me dizzy and after some thought remembered that breath on my neck all of Saturday night and Sunday morning, realizing it had been produced by the stereo speaker sat directly behind my head, relentlessly pumping out hard house (not my cup of tea really).

The next two days would be spent in some kind of physical and mental turmoil. Not knowing what to eat, when to eat or weather I could eat. Not sleeping but when I did, having nightmares.
Not waking but when I did, doing so too late or far too early. I will spend the next weeks trying to sweet it out a little ready for her arrival from Hong Kong.

“Only the pervasive fantasy can still save us”

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(29) George Orwell “The roar to Wigan Pier” pp31 (30) Mathew Barny’s “Cremaster Cycles” pp1