The Cut

 

I decided a month ago to have a break and get the move between houses sorted.  I haven't had a total break as I've been reading and thinking and going into the playground but doing my PhD has not been a priority, or the first thing on my mind and this has made me feel like I have had a break.

Today is probably a day I should get back to it, mainly because I don't have anything else which I could really call what I am doing.  I would like to say I am feeling less stressed but the tiny things I have got to sort out and the background feeling that I should be doing something else, whatever I am  actually doing  conspire to keep my stress levels consistently high.

I had my stitches out yesterday though I'm not ready to start back doing proper physical work with my hands, the wound looks really good but it did get a bit sore very quickly as I realised when I tried to cut the grass yesterday. In the month I've had off I have tried to gain some clearer thoughts about where my writing should go.  This hasn't really happened. The world seemed to sweep into some of the spaces that were opening up and wash the stuff that was starting to sediment away. I have a suspicion that this was a necessary thing.  I am not really a fan of bullet points but going back through this blog I am aware that the short and too the point bits are quite useful.  They are points of consolidation to be worked out from.  I will log them now and then move on.

Not doing anything at the playground with the loose parts area is actually a really good thing.  The playground staff are taking ownership and the kids needs to get used to it.  When I sit in the space and look at everything I've shaped over the years I think it is something to be proud of . The loose parts area is part of the PhD as it is much more about affordance and potential.  This project was always about space and not about running workshops.

I am not sure how to work with young people to do research with them and comply with the ethical protocol.  The study will be shaped very much by what it  is possible within external constraints which I have decided is a good thing but will probably make it slightly navel gazing.

I can probably make a contribution by expanding a space between researching with young people using research -creation and process philosophy and individual artistic practice in relation to process.

 

Interestingly what is lacking at the moment is a coherent practice  I feel like i have lost it a bit this year, misplaced a piece of the sense of it.  The last bit of fieldwork then has to be about regaining this with the playground and the young people - investing in finding a dispersed subjective within time and creativity - technically getting my MoJo back.

I will work on it. 

The other thing that struck me is how the making and shaping and building isn't understood and does not come to writing easily.  The writing and thinking about the body, the physicality of the space and materials the cuts callouses and bruises does not and will never make sense to people who don't have an insight into it through the doing of it.  There is an open gulf and seperation between those who make and those who don't. 

It feels like moving sand

 We moved 15 tons of sand yesterday at the playground.  I had arranged for it to be delivered at 7.30 in the morning. It was lightly used play sand that had formed a pop up beach at the Peace Gardens in Halifax only 12 hours earlier.  I am very pleased with my intervention, I was behind making it happen and it took a little maneuvering, we really needed to refresh the sandy bits of the playground.  I also enjoyed working hard with my friends and feeling useful. It has been a difficult time at the playground with the specter of Covid hanging in the background, a worry about funding and the fact we have been closed for building work for a couple of weeks. I think for the staff the sand was yet another thing to have to think about but now its all moved and raked flat it is actually one less thing to think about so it's a result. 

When you have to tackle a big job like moving sand you can only think about what you have done not what you have left to do. That is unless you get very near to the end when you don't really have a job to do so you can think about finishing it.  Completing a PhD is a bit like this except when you move sand it is harder to feel like you are going backwards the pile goes down. The task is simpler, move pile A to location B.  If you keep at it, however fast you work or don't work it will eventually get done, unless you stop. Working on writing feels more complicated. You can go past the sweet spot in writing, loose the tenuous threads that weave thought together through words, cut the ties.  You can move the giant pile of sand that hangs above you as a metaphor yet feel unclear about where it actually needs to go. 

It is Thursday and it is my writing day.  I had an hour long conversation with Yvonne this morning which was great.  It was the kind of conversation I thought I would be having all the time with people when I started my PhD before Covid and reality got in the way. Then my friend Hugh came over and we talked until 2.00.  We talked about theory and films and linguistics and post-structuralism and all my kids. We talked about new materialism and I pointed out the connection between Kathleen Stuarts Everyday Affect, Benjemens Two-Way Street and Ernst Blocks Traces all shifting the form, fizzing between fiction and fact .  We then talked about horror films and growing vegetables. I told Hugh I was tired and could not stop I said that at points I was beggining to unravel and part of this was physical, my body telling me to slow down.  I was not intending to tell him this. I don't really think I am unraveling in the slightest but it slipped out of the side of my mouth when he asked me how I was. Perhaps I need to pay attention. 

I am supposed to be giving myself a rest from the Phd as I haven't had a proper break for a while but like the giant heap of sand it is not going to move or write itself. I was intending to stick to my Thursdays writing.  I have written this Blog post  instead to cleverly remind my future self that there is something similar in writing a PhD to moving a giant pile of sand.

1. You cannot be overwhelmed by the task in hand or you will be immobilized

2. It is better to keep going if you can, when you stop you tend to seize up and its hard to get going again.

3. Its good to know where the sand is to be moved too. 

4. You can save time by working out the easiest route for the barrow, this is not always the most obvious one.

5. It is good to put a plank on the curb so you can wheel things smoothly.

6. The sand will never move itself.

7. You can bury your head in the moving of sand but the PhD will still be there when you emerge. 

*. Kids will be able to play in the sand dig and make castles it is important to do things that are useful even if other things don't get done. 

Seven is a good place to stop. I still can't really do any fieldwork with the kids but even though this is a reality it is starting to feel more like an excuse. I probably do need a break from thinking as it tends to become worrying and circular.

Feeelin g like things are temporary

 This is the longest break in my blog record since I started my PHD.  In the last 3 weeks I have packed up the old house moved too the new house, had a week in a school doing the Odd project, delivered a paper at the leaping in to the limanel Pgr Conference, done a lot of gardening and now feel pretty exhausted .  It is clear now that footballs not coming home. I don't seem to be able to switch off, every job seems to generate another job. The PhD work has suffered a little because I have been too busy to think.

I went back to the old house to delver the conference paper, it felt strange to be rattling around in the large empty rooms.  The WiFi switched over to the new house the day after the conference finished and I haven't really been back here  properly since then, I have a new home.  I haven't had much time to write or to take stock. I dodged a supervision last week  as I don't really have much to show.  I quite liked my presentation at the conference though, there was something about picking a line from Deleuze and Guattari and working it into my practice that I quite liked - it is at least the thread of something to follow.  

Yesterday I unpacked all my books, from my PhD shelves. This was interesting as I have them on 3 shelves, the old historical baseline books which are mainly philosophy and British cultural theory.  Then the central shelf which is the literature I really need to take account of - stuff on research creation and lots of Manning and a couple of new materialist classics and then lots of practical stuff on ethnography and writing - this is my pragmatic shelf ( its not quite big enough and runs onto the bottom shelf). The rest of the bottom is taken up with Ruskin and then there are the historic adventure playground books - there are not many of these but I think they will be useful at points.

Even though to reference Walter Benjamin I have unpacked my library  I don't feel like I am ready to start writing again. Something needs to give, there needs to be a pause for breath.  Moving house has not been easy. It has required monumental focus and graft and I don't feel at all settled yet.  I think when I get to the end of July and the playground opens up again  there will be a point to refocus and come up for air.  I remember a quote about been a tunneler and occasionally having to pop your head up out of the ground to see where you are.  Alfred North Whitehead in his flights of the speculative imagination talks of dropping down from the cloud in a plane- to land and take stock a while and find a sense of place and direction.  I feel very much like this, lost in the busy pragmatics of life. I am relatively happy and I want this feeling to carry on for a bit.  It will lead into an intensive period of some kind of fieldwork and then I will do other bits and bobs and spend time writing all this up next year.  At least that is the best laid plan of mice and a man.

Fitting a slide - to provide a line of flight.

 I'm 54 in two days and we are moving house so I'm not very focused on my school work.  I am interested in the slide as it is something that isn't part of my PhD and I don't really think its part of my arts practice it is something distinctly different. I am not really going to talk about Derrida now but very simply it may be useful for the PhD work as it presents us with an edge.  For me it is a clear and defined edge and I can probably think of a few reasons for this which I will list.  I can then use this list to help form a category of what can be practice and what can be research and then talk about slippage and lines of flight.

I have just broken off from revisiting a section of my literature review I wrote in September 2020.  It was useful as it felt like someone else had written it and although it wasn't terrible I could see where it needed a tighter focus and where it needed filling out.  Perhaps this will end up as a good way to write?  To get something down, stick it away for 4 months and then revisit it as if I am my own second author, it certainly helped to not be looking at a blank page.

I will have to be careful not to overdo things as I have overdone things and I'm aching all over and we have a big house move coming up.  I also for the record am feeling a little exhausted by the change of scenery coming up and the fact I haven't really had a break for while coupled with the fact that I don't actually feel like I'm doing anything even though I am doing loads.

The writing is probably going OK I am working on three trajectories and I think the potted literature review I came across this morning may become something plus I have the section on research creation.  Kate seems confident I will be able to hybrid this into a PhD document and although it will not be brilliant it will be full of practice. 

It is this I think that is interesting the relationship between thinking and doing that all practitioners have but few academics can actually have as they need to spend their lives becoming academic practitioners so there is not time to actually do anything else at a level that would give it the status of a practice.

That's why the slides important - its a line of flight out of the assemblage of the artists residency as method - I worked this out writing my literature review today.  There is a contradiction however as now I am using it as an example of difference it may re-enter the frame or platform of the work. I will need to work hard to keep it at a distance.

This afternoon I need to drill four holes and put bolts in - then it will be finished and can slide away.

Busy Week doing other stuff

 I have had a bust couple of weeks in the past 14 days I've done 5 projection events.  I've worked 5 days at the adventure playground and I've started to pack up the house.  I tried to do a writing day on Thursday but it got pushed back so I could write an extended plan for some work in a school.  Today I edited a film for the Odd project, this has been on my mind so it was good to get it out of the way. I quite liked it in the end as it drew an practice.  I film I made in Gainsborough that used four screens and a single timeline and attempted to edit collaboratively and a film I made about Venice and Sheffield for our we are not an island project.

Its strange as I will not probably pullout this direct line to practice within the project as this is the works dependence on opacity.   It is the thing that makes the film for the project more than just the film for the project as it flows into a distinct line of practice and a slight obsession with early and later Brian de Palma movies.  If I can actually get my head together and do some thinking this is probably important for my PhD work as the line between my research and my practice is sometimes more obscure than opaque. 

I have also been thinking about the idea of going native.  I don't think you are allowed to say this anymore but historically it holds a specific meaning.  As I'm excluded mainly from my world which I see as a place of conceptual artistic practice then  I have the potential to go native  or perhaps less provocatively adopt two worlds. The community world of the playground where i feel most at home and the strange and exotic world of the university where I feel disjointed.  I'm reminded of an earlier post on here or somewhere else where i quote from the film the fly. "perhaps I am just a community worker who only dreamed he was an artist."  perhaps though dreaming is important and the rusty nails on a bench or the fixing of toilets as an art act, the story of the rat in a pipe and thoughts about building paying attention to dwelling from Heidegger are not really an assemblage or an actor network perhaps i need to go back to feeling them as a practice.

Leaving a Mark

 I found this hand on the underside of the castle.  Somebody clearly left their mark.  It reminded me of hand prints early peoples made in caves and also the marks on first nation Americans horses.  On a personal level it reminded me of how crap I am at painting and how I always seem to get my hands covered in paint.  It is Thursday writing day today and I felt like I had to mark where I am on my blog first.  This is leaving a hand print under the surface of the work to be found and paid attention too at a later point.

I had a supervision yesterday and in many ways it was productive.  Kate was very encouraging and Laura was very practical.  My writing about my connection to the playground was never really supposed to be part of the PhD writing, it was an effort to write through the blockage of expectation.   Like the sewers of London I felt that years of baby wet wipes had combined with the oils of angst to create a giant fatberger in my head that needed moving.  I just did some writing that I could do, the draining thoughts leaking throw a side tunnel or into the water table of my life.   

Now there is something about taking Kate's positive thoughts and working back into the document and getting it to look more like a PhD chapter.  This will be adding some references but also the Narritive makes this possible in a less abstract way.  Within this chapter I will be able to introduce some play theory, some history of the adventure play movement without going into the fine grain.  I think I can pick and choose some of the relevant bits and cover a bit of stuff from play theory where it meets my lived experience.  I won't have to do a potted history of the adventure play movement but i may talk of Colin ward and changing attitudes towards the child and the city.

I can't really face this today though as I'm feeling a bit stressed with everything about the house move and I need to walk the dog and I need a bit of a break.  I still like my idea about analytical and continental philosophy and I think I may be able to expand on this in my writing. Laura asked me to think about data and I suggested we should talk of it as what I would collect - this felt easier, perhaps I need to write about this as well.  Calling it data creates a territory for research and essentially it is this territory I am resisting

Slides and Other Things

 

I had a supervision this morning I think it went OK although the writing I sent in wasn't really supposed to be PhD writing it seemed to go some way in providing a context for the next piece of writing.  It wasn't trying to be very clever but it ended up having some quite clever bits in it.

I did two days at the playground and finished off a big tidy up, helped Patrick sort his office out and started to build a platform for the new up-cycled slide.  None of this is part of my residency or my PhD it is working as a volunteer and it complicates things in what I'm hoping is a good way.  

The supervision went quite well though I left thinking I need to be less opaque and more explicit in my PhD writing.  Instead of presenting something I feel is a poetic speculative proposition I also need to explain in more detail what this is and why I think it.  Just found out our house sale has fallen through which should not be very worrying but somehow is strangely worrying and a reminder that I'm not feeling particularly myself at the moment. 

Kate came up with a good plan for my writing and I ordered a Tausig book to read.  I read a very short introduction to continental philosophy over the weekend and this felt like the kind of reading I used to do for pleasure.  It was similar to the Harmen books I've read about Object Orientated Ontology.   Lots of returns to Kant and references to Hegal and Hursul and the Frankfurt group.  I am not sure why I read it and I'm feeling a bit at sea but i think it is the house move and sale and all the kids coming home - in their words I'm feeling a bit Moach which means emotional.