This week we had an interesting lecture by Dr Rebecca Sykes at City & Guilds. It couldn't have been more timely as we've just moved into our studios which we are offered in the run up to our exhibition in September.

We spent quite some time looking at Alice Neel, a mother of four, one of which died as a baby, another taken from her at 18 months by the father, and then following two miscarriages went on to have two sons which she raised alone. She finally found success within the art world at the age of 74.

We discussed the faith, courage and perhaps even the sheer dogged mindedness that it takes to keep working when, making space and finding the time is against us. My dissertation was very much about making work within particular conditions, those conditions include being a mother, working and being in recovery. My conclusion essentially was with politics failing us, it was the spiritual that has saved me and that artistic practice allows me to access the divine.

If you don't have kids you might have some romantic idea that you can make with them, or with them about you, but you can't. It requires concentration and sustained focus and then you need to pause look, maybe listen, for long periods of time quietly to see what the painting needs. A bit like parenting I guess.

When your with your children but feeling inspired by your work, it circles your brain, when you're in the middle of painting but away from the studio, it nags at me, I keep looking at the latest photo, feeling a mixture of trepidation and excitement of wanting to get back to the studio and solve the puzzle. I'll be honest, some times it makes me a bit short tempered to yield to the job in hand of being a mother. Luckily I have enough 12 step program in me to re-orient myself to the present moment, but the painting continues to sit there nudging me back.

I'm about one of the most determined people I know, and my creativity is something I have learnt to protect and nurture, I'm a post-medium artist, I research a lot, and I write and I guess deal more with concepts than the process itself. I don't really draw that much and I don't feel any real confidence as a painter yet, but its got really under my skin. Painting, making art is less about talent and more about practice, consistency, experimentation, and returning to the studio as if it is your job but your not getting paid, which logically makes no sense to us. So often conflict arises, and with that can follow ambivalence.

Moving into the studio to work amongst other women has put some fire in me though now, I have near on 7 weeks where I can spend some solid time practicing. I have to have some faith and not give in to doubt. Neel and her kind give me hope.

With the Masters coming to a close in September it is time to consider what we will show as part of our exhibition at City & Guilds London. I learnt so much from installing The Pale Soft Palaces of Death and my thesis reflected upon this gradual emergence of a post-medium practice grounded in installation, material relation, and duration. Here’s an except from my thesis outlining an idea for the new work::

A continuous live feed from the south coast, looking outward towards the horizon and projected into the gallery, while simultaneously streamed through my website. The horizon signifies futurity, aspiration, and the possibility of what lies beyond, yet it is also an optical illusion that continually recedes as one approaches it. In this sense, it becomes a figure for unfulfilled longing and the cruel optimism that runs throughout this thesis. The feed would continue uninterrupted through night, storms, changing weather, extended periods in which little appears to happen, and the occasional technical failure. This durational emptiness is central to the work. Through prolonged looking and suspended action, anticipation, projection, anxiety, and boredom begin to emerge. The viewer becomes sensitised not to an event, but to the condition of watchfulness itself. Drawing upon the visual language of surveillance infrastructure while displacing its conventional function, the camera no longer secures territory or produces actionable information. Instead, it performs a continuous and unresolved act of looking. The work operates as a form of affective surveillance: a technological system registering atmosphere, duration, and the psychological textures of living under conditions of precarity, overwhelm, and diffuse threat. Yet it also remains attentive to resilience, care, and the labour involved in sustaining forms of life under such conditions. Alongside the moving image, I am considering painting and sculpture as components of the installation. The figure of the dog recurs as a symbol of protection, guardianship, and vigilance. Territorial and watchful, it occupies an ambiguous space between care and defence.

In developing this work, I became interested in the metaphorical relationship between territorial borders and psychic ones. The live feed of the south coast borrows from the visual language of surveillance, yet its subject is less the coastline itself than the conditions of watchfulness it evokes. I found myself returning repeatedly to the question of fear and the ways it becomes politically organised. Borders are not natural facts but political constructions, shaped by power, resource distribution, and anxiety. At the level of subjectivity, similar dynamics emerge. The psyche establishes its own borders, producing a sense of sovereignty through vigilance, defence, and self protection. The work explores these resonances between the political and the personal, asking how fear shapes both collective attitudes towards belonging and exclusion, and individual experiences of vulnerability and hypervigilance. These questions of fear, protection, and belonging are never fully resolved; rather, they persist, returning in different forms across personal and collective life. As Sadeq Rahimi writes, “to tell a story is always to invoke ghosts, to open a space through which something returns” (Rahimi 21). Rather than resolving these tensions, art becomes a space where they may linger. Positions are not fixed within narrative but dispersed across forms – text, image, object, and duration – allowing absence to operate as a structuring force.

Yesterday I went to one of my favourite places in London, The Warburg Institute at SOAS. I go there when I need to do some visual research, to gain a deeper reading on the references I am working with. I found Thoth there (God of Time) which was the kernal of the body of work I went on to make around my relationship with my dad (Pale Soft Palaces of Death). Thoth is also part protagonist of a short fictional work I wrote, Stray (see Writing).

They have the most wonderful collection of global cultural history and address the role that images have in society. Whenever I go there I find a gem and come out inspired.

I have begun visual research for a new painting I want to make and was looking for dogs, see (proposal for new body of work) but found this little feline which was hiding in the wrong section. She's a copper alloy incense burner from c.1150–1200. (We have a cat who is such a valued member of our little family, it's like she's nudging me to be included). This object symbolises, valour, power and protection. Her use in medieval Persian culture, was to smoke wild rue (Peganum harmala), which operated at the exact intersection of magical protection and scientific pharmacology. Ordinary folk burned the plant to navigate a world filled with unseen spirits and as a tactile reminder of a spiritual instruction, urging the household to transition from the material world to spiritual contemplation. This immediately spoke to hauntology, survival and the household. Ideas I have been writing about for my dissertation.

The staff at Warburg are so helpful. Paul photographed it for me at high res and emailed to me. Now, I just need to figure out how to make a painting with her (Luc Tuyman's guidance that a painting must be more than the image itself circling). And I have ordered some Wild Rue incense.