All around the water tank waitin’ for a train
A thousand miles away from home sleeping in the rain
I walked up to a brakeman just to give him a line of talk
He said if you’ve got money I’ll see that you don’t walk
Well I haven’t got a nickel not a penny can I show
He said get off you railroad bum and he slammed the boxcar door
[ piano ]
Well he put me off in Texas a place I dearly love
The wide open spaces all around me the moon and stars above
Nobody seems to want me nor to lend me a helping hand
I’m on my way from Frisco headin’ back to Dixie Land
My pocketbook is empty my heart is willed with pain
I’m a thousand miles away from home just waitin’ for a train

I have been working on my dissertation alongside my practical work and have been struggling to find a solid connection between these two areas of my practice. Although my ideas about both crossover, there was no solid connection between the work I am making and the theories that I am writing about. During my last crit for my practical work there were some discussions around the fact that my work is based on personal experiences, the question of this way of working as being too enclosed and inaccessible to a wider audience was brought up, yet I tend to disagree with this notion that art can be too personal. Artwork is nothing without knowledge of the artist, the first thing people want to know when viewing a work is who made it? We have artist bio’s at shows, biographies of an artist’s life, not just their artwork but their entire being, because you cannot separate one from the other. I get that an artwork should be accessible to the viewer, however you can’t make a work that is accessible to everyone, the work must draw in its audience.

In this line of thinking, I look at my artwork as an extension of myself, it is part of who I am and therefore part of who I am is in the work itself. In relation to my practical work, I have always introduced a certain autobiographical element into my work using childhood photographs, my own body or extracts from my diaries. Yes it is very personal but I am aiming to draw the audience into my world, my experiences and my thoughts, perhaps some will walk straight past or glance over it but those who are engaged will hopefully gain something from experiencing the work.

In my dissertation, I have been researching the notion of the maternal in Feminist Art practice and theory, looking at the under-representation of motherhood in art and questioning why this may be. I am interrogating the theory that women cannot be both mothers and artists, and the tension posed when a woman decides to do both. I have written about 3000 words focusing on Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document, and questioning its relevance to artist-mothers today however I am about to scrap every word I have written. Why am I trying to be something I am not? I’m not studying a degree in Psychology or Philosophy or Art Theory and I know my limitations, I’m not a brilliant essay writer, I’m dyslexic and scraped a C in Higher English! I do know what I do however, and what I have done for years, I write autobiographically, whether in a journal, blog or within an artwork. So what makes more sense than to write a 6500 word dissertation in the first person! All my theoretical concerns are based around my own experience of being both an artist and a mother, the struggle for the two to co-exist and the stigma attached to a woman who has chosen to focus on art leaving the childcare responsibilities to the father. I think I can quite easily weave theory into the work and I have done a lot of the groundwork, it was the actual writing of it that I struggled with. For me, the personal element in my art practice should crossover to the dissertation and hopefully I will get more out of the entire process. Any comments, suggestions welcome as these next few months are going to be rather intense!!!

‘A desire path (also known as a desire line or social path) is created by erosion from human or animal tracks. It usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between departure point and destination.’

click to hear sound piece: Voyage version I

I’ve been investigating ideas around the notion of perfection in relation to women and motherhood, in particular looking at depictions of the virgin mary as a symbol of the sacred, the holy and of the perfect mother/woman. I was interested in the need to try and live up to this unattainable ideal and how photographic portraits of mothers have mirrored this particular catholic aesthetic of the icon. I worked with found photographs of mothers and child from era’s ranging from the 1930′s to 1960′s and discovered a common aesthetic in terms of the composition, style and pose, I saw these photographs as sacred in themselves, each an original one of a kind print giving them an importance and a vulnerability. Once pairing up each photograph with a religious iconic image, I began investigating different ways of displaying these images. I wanted to bring together the domestic with the idea of the sacred and so experimented with using gold and patterned wallpapers as a backdrop for the images and to bring the two elements into one context and into the white cube. From this point I will further develop my own wallpapers through printing techniques and hand drawing to use as a backdrop to these found images.