Actually Making It Happen

Music video by Mariah Carey performing Make It Happen. YouTube view counts pre-VEVO: 21,232 (C) 1991 SONY BMG MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Is it just me or are people crossing

the road more than they were before? Maybe

I'm paranoid, is that a symptom, been

hard to keep track of all the news. I see

Black humans keep dying though, a mystery

apparently, unrelated of course

to the fact PPE rules changed daily.

An image in response to the poetry written for this project

An image in response to the poetry written for this project

The making of this work started with a basic plan, a flowchart written on an A4 sheet of paper. Once everything’s mapped out you’re often painfully aware of how much ground there actually is to cover and that was certainly the case here. 

How do you cover loss, grief, loneliness, shielding, contracting COVID, looking after COVID patients, losing your job, worrying about your friends and family, worrying about the world, health inequalities due to racism, systemic racism and more in ‘3 - 5 images’, which was the brief we’d been given? 

The first plan

The first plan

Well you can’t can you! My wildly ambitious original proposal crashed into the unyielding realities of the time we had to complete the work and the quixotic scope of my plan was abruptly reshaped into something more manageable and achievable in the timeframe we had to work with. The dispassionate wisdom of Andrew Jackson was again crucial here, pointing out the potential range of this work if done comprehensively and how it might be sensible to consider it as a related series of smaller projects to continue working on beyond the current deadline. 

Even with this advice in mind the scope of the project remained daunting. My original plan was to contrast the experience of my mother, who’d been sheltering during the first lockdown, with my own as a front line health worker. I’d discussed this with my mom before proposing the project and she’d kindly agreed to work with me, so the plan was for her to respond to some questions about her experiences of sheltering alone during the first few months of the pandemic and I would use these reflections and some writing of my own to inform the images I would subsequently make. 

Once I’d been selected for the project I passed the questions to her and she started gathering her thoughts while I started writing some rudimentary poetry that captured some of my instinctive responses to events of these last few months. The main aim here was just to get thoughts out of my head onto the page and see if any themes or ideas resonated for further exploration visually. 

6 questions given to my mother to elicit her experiences about sheltering at home during the first months of the pandemic

6 questions given to my mother to elicit her experiences about sheltering at home during the first months of the pandemic

This process of writing turned out to be somewhat unsettling both for my mother and myself, forced as we were to confront the true extent of the personal toll the pandemic had had on us individually and as a family. What was interesting though were the similarities in our reflections despite our very different experiences. Ideas such as grief for a way of life lost, fear of adapting to the ‘new normal’ and of other things, uncertainty of how to interpret one’s perception of increased risk as a Black person and determination to preserve some freedoms now seemingly under threat shone through. Many of these themes had been anticipated when planning the work and the task now of course was to try and translate some of these ideas into pictures.


“I fear having to be admitted to hospital for any reason. I live with conditions that can be detrimental, but now COVID has been added to the mix of things I have to be careful about… 

If I became an inpatient, in a COVID-heightened environment, I fear that I would not come out of hospital.” 

An image in response to mother’s words above, articulating her fears about contracting COVID-19

An image in response to mother’s words above, articulating her fears about contracting COVID-19

Meanwhile of course, the pandemic continued apace. My region introduced stricter COVID restrictions as the project deadline closed in and with very little shooting having taken place. This forced me to change plans and I now had to pivot to a more restricted approach with less travelling, less visits to my mother’s house simply for the purpose of making photographs and a decision to stay very close to my own home as much as possible. This meant having to reconsider how I would put together a coherent series of 3 to 5 images despite abandoning some locations I’d considered integral to telling the story.

Thankfully due to the preparation that had already been done, some flexibility on shooting days and photographic luck, I was able to hit enough of the touchpoints despite these last minute changes. In this case, the planning and synthesising of ideas took up by far the majority of time and effort invested in the work, with actual camera time being only a small fraction of the overall activity. 

This is possibly the most useful lesson arising from this project, that the time spent planning, writing, conceptualising and reflecting on the themes pays itself back exponentially when it comes to making the pictures. It’s surely possible to work the other way round, to start out by creating the images and then slowly piece them together into a coherent narrative, but I’d argue that is a much less efficient and more time-consuming way to work (although possibly involves less agonising). That’s not to criticise different approaches, and I’ve certainly worked that way myself in the past, but rather a realisation for me that I’d gained a better understanding of my own process as a result of being given this opportunity by ReFramed and have been able to build on foundations laid during my MA studies. 

I’ve spent some time gathering my thoughts since completing this work and found the wise words of my old tutor Wendy McMurdo swirling around in my head (as ever!).

DACS member, Wendy McMurdo talks to DACS about her work and artistic processes. A photographer and filmmaker, Wendy speaks about the impact of computers and ...

The thing that she always told me that I find myself going back to repeatedly is the need to simply persist, to keep making work and to remain committed to the process of being creative. Another astute idea of hers, reflected in this interview, is of staying faithful to subjects that interest you. As a result of this COVID work, and following on from a recent chat I had with the Photography Ethics Centre, I’ve had some new ideas about revisiting elements of my Reaching Out Into The Dark (ROITD) project and reconsidering loneliness in the context of the pandemic. It’s clearly been a time where many of us have been confronted by isolation, loneliness and disconnection from previously nurturing social networks and I’m looking forward to picking up this subject again with a fresh perspective moving forward. 

So on that note I’ll leave you with another song. This one can be found on the ROITD project playlist and is where the title for the project came from. 

Till next time…

Directed by James Mooney Belong is taken from the new album Recycle Love. Featuring TriniCassette, God Zombie, Visionz and Fresh. Edited by Joe Carey https:/...

Research/Life

One of the reasons I decided to write about my work in progress in this way was to affirm (and remind myself of) the fact that the reality of the creative process is rarely of a brilliant artist working singlemindedly towards the production of a widely-acclaimed masterpiece, but rather a quite normal person, who cares about something, battling various practical and financial obstacles in order to bring into being a piece of work that, in the majority of cases, nobody else cares about at all, with the progress towards this objective being anything other than a straight line. 

Thinking about this brings to mind the wise words of Wendy McMurdo, an actually brilliant artist, who I was fortunate to be tutored by in the final phase of my MA. During one of my many existential crises she calmly informed me that the numerous issues and problems preventing me from making work that I was describing to her were in fact simply part and parcel of being an artist, and that the associated self-doubt and uncertainty were all part of the creative process. Her advice being that I should basically suck it up and make work anyway because that was the only way anything ever got done, the only way any progress was ever made. Coming from her, these words meant a great deal and have stuck with me ever since. 

So, I write to remind myself of this and also to keep myself accountable and it is in this spirit that I make this latest entry in the WIP log. The last few months have of course being challenging for everyone, what with the rona, and life as we knew it seems to be gone for good. I’ve been overwhelmed with work stuff and also had to survive my own bout of the virus, so it’s been a challenging time for sure. Amongst all this though, I’ve tried to stay committed to the idea of continuing on regardless, as best as I could under the circumstances. One of the lessons I think, is that instead of being hard on yourself for not being as productive or creative as maybe you’d hoped to be in certain circumstances, it’s preferable to stick to your guns and just do what you can. Every little helps and with each small step you’re that bit little closer to the end goal. It’s important for me to remember that there never is a ‘perfect’ time to make work, with absolutely no obstacles or distractions to contend with, there’s always just now.

As I’ve continued planning and researching for a project focusing on mental health, there’s been an inexorable convergence with the themes of Reaching Out. 

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

I recently had the opportunity to talk a bit more about the making of ROITD over on the Shutter Hub blog

Loneliness and solitude certainly offer psychological challenges, but it’s been really interesting that I’ve found myself circling back round and being forced to consider loneliness from new angles. Another lesson perhaps, that research is never wasted even if it seems to be not directly related to the topic at hand at first, and a reminder that my MA work lives on, and remains unfinished business. 

I’ve been reading A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti. Looking at how loneliness has been conceptualised, written about and experienced through history, it’s an ambitious work indeed. Interestingly, Alberti starts from the position that loneliness is not intrinsically bad, and that there are positives to be gained from experiencing this state. Describing loneliness as a ‘cluster of emotions’ rather than a single feeling, the author argues that it hits differently at different life stages such as divorce or old age. Alberti also argues that loneliness is not an inevitable or universal aspect of the human experience, and when encountered can also confer benefits such as increased self-knowledge or creativity. 

It’s fascinating to consider that loneliness has not always been with us, simply because the vocabulary associated with this experience did not exist before about 200 years ago. Prior to that, being alone was not at all bound up with typically negative ideas of loneliness that we take for granted today, but rather considered a much more neutral state of being. This idea is really interesting to me, that how we describe or think about things, materially affects the way we experience them and it’s an interesting idea to explore visually in the future.

Another book I’ve covered recently is Advice for Strays by Justine Kilkerr. This is an interesting story, about a woman going through a difficult time who’s revisited by an imaginary friend from her childhood, returned to accompany her through her troubles. This friend, a lion named Jericho, appears when things seem to be slowly falling apart in her life, and while their relationship is never fully explained, there quickly develops a seemingly mutually beneficial co-dependence. The key theme that resonated with me here was the idea of perception, of being able to ascertain what is real and what is not, and whether sometimes it’s actually easier, even safer, to surrender to the constructions of our minds rather than address difficult things in the ‘real’ world. The idea of spending so long immersed in your own perceptions that you struggle to differentiate between what’s real and what’s imagined is also interesting. How does one categorise experiences that can seem very real to us, and from which we may derive some positives, if they are not perceptible to others…are they any less valuable, less real? This boundary between our tangible material world, and that of our very personal, internal world is a fascinating place to explore.

What’s New?

Despite not being outwardly productive in recent times, I’ve been quietly plotting some new work. In addition to this, I’ve also been fortunate that the work I started during my MA has continued to generate discussion and act as an opening to new opportunities. 

One of these opportunities came as the result of some images from ROITD being selected to be shown in the first exhibition of Shutter Hub’s ambitious new project. Postcards From Great Britain aims to share visions of British culture through photographic images and promote connection and debate. The images include social, political, observational, historical and traditional responses and when the project finally closes, at the end of this year, the submitted work in its entirety will be archived and housed in various significant collections worldwide. 

Images are presented in postcard format, depicting visions of British life

Images are presented in postcard format, depicting visions of British life

The project will be punctuated with exhibitions throughout Europe, the first of which opened this week and a happy coincidence of my work schedule allowed me to nip over to Haarlem, just outside Amsterdam, to attend the exhibition opening. It was good to be there and I was happy to be able to meet a number of the other exhibiting artists and discuss how they work. These connections stimulated a couple of promising avenues for future exploration and possible collaboration and I’ll expand on this in future updates. 

Attendees at the exhibition opening in Haarlem

Attendees at the exhibition opening in Haarlem

Apart from enjoying the short break for the opportunity to see the exhibition, I was also able to get out for a quick photo walk and the mental space of being away also allowed me to continue planning for the main focus of this year, which will be an exhibition of my own work in collaboration with selected artists, later this year. 

My own research for this is ongoing: I recently finished reading Catch by Simon Robson. The book centres around Catharine (referred to as Catch by her husband), a wife alone at home on a winter’s day while her husband works away in Birmingham. She is bored, self-critical, over analytical, aloof, over-serious, frustrated by a lack of musical talent, envious of other more frivolous/artistic/bohemian people, embodied in this case by her friend Masha.

She is also, evidently, dissatisfied by her inability to have a child with her husband Tom. 

Cover of Catch by Simon Robson

Cover of Catch by Simon Robson

The writing is often overly elaborate, to the detriment of the narrative and the revelation of character. However the author still manages to depict an unraveling, a sense of quite rapidly losing touch with oneself and the certainty of circumstances that previously anchored you in place. Catharine quickly loses touch with her sense of self, caught up in an accelerating cycle of thoughts, careering towards the dissolution of her marriage, the destruction of her longstanding friendship with Masha and to the relinquishing of her sanity, triggered by innocuous events such as a conversation with a disaffected teenager in the village and some low level flirting with a retiree.

This feeling of being captive to self-destructive thoughts, apparently founded on ‘fact’ that one is mistakenly convinced of, felt very familiar. This negative feedback spiral can be a very lonely place, where you feel increasingly hopeless, convinced of the futility and finality of everything, and almost unable to listen to reason. This is something I will be exploring in the work that I plan to show later this year.