Research Project 2 – bexODESSA

Shipping News

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Interim Show, Project 2

Today was dedicated to all things maritime, in the hopes of furthering my research for the Ann project. It began with a trip to the the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Although it is a beautiful museum, I was disappointed to discover that it doesn’t house or display any information about Britain’s Convict Transportation system. Even the Museum’s Caird Library does not have any documents pertaining to it within its archives. However, the librarian there did steer us in the direction of the National Archives in Kew. We did contemplate taking a trip down there, but the weather was so cold and miserable, plus they prefer, though do not require that you to make an appointment. So, instead, I filled out an online archive research form, requesting any information they might have about Ann and/or the Amphitrite shipwreck.

Seeing we were in Greenwich, we decided to visit the Cutty Sark. I’ve never been on a ship like that before, and I have to say I was very impressed. I especially loved seeing the top deck and sleeping quarters. When I was in the hold where the cargo was kept, I thought of Ann’s experience of being locked in the hold of the Amphitrite while it was being wrecked during a storm in the middle of the night. It must have been terrifying. The Amphitrite was more like the Bounty than the Cutty Sark, but it still gave me an idea of the kind of vessel she was on.

The highlight of the day was going on the cable car across the Thames. I was very scared at first, much to my fella’s amusement, but I soon got used to it. It was an amazing way to see the river, and we were even able to see Trinity Buoy Wharf, where the exhibition is, as well as our hotel. Unfortunately, due to the miserable weather, the photos I took left a bit to be desired.

We’ve decided just to hang out in the hotel this evening. There’s a lovely bar downstairs and a McDonald’s next door, so we’ll be well fed and watered.

My fella has a rover eye

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Project 2, Week in Review

If I’m out with my fella and he does a double-take, I don’t have to look around to confirm my suspicions. I can tell by the goofy look on his face that he’s spotted a dog. It’s like he has a special dog-radar. If one is in the vicinity – even crouched down in a car or hiding under a bush – he’ll spot it. I am regularly reminded that the only thing he loves more than dogs is me. It’s true that if the house was on fire and it was me or the dog, he’d rescue me first, but, you can guarantee, he’d then risk his life to go back in and rescue the dog. That’s the kind of dog-loving fella he is.

We reached the grand milestone of four years together yesterday. I completely forgot, until he turned up at the studio with two bunches of flowers. That wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t forgotten Valentine’s Day as well. To be precise, I forgot to get him anything, while he surprised me with three lovely presents from a gift shop in town, and a dinner at the local pub.

To make amends, I bought him a belated gift. For future refence: an after-the-fact Amazon gift that you also bought two Valentines ago is bad! Luckily it was a Star Wars t-shirt, which seemed to soften the blow. The upshot is, he’s completely amazing when it comes to rescuing and romance, and I should live on my own with a cat.

I wish I could say that I’ve made great progress on the green paintings. But the truth is, I’ve mixed a bit of paint here and there, producing greens I neither like nor want to use, and that’s about it. Instead, I’ve been spending most of my time on the Ann painting, and I’m not even sorry. The home-stretch of a painting like Ann is an unmitigated pleasure, and I am savouring every moment. I was secretly hoping to have it finished before I go to London next week. But even if I worked on it all day and night, it still wouldn’t be finished. Besides, it would be reckless to try and rush it at this stage, as that is how mistakes are made.

As pleasurable as painting Ann is, it is also really nerve wracking, especially at this late stage. There’s no fixing a delicate, pristine painting like this, so damaging it is some way would be heart-breaking, not just because of the labour involved, but for the painting itself. Like a mother hen, I think all my chicks are beautiful, but Ann, she is beautiful and then some.

A word salad with the right dressing is delicious

CSM MFA - Progress Blog, Project 2, Research Project, Research Study Statement

A word salad is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as:

a mixture of words or phrases that is confused and difficult to understand.

Borrowed from psychiatry, where it describes the unintelligible speech of those afflicted with particular psychiatric disorders, a word salad has come to be used to describe a style of academic writing or speech that is unintelligible to the uninitiated (and sometimes even the initiated). Often touted as the panicle of the academic word salad is the writing of philosopher and literary theorist Prof. Judith Butler. It’s not hard to see why with gems like this:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time, published in the scholarly journal Diacritics (1997)

Personally, I find the above completely inaccessible and it hurts my head to even try. Unless Butler is being deliberately obtuse, and there is no “there there”, I assume an expert is needed to teach the meaning of what is being said, because knowing the language in which the ideas are being expressed is simply not enough. Of course, this is nothing new, the history of western philosophy is littered with great thinkers whose ideas were pretty much incomprehensible in their lifetimes, and remained so until greater minds rehashed and broke down the ideas over the years, making them accessible to average-Joes like me. So, who knows, in 100 years everyone might comprehend Butler.

There is an anomaly to my aversion to Butler’s word saladrey, that is a lecture Butler gave at a symposium called Topography of Loss, about Doris Salcedo’s 2017 The Materiality of Mourning exhibition at the Harvard Art Museums. The lecture was titled Shadows of the Absent Body, and I have to say it was the most powerful, mind-expanding, and heart-wrenching art lecture I have ever heard. On the surface, much of it is incomprehensible. However, the ethereal way Butler strings words together seem to perfectly reflect the theme of the exhibition, that is the terror and loss of disappeared people.

One of the best things about the lecture, was it introduced me to Doris Salcedo’s work, and allowed me to access it and fall in love with it in a way that I wouldn’t have were it not for Bulter’s sublime word salad. I am deeply inspired by Salcedo’s The Materiality of Mourning exhibition, particularly the textile piece below.

Disremembered VIII Sewing needles and silk thread

I would like to make a textile piece for my Ann project, to be shown with the painting. The idea I am toying with is something related to the clothes the transportation system officials required be sent with each prisoner, the list of which I found in Ann’s court records.

I am also thinking of including the list of the female convicts who were on the Amphitrite, all of whom died when it was shipwrecked. I think the contrast between the beautiful penmanship of the writing and the terrible fate that awaited the woman on the list is both poignant and haunting.

Amphitrite Indent List – Ann’s name at the bottom of the last page

I’m not quite sure how I will marry the two together, but as soon as I have finished the Ann painting, I will start experimenting with different ideas and fabrics etc. Who knows, maybe something will come to me in a dream in the meantime.