I’ve taken inspiration from Rebecca’s latest post.
Siblings
Month Aug 2025
You Can Take The Girl Out Of Essex…
So, you’re an Essex Girl!
No, I’m not from Essex (I’m not really from anywhere). A pejorative term used to belittle a certain group of women, used so much in everyday speech that it earned itself a formal dictionary definition: promiscuous, unintelligent, materialistic and lacking in taste. It was only 5 years ago that Oxford University Press eventually relented to a petition and agreed to remove the term from one of its dictionaries – the one used to teach foreign students English. A member of the Essex Girls Liberation Front, the campaign which spearheaded the move, is conceptual artist, Elsa James.
Nowadays, I don’t really give two hoots. In fact, I often don the mantle and wear it with pride, even though it’s not really mine to wear. I still don’t understand why it’s the only county which has given rise to such a term of speech. Once you get out of ‘London Essex’ the countryside is beautiful, just like its neighbour, Suffolk, a landscape favoured by Constable, and the accent is so totally different from the stereotype.
I was in a local bookshop the other day and was looking at their maps when I noticed that they had a bundle of OS maps on sale, and, as if by luck, they had Landranger Map No 167 ‘Chelmsford, Harlow & Bishop’s Stortford’, so I bought it.
I lived in Essex with my parents on and off for about 12 years. I couldn’t wait to leave; it was on a road to nowhere and I spent the school summer holidays, which seemed to go on forever in those days, sunbathing in the back garden with cooking oil, reading Jilly Cooper novels and dreaming of finally breaking free and moving to London or somewhere else equally as exciting, perhaps one of the destinations of the planes that I used to watch leaving trails across the big blue sky.
I’m not sure why, but my old school isn’t on the map (the map is not the territory). It definitely still exists. It should be where the 08 is. I had to travel over half an hour on the 311 bus to get to school; the bus stop was right outside my house, which meant that rolling up my school skirt to make it shorter had to be done with expert precision as the bus pulled up at the bus stop, just in case anyone was watching. Then up to the top deck where you could smoke, with my small stash of cigarettes which I had pilfered from my father’s packet of Rothmans, left on the side in the kitchen.
It was an all girl school. There was a boys’ school across the road, KEGS, and in the fifth year there was a lunchtime club, Senior Christian Fellowship, to which the boys from across the road could come. It was the most popular club.
What has Essex ever done for us?
- Grayson Perry went to KEGS: he left a few years before my time. He went on to do his foundation at Braintree College of Art. That’s where I wanted to go, but didn’t. We both got out, by different roads, and to very different destinations.
- Ignoring the obvious ones, there’s The Prodigy, Depeche Mode, Yazoo, Olly Murs, Jamie Oliver, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Damon Albarn, Richard Osman, and Robert the Bruce, amongst others.
- Colchester is Britain’s oldest town.
- It has the smallest town (Manningtree) and the largest village (Tiptree, home to jam-makers, Wilkins & Sons).
- Southend has the world’s longest pier.
- The world’s oldest wooden church is in Greensted.
- It has 350 miles of coastline, second only to Cornwall, and the most islands of any county.
- Chelmsford is the birthplace of radio.
- The Mayflower was built in Harwich.
But even so, I still don’t think that I’ll ever go back and live there.
I’ve taken myself out of Essex…
Arachnid
Whenever I go to B&Q, I always want to come home and do some DIY; whenever I visit a beautiful garden, I always want to come home and sort out our garden; whenever I go to an exhibition, I always want to come home and make.
I’ve been feeling in need of a pick me up recently, and so yesterday I headed into London on a hot, Notting Hill Carnival, Bank Holiday Monday to catch Louise Bourgois’ ‘Maman’ on its last day at Tate Modern, the very space for which it was commissioned back in 2000. There’s no doubt that it’s impressive at 9m tall – again, I ask myself whether it’s all about the size, but I think any spider larger than real life would have an impact. I had an overwhelming urge to touch it, but resisted in light of the ‘Please Do Not Touch Sign’. I also found myself wondering how they got it into the building, memories of Johnny Vegas’ struggles coming to mind.
It was well worth the trip, a rare chance to see a piece in the flesh in the very place for which it had been made. Having said that, I’ve seen some images of it in a landscape, which I find particularly effective.
Tate Modern’s website on ‘Maman’:
Louise Bourgeois started making sculptures of spiders in the 1990s. This version is her biggest spider. Its title, Maman, is French for mummy. The artist said spiders reminded her of her mother: ‘Like a spider, my mother was a weaver. My family was in the business of tapestry restoration, and my mother was in charge of the workshop. Like spiders, my mother was very clever … spiders are helpful and protective, just like my mother.‘
I’m a bit behind with things at home, and we’re starting to amass some really impressive cobwebs. I watched as a flying insect became entangled in one of them; in a flash the spider came from nowhere and quickly got to work wrapping it up.
I’m not sure that spiders are clever as such, but they do have great skill. I don’t really think of them as being helpful and protective: they set traps that you can’t see, they ambush you and then swaddle you up until they consume you. Although, I don’t have a problem with them, as they catch flies etc, as long as they are not where they’re not supposed to be, such as on the bedroom ceiling above my head, or in the bed.
Lifelong arachnaphobe, Primo Levi, in his essay ‘The Fear of Spiders’:
“The spider is the enemy-mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly and take us back to the impotency of infancy, subject us again to her power…”
I’ve tried not to be either of those spider mothers. I’ve tried not to be suffocating and I’ve tried to resist the urge to fix things. I’ve definitely failed; I often tell my daughter that I’m trying my best, and, when she’s older, not just to remember the times when I’ve not been at my best, like I seem to have done with my own mother. It’s that negative bias again, I suppose. I’m now actively remembering all the times when she was kind and caring, supportive, and all the laughs we had together, which by far outnumber the not so good.
Is It All In The Name?
I watched a Channel 4 Documentary the other evening ‘Art, ADHD & Me’ with Johnny Vegas. It was five years in the making – during filming Vegas’ mental health declined, and he was diagnosed with ADHD.
It follows him embarking on a community public art project as a tribute to his home town, St Helens. His initial idea of a walkway in the centre of a busy square, designed to give a few seconds respite and space to think, was stopped in its tracks by the number crunchers – it would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds to realise. Whilst Vegas was going to have a fundraising exhibition of his work, it wouldn’t be enough. He had to come up with a plan B – a metal structure displaying tiles which forms a love letter to St Helens, and which is to be displayed at the World of Glass. The measurements were off and few of the tiles actually fitted when it came to assembling it. On opening night, Vegas is shown outside with an angle grinder trying to cut them down to size. He didn’t finish. It’s a work in progress.
It’s a programme full of vulnerability. I felt as if I was there with him, experiencing the self doubt as to whether he should go with an idea just in case there’s a better one he hadn’t thought of yet, feeling the frustration and disbelief when things didn’t fit, and the stress of time running out followed by the final acceptance that what would be, would be. It was interesting seeing how his mind works; instead of falling asleep, he wonders how many pigeons it would take to lift him up.
However, I did find myself wondering whether he would have been given the time of day by the Council, had he not been who he is.
I was walking through Winchester last week, past one of the two Castle Fine Art galleries in the city. I looked in the window and saw a 2D Johnny Depp looking back at me. I peered in and saw the far walls adorned with his work as well as a large photo of him in the act of being artistic. The gallery also represents Billy Connolly, Bob Dylan and Boy George. It seems that everyone’s doing it – just this morning I saw a post about Noel Fielding’s new exhibition. David Bowie did it, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards do it, along with Paul McCartney, Miley Cyrus, Pierce Brosnan, and a plethora of others.
My first thought is that it’s simply not fair – leave some space for the rest of us. Then I ask myself, why shouldn’t they be able to express themselves in the visual art world just because they’ve succeeded in another sphere? They should be able to, and some may have even started off in the arts – Vegas has a BA in Art & Ceramics – but their lives took them in a different direction. But I do wonder whether we would even see their work if they worked under a pseudonym.
If You Go Down to The Woods Today
Playing with pano.
Carbon Dating II
In the words of Vinnie Jones: it’s been emotional.
Over the last 54 days I have been mapping my emotions each day, using orange for positive, green for neutral and blue for negative. At the beginning, I was going to use different shades of each colour but I soon realised that this would over-complicate things. I also realised that I needed to put some rules into place: I started each line from the dated contour line, drew for two minutes, trying to explore as much of the sheet as possible to achieve an even distribution of mark-making, and finished the line off the page. I wanted to make it so that theoretically I can pick any day and trace the line which represents it. I drew each line at the end of the day, and took a photo. Unfortunately, sometimes it wasn’t light enough and so I had to take photos including a number of days’ worth of lines, so instead of having 54 photos, I’ve only got 46 which has resulted in a sudden surge in orange lines towards the end – maybe I was enjoying the positive. They are not the best photos – the lighting is all over the place. Next time I do something like this I will try and make them consistent, although I do quite like the movement it creates.
What have I learnt from this exercise? Had I not done it and you had asked me what the last 2 months have been like for me, I would have said that they have been difficult, and that for the most part I have felt negative emotions such as sadness, grief, stress, frustration and anxiety. However, looking at the end result I can see that this isn’t actually the case; I can see that there are more orange lines than green, which in turn outnumber the blue. This must mean that I feel negative emotions more strongly than positive ones, and this results in my perception of life being somewhat skewed. The map reflects this, in that, whilst they are few in number, the blue lines jump out at me from the rest. I think the technical term is the negativity bias. I don’t think that I would have had the same result had I represented my daily emotions diagrammatically in a chart – it matters that each day is individually represented. Maybe there is another way of doing it – I’m just not a mathematician!
I found the exercise to be a positive one; the act of drawing a line each day not only meant that I was making, but it also allowed me to reflect on the day as I drew – a form of visual journaling. I enjoyed the process of it and whilst it can be said that the resultant map is interesting, what it reveals also became apparent during the process itself; as the map was becoming each time I engaged with it, so I was becoming.
As ever, I’m not sure how I can develop this, if at all. Or maybe, there’s no need. Today was the last day. I think I will miss doing it, so I might just continue.
Forget-me-nots
It’s a long time since I last had a pet, and this may not be anything new, but there’s a business out there, maybe more than one, which is supplying veterinary surgeries with packets of forget-me-not seeds to send to customers whose pets have died. Since Monty died we’ve received cards of condolence from our regular vets and the specialist practice, both enclosing identical packets of seeds.
I will sow the seeds and hopefully next year green shoots will emerge from the earth, but with my gardening skills, I don’t hold out much hope.
I appreciate the thought, if it was indeed a thought, and not just a gesture generated automatically by an impersonal process. The cards contained messages from staff I didn’t even know were involved in Monty’s care; general messages of sympathy for our loss, except for one, which stood out because it described him as having been such a character. No sooner had Monty’s heart stopped beating than the vet’s hand was on my shoulder, followed by “I’m sorry for your loss”. Similarly, from the veterinary nurse who had assisted, with an added hug, whose eyes failed to show any sign of recognition a couple of days later when I went into the surgery to speak to her about our other dog.
I’ve decided that I don’t like the phrase; it’s trite and it doesn’t make the pain any easier to bear. In fact, I don’t think that I’m a fan of euphemisms generally, particularly, the idea of passing or passing away. Where to? My father died, my mother died, my dog died. That’s it. They didn’t go anywhere, I didn’t lose them, and there’s no chance of finding them again, and reuniting.
That’s not to say that I don’t believe in something else. Maybe I believe in the law of the conservation of energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed.
Now, where are those forget-me-nots?
Wayfinding
I think that I’m finally getting some clarity. Or maybe I’m seeing connections and signs where perhaps there aren’t any, but it seems to make sense, in my head anyway. In my second tutorial, Jonathan commented that he had a sense that it was all leading to something (the first sign).
So far during this course, trite as it may be (although Jonathan has assured me that it is essentially what art is about), I have been concerned with understanding myself and my place in the world as a practising artist. I’ve been working from memories, guiding me like a compass on my exploration, probably slightly off kilter, as well as my day to day life, thoughts and feelings. I have been trying to concentrate on the process as opposed to the result (a sign), experimenting along the way, and producing very few finished pieces of work. I did feel uneasy about the lack of finalised output, but no longer. I’ve been on a dérive (our session on Guy Debord being another sign).
In my Study Statement I question whether it is actually possible to ‘find myself’. Kierkegaard thinks not, in the sense of a static and unified concept, for the self is constantly being formed not just by reflecting on the past but also by engaging with the present; it is in a state of becoming, in a state of flux, something I have said I feel on several occasions in this blog (a sign). I accept in my Study Statement that I can only hope to know myself as at a certain point in time, and that reflection is something which will have to be a continuing process. Something else I have mentioned on several occasions in this blog, to fellow course mates and to Jonathan, is that I feel like I am a different person to the one that started the course back in October last year (a sign); I have changed and I will continue to change – to become.
Recently, I’ve become interested in the subject of maps – the comment in my Unit One feedback that I seem to be engaging in a process of mapping jumped out at me (a sign). That led me to start thinking about maps and the process of mapping and map-making, experimenting with cartographic symbols and mark-making. The subject of maps is a huge one but during my research I came across the philosopher, Korzybski, the father of general semantics, a central principle of which is that the map is not the territory (rather like the image is not the thing: Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (I used this idea with my red telephone at the Interim Show (yes, another sign)). In short, our models of the world are abstracts of reality, and do not represent it. This is a principle I’ve been trying to be more mindful of since I read about it – my map of the world is not the same as everyone else’s, so we can be in the same situation or look at the same photograph but have our own very different experiences and interpretations of it (our sessions with the photographs being another sign). Something which is blindingly obvious, but which I don’t always appreciate.
This then led to the notion that geographical maps themselves do not reflect the territory in the sense that there is abstraction and subjectivity in the production of all maps: the size of countries and borders can be manipulated for political and social ends, the purpose for which a map is intended can determine what is included and what is left out, viewpoint and projection can distort the world view.
Mercator Projection
Authagraph Projection
The Authagraph Projection is considered to be the most accurate flat representation of the world. It highlights the distortion caused by the traditional Mercator projection in terms of the size of Africa, South America and Greenland, amongst others.
I have been reading a lot about cartographic theory, a discipline which has only become a thing relatively recently. There is lots of disagreement about what a map is and the separation between the artefact of the map and the process of mapmaking and mapping. Post-representational cartographic theory does what it says on the tin – it argues that maps are not the territory but actually create the territory, are in a state of flux and are constantly changing, and theorists have moved away from the idea of a map as an artefact, but as being performative and processual, and always in a state of becoming.
Whilst working, I have been reflecting on past events and experiences, but whilst doing so I have been conscious that my recollections are probably my version of the truth; that I am my own unreliable narrator. I have been interested in memory for a while, particularly as to its probable unreliability and its potential to be manipulated. The way memories are formed and retrieved means that they are not fixed archives, but are constantly being formed and reformed with each retrieval; they are in a state of becoming.
The link between selfhood, mapping and memory is the concept of the state of becoming: ontogenesis. In my research paper I want to explore ontogenesis in the context of autobiographical artistic practice because it is the essence of what I am trying to do. In my experimentation and production of unfinished work I am engaging in the process of mapping, changing and becoming, relying on my memories which are also in a state of becoming but how can I represent this in a visual form which is also in a state of becoming? Hopefully, by the end of the research paper, I will have a better understanding as to how it can be achieved, if at all.
That’s the plan for now anyway, although I may change my mind, in my state of becoming.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 