pastwords

Currently, a large majority of my time is spent tapping away, or staring at my laptop. Like many of us I spend HOURS gazing at the screen, for work, for play, for social networking, for research, for entertainment. Occasionally the screen darkens and I’m surprised by my own reflection and become cognisant of the solitariness of my interaction in a way that I don't feel when watching TV. Is it to do with distance? Interaction with a laptop is intimate, it rests it on my knees, my stomach, I take it to bed with me.

As my online usage has increased I’ve gradually assembled a variety of usernames and passwords that allow access to my online world. Each username and password reflect where I was at the time of their invention and tapping them out takes me on a trip to past lives, for example, a romantic trip arranged by an ex for my 30th birthday, door numbers of previous homes, cities lived in and memories of a much loved deceased pet. So a simple transaction online can bring to mind the past self while accessing information relevant to the now.

Could a chronology of passwords tell a life story? Could this tumble of words become a poem? What would a stranger make of your passwords and the secrets that your online fingerprint holds?

engaged

I know of people who don’t do public transport. There is a funny scene in The Inbetweeners where the lads on an appallingly shite night out in London shout ‘bus wankers’ to people at a bus stop... wonderfully they get caught in a traffic jam a few yards down the road and get their comeuppance. A sweet victory for people choosing to be, or dependent on public transport.

Public transport has provided me with random opportunities to meet people whom I would never have encountered any other way. One such meeting occurred recently and the strangers words have stayed with me, providing food for thought and impacting on friends I’ve shared the story with.

On a beautiful summer like day in early April I was waiting for the 379 in Bristol bus station, we were informed that the bus had broken down so had half an hour until the next one. I passed the time chatting to a woman who had sat next to me, it turned out that Caroline was an ex Londoner too, had moved to Surrey and then to Glastonbury five years previously. Before the move she had worn an engagement ring for fifteen years to keep suiters away. Caroline has always known she didn’t want children and that she herself had been a mistake, none the less she had been loved and had happy memories of childhood. In Glastonbury she decided the time had come to remove the ring and see what happened.

Caroline told me she really wanted a job in the local bookshop so popped in and asked about vacancies. There were none but she left her details. The following week she was called in for a trial run, offered four days a week, then a further two days in another bookshop owned by her boss. So happy, busy and at the centre of town life she was in a great position to meet the community. In the bookshop she got chatting too a man who had recently retuned to Glastonbury and eight months later they were married in the local registry office. Marriage had never been an ambition, so at 50 to be walking down the aisle was a complete surprise. She had met her soul mate and felt free and very happy. Removing the symbol of being taken had opened Caroline up to try new things, to embrace opportunity, to see what happens if... Her advice to me was to put it out there, ask the universe, get stroppy and don’t give up.

Her words got me thinking about my own wants and if/how I name and voice them. Also to consider the invisible physiological engagement rings each of us wear, not necessarily tying us to a partner, but tying us to a past, a limiting belief, an outmoded idea of ourselves that no one in our current life would recognise. The ways of being that allow us to survive the past are no longer needed today, we (hopefully) update our hair, clothes and interiors but do we ever spring clean and challenge our belief patterns? Do they still suit us? Are they useful? Could they be limiting us in some way?

creature

This creature totally brightens my day, I always look out for it when traveling in and out of the city centre. It lives at the city end of Ecclesall Road, Sheffield.

behave

lost things

During the deep snow of December I became conscious of lost gloves sprinkled about the place. Now I'm noticing lost and discarded items everywhere and have begun to photograph them. The significance of this is just dawning on me at a time when I must admit to a feeling of lostness myself. The heady mixture of the close of one year and the beginning of another, returning to a city that is not yet home and the approach of a significant birthday has resulted in a dose of existential angst that is most unwelcome and most familiar. So as I process my memories and thoughts I am in league with lost things.

hepworth

Yorkshire major new art gallery, opening spring 2011.

I'm thrilled to be appointed as a creative practitioner at The Hepworth Wakefield. We will be responsible for inventing, developing and delivering the educational and outreach programmes in the gallery. I'll be working on primary, secondary, post 16 and family learning programmes and can't wait to get started. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to build from scratch, there is NOTHING in place - it is truly up to us.

The gallery is due to open in May 2011 and last week we had our first team meaning and got to see the building in progress and the 10 rooms that make up the gallery. It was a real privilege to see the empty spaces, some with work already installed. We got an insight into the story the rooms will tell of Barbara Hepworth's work, legacy and the role she played on an international stage. We got to see the building as sculpture, it's light, scale and angles. The slopping roofs mirror and comment on the factory buildings around and about and the buildings surface is cleverly designed to become darker when wet, a purple hue that reflects and responds to the moods of the sky and landscape that surround it. Rooms 7 to 10 will be dedicated to three contemporary temporary exhibitions per year, and I know who the artists are - whoop!

Beyond The Hepworth the land is a building site, I enjoyed seeing it in its transformative state, it felt provisional, unfinished, unpolished, the earth trudged up and suiting the cold static of winter. When The Hepworth opens in the spring this earth will be landscaped and grassed, with a zip wire, picnic area, community stage and lots of space for our art activities which we plan to take beyond the building.

chocolate eclair

After my first interview in a long time I amused myself while waiting for the return train to Sheffield by idly finding a rude word in Scunthorpe. This is something I do, look at signs and mentally remove or add letters to make them vulgar - I didn't have to try too hard on this one.

Once on the train I sat next to an elderly gentleman who began to tell me how the scenes flying past the window were so different from his youth, it was the emptiness that he commented on telling me that as a boy and young man the fields would have been full of working folk, a landscape teeming with people. I found this fascinating and profoundly sorrowful all at once. He told me of memories of war, of landing in France, of his friends who had been killed and his time as a student in Oxford - the time of his life apparently! I'd assumed he was in his 80's when he began to talk but he told me he was 99 years old, 100 on 15th December 2010.

I've often thought about him since and how he let me into his world. His memories projected onto the fields revealed a missing, a lack for him, when to me the fields were as they had always been. Now they are not and I think of his view. The past is always present, memories haunt landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, the everyday and unremarkable only visible from our vantage point of now. Today will one day look dated and strange to us, to others, what we will miss is still unknown.

He got off in Doncaster, I got up to let him into the aisle, he didn't say goodbye. I don't think it mattered to him who I was, anyone with ears would do but I felt privileged to sit next to him. I shuffled over to his seat, watched him become part of the crowd and disappear. At my feet were a pile of chocolate eclair wrappers, a remnant of his presence and I smiled as internally I reprimanded him for not putting them in the bin. 

I didn't get the job and that doesn't matter, I'm just glad it allowed me to be in the right place at the right time.