for glen

i now can't stop listening to this

Always

Amandine Alessandra

Coughing Fits

are keeping me from sleep. After three days in the studio with a power sander at my disposal the dust and the onset of hayfever have left me with a voice that has drawn comparisons to wheezy the penguin from toy story and a grey tinge to my hair that made some believe I'd emerged from the regency period, that or I had just gained about forty years. However, we do have two very amazing white walls, so it was worth the huskiness and the premature aging. And the honey and lemon I'm drinking now, lets just ignore the fact I had to take both the vital ingredients for this from a flatmate's cupboard, but I will do a replenishing food run at some point over the weekend.

It has been a pretty good week as weeks go, if I overlook the fact that my right bicep is now considerably bigger than my left thanks to the sander reverberations. Wednesday saw an early morning jaunt to Oxford Street, and a painful rendering of money away from my bank account. Purchased: an amazing all in one. a beautiful beautiful jumpsuit to frolic around in to my hearts content. And some fake flowers for my hair, naturally. And another Muji notebook and a pen, just in case. Making the most out of the travelcard the evening saw me and ellie, in our onesies head off to Koko to see Yeasayer. Amazing. Right at the front. It would have been so much better had I not been consistently distracted by how full my bladder was and the need to relieve it. Still, I held out for a good ninety minutes.

Thursday brought about more studio exertions and a gradual decline in my vocal strength. Also a visit to the Montague Arms for the unwrong quiz. How to describe the Montague. It looks like a hedgehog has polyfillered the ceiling and Salvador Dali scattered trinkets inside it. And then B&Q came along to drape some of its various fairy light assortments. I won the most incredible book, entitled 'Sleeping with Soldiers, in Search of the Macho Man.' Actually its the least incredible book that I think has been in circulation, and I'm too embarrassed to even quote a passage from it. Suffice to say it deals with a woman who knows what she wants and isn't at all subtle about it. Though amazon are selling new copies of it for £15.95, that's pretty good.

Today saw a freshly painted studio and some heavy dust removal.

Tonight sees the impact of the cider bought for me by my lovely third year, the floor paint fumes and the dust cloud that has seemed to settle in my throat. Sleep may not be on the agenda for a long while. On flicking through 'The Art of Looking Sideways' once again, the discovery was made that we spend on average 25 years of our life asleep. 7% of this we spend dreaming. That's just under two years of our life we spend with wistful imaginings and distortions of our day unravelling through our unconscious. I just wish the gap between them and reality wasn't so disparate. Never mind. Anyway, thanks to my late night blog wandering, I stumbled upon the work of Amandine Alessandra. It has something of a dream like quality about it, in releasing words from print. There's something about playful typography that never fails to make me smile, and it reminded me of those plastic cups I'd seen in Camberwell.

Beirut

infused evening session.

It feels like a day for a list, especially after flicking through the Art of Looking Sideways once again. 'Impressions, fragments, memories of places. How often has one seen a gem, an oddity, a surprise, a piece of information, an idea, only for it to dissolve in the memory and be forgotten. A visual encounter lost forever.'

Today. Studio, Greenwich, blanket, sunbathing, scantily clad, bare feet, running down the hill, rounders, ice cream, flip flops, cat nap, makeshift cardboard tray, hurried dinner, 436, camberwell, patterns, gloss, brown paper squares on graph paper, etchings, miniature plants, easter island canvas, print room envy, wolverhampton reunion, petrol station snack stock up, home, chilli, spotify, an ellie on my bed, vogue, fashion blog trawling, budget, midnight ice lolly, shopping trip plans for tomorrow. Lists make me sound so much more productive.

Sunday Smile. But on Monday

The sun seems to extract happiness from everyone, its all that vitamin d that's floating around. This picture is from Greenwich when it was bitingly cold, but that's beside the point, it was sunny then as well.

The ukelele society's first gig yesterday was pretty immense, though I don't know quite which was my favourite song, either the rendition of last night by the strokes or the particularly exquisite finishing number, the lyrics to which involved something like spreading the ukelele love. Because if you have love to give, there surely has to be ukeleles involved.

I'm quite tempted to join next year.

Today I did manage to get back to reading and get back to nature. Packed a towel and a bikini and headed up to Hampstead Heath with a friend. In an entire sitting, I lost myself in another Murakami novel, this time 'South of the Border, West of the Sun'. It was a bit heartbreaking to be honest, with a particularly beautiful quote about the sun setting being like blue ink seeping onto paper, resonant passages about the need to look forward. I think its always easier to lose yourself in a book when you are in a different environment. Hampstead was this. Masses of flowers, buttercup strewn fields, parakeets, magpies and geese flying overhead at any given moment. Getting back to nature was a bit more difficult than I anticipated, namely because I don't think I've ever truly been acquainted with it properly. I have two insect bites on my thigh and pond hair. The pond was pretty spectacular, yet even bearing in mind the heat of the day it was still ridiculously cold, it was a challenge enough to keep afloat considering how deep it was and a race to the nearest float culminated in a mascara stained face and a near loss of dignity with my bikini top. The choco leibniz biscuits restored my energy though. It was a monumentally great day, one of those spontaneous days where you go where the moment takes you (it took us to Nando's incidentally) and it is filled with conversation that you want to last forever.

The day also saw us lounging around in the long grass, dipping into A.C. Grayling's 'The Meaning of Things'. He has some insightful things to say about love and leisure, the idea that leisure is something better than being a counterpoint to work, it is 'the opportunity to work for higher ends', looking into Aristotle's ideas that well used leisure is a time that should be used to enjoy what makes us flourish, to enrich and better ourselves, 'to pursue the arts, to reflect, to deepen understanding, and to pursue excellence.' It's something that I hope I embrace this summer, along with endeavouring to build a matchbox pinhole camera. That excites me.

In mid conversation, Faithless came up on the agenda. We came to the conclusion that it probably would be pretty great to make mad love on the heath. Yes.

Wolverhampton

All is quiet. No trains, no sirens. Just a bit of birdsong and the like, and little girls singing Nelly in the street. That's a bit worrying. My muscles are aching from an extravagant cycle to the swimming pool, my hair excessively poofy from a windswept ride back. You can never feel as good as when you are freewheeling down a ridiculously large hill, in sunglasses of course. I had the intention of being home and getting back to reading, getting back to nature. So far I have managed the June issue of Vogue and realising the dilemma that whichever of four different ways back from the swimming pool I took, all of them involved an uphill incline. I do love Wolverhampton, even more so after learning that good old David Lloyd George (my favourite of our prime ministers) called the general election of 1918 here, but I feel I need to document it better. That may be a task for the summer.

Remedy for tonight, indulge in a bubble bath, a book and some nail polish. Lovely.

..

Today I am thankful for friends that take you home, make you food, spoon you on your bed and make you put your pyjamas on and go to sleep. I have the best housemates next year, thats for sure. When I opened my wardrobe this morning the playsuit I was wearing the night before was hung up and everything. I have woken up with an explicably large bruise on my leg and fading memories of last night. I have been assured that it involved four people asleep on my bed until about half four in the morning when they disappeared into the night, my friend bringing a cat to me whilst I sat on the pavement outside and frying halloumi at half three in the morning. You sure can't go wrong with a night if it culminates in fried cheese.

Makeshift

My tights have pale pink paint patches splattered upon them, my bathroom floor has pale pink paint splashes. My silkscreen is leaning against the shower to dry. It looks like a strawberry milkshake took its last breath in there. Assessment is over, I feel like I can play again, hence why my bathroom has turned into a makeshift printroom, having a mess around with stencils again, and not having to abide with the ridiculously stringent law of the land in the Goldsmiths print room, though I could do with some of that amazingly lemony scented hand scrub in there. Speaking of which, I found a very handy bottle of Vaseline hand lotion on the tube today. London is full of surprises. Went back to the Barbican to see the birds, they were so soothing, until they started nibbling at my boots and landing on my handbag, it was both enchanting and disheartening, for surely the implication was I smelt of birdseed.

(prints of the birds. naturally)

Ice cream was to be had in a beautiful little park in Islington, via our return from Cass Art (I think thats what the big hole in my budget pretty much constitutes) and my optimism regarding the weather was rewarded when the sunglasses came out to play. It was just a shame the gathering pigeons couldn't live up to the reputation of the zebra finches, especially the adorable one that fell asleep on the fretboard. Pigeons and crumbs just don't cut it, no matter how good the Natalie Imbruglia song may or may not be (of course I'm inclined to think it may...)

Other exhibitions of the weekend included Michelangelo's Dream, Bill Fontana's River Sounding (that was pretty stunning to be honest) in the subterranean of Somerset House. It was so easy to get lost in the noise, and the various underground caverns. Had a nose in the photographer's gallery amongst some H&M and Muji purchases, where there was a graduate show on, 'freshfaceandwildeyes2010'. These were the names that stood out to me, Clarisse d'Arcimoles, Ben Elwes and Daniel Simcox. The subject matter is very close to some of my interests this year, recreating the past, uncovering forgotten archives, forgotten memories, or, as always, I just really liked the aesthetic. Though my tutor wants to kill me every time I use this as a basis for anything. Meh.

Braved the Tate Modern during its tenth birthday. It was a bit manic. All we really wanted to do was take advantage of the members room and sit on the balcony overlooking the Thames. That we did, and I may have stolen a bit of my friend's cream and jam laden scone.

So that was my Monday and my weekend. Although I forgot to mention the Martha Stewart enthused domestic rampage that I underwent yesterday. Washing up blitzed, one roast dinner, one apple crumble and 22 cupcakes (with varying gradients of pink icing and sprinkles). Basically I'm trying to keep busy. And now I need to stop listening to Natalie Imbruglia.

I also need a scanner.

.

London has never felt as lonely as it did yesterday.

bits and bobs

this is the view in brighton

this is the view in london

Day trip to Brighton to see the Pressed exhibition, first year printmakers from Brighton University showing in a little room above a little coffee shop, my friend's amazing work being on display. Interspersed with this was some mightily fine chips and building pebble mounds on the beach.

Back in New Cross a group of us dawned upon Sainsbury's, stocked up on sausages, baps, disposable barbeques and some cider and trekked up Jerningham Road to Telegraph Hill, for what will hopefully be the first of many summer excursions. The park itself felt like it was a million miles away from New Cross, a mini blossom strewn utopia, sitting under the dusky sky on a picnic blanket watching the sunset and gauging the colour changes, it was like picking out various crayons from a crayola box. I am certain we had ranges from periwinkle to midnight blue.