CosmiKnot

Obvious title really but it refers to the idea of doing or making something in order to think. Manet for instance thought through painting. Rodin thought through sculpting and drawing. William wegmann thinks through film making. Charles Dickens made up stories to himself. Nowadays the artist or pupil "thinks things up" due to the nature of accountability in funding. "Making things up" feels more resonant and relevant to mutual and connected experience. Having said this the ebb and flow between the mind's eye and the hand's action is a delicate force. The minds eye often seems to present the maker with a barrier to making. Likewise the making can develop sufficient momentum to obliterate the fragile web of initial inspiration. Put simply imagine you have a ball of clay. You could sit and think all day about what to make. This would be thinking up. Or you could pick the clay up and see what you make. This would be Making Up. Of course every creative process is...

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Don 3D specs now... Thanks to martin White for rendering this. I'm very pleased at the accidental union of left and right brain this produces.

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The clocks have gone forward

I have dutifully deferred gratification and I am now standing in the Jaflong curry house with three bags of Co-op shopping in my hands (yes I forgot to take my bags for life with me). Change is afoot. Our nearest take away has recently stopped doing curry choosing instead to concentrate on local favourites such as ye olde donner kebab. Ah well everything changes. So I now have to drive – perhaps I could cycle but have you ever tried carrying a takeaway curry in a rucksack? In fact I have and it was a miracle we ate that night. I’m not sure I’m ready to become that Lycra clad male who has fashioned a custom-built curry-steadying insert for his rucksack. I don’t really own a rucksack I use the turquoise one that used to be the nappy bag. The one that carried all the paraphernalia that as a stay at home dad I used to carry around. For a long time it still smelt of wet ones and by association something else that doesn’t sit well in a conversation featuring curry. That smell has now gone....

I am outside lecture room EBG08 – this translates as East Building ground floor room 08 – I am there for a book launch. The invite says it’s between 3.30 and 5 so I think 4 is probably an okay time to arrive but it seems I have come in mid way through the guest speakers speech. Suddenly I feel like an aberrant student. Still I quickly squirrel myself away in a seat at the edge of the front row and keep a low profile. I don’t make a habit of going to lectures in other departments but something about the blurb on the polite invitation drew me in. It’s all about post humanism and escaping the strictures of Newtonian analysis (although here I am already embellishing their copy). The guest speaker is talking about how innovation comes about not through individuals but through groups of ideas happening at the same time and somehow coalescing over time to make a new system that makes the old system obsolete. He is clearly tickled, as am I, by the metaphor of the fax-machine that once ru...

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Richard Holloway is a Christian Agnostic and this got me thinking. I mean everyone's talking about secularism versus faith right now. I have never seen so many comments on an article . Mind you religion brings the zealot out in us.  I like point about the Agnostic Anglican. It has a nice ring to it. From where I'm sat it seems clear that our spiritual selves are seen as an embarrassment even to believers. We (civilised) humans have come so far on intelligence alone that we feel we can leave our deeper perception of life behind. Agnostic Anglicans and their like try to present belief as an adjunct to the rational. An egg laid by reason's hen. I don't feel confident about us realigning the two experiences of life when I see the either or options we present ourselves with.  Technological advancement has required intense objective activity but not all of us can maintain Einstein's empathy for a faith based on doubt (wonder!) when we subject ourselves to this process. ...

 I've painted my mum for The harry Pye curated show, Mothers which opens in Chester's contemporary art space Thursday 8th March. Here's a close up. She's in her district nurses uniform as I remember it. I was about 9 when she became one and the transformation into blue really struck me. She seemed important and useful. Until then she had never worn a uniform at home.