June 11, 2015

8.30 am. A moderately better experience of rising. Today, I did not feel as though I’d left my head on the pillow. 9.15 am. There were a number of admin responsibilities that needed to be pushed towards the finishing line: references, appraisals, responses to queries, and such like. Things get done; they just take longer. I’m punctuating my efforts with only minor dozes this morning.

11.45 am. I reviewed my first engagement with industrial landscape: two small drawings on Perspex, which had been variously incised, drilled, cut into with a circular saw, heated, painted upon, and collaged. They were made at the outset of my first year BA Fine Art studies:

IMG1

IMG2

I didn’t return to the subject until the end of my third year. Thereafter, my commitment surfaced only once and during the year following my graduation, in response to a commission by the soon to be opened Big Pit National Coal Museum, Blaenavon. I made a drawing of the pit in situ and in the open air (I had no camera) intermittently over several weeks (due to the rather unfavourable weather conditions):

IMG3

The commissioners wanted a topographical representation of the pit as it might have looked when it was operational. I complied (much against my better judgement). But the project paid the bills. Thereafter, my interests in the South Wales’ coal industry were expressed only art historically, through the topic of my PhD thesis, second book Image of the Visible, and exhibition Miner Artists, which dealt with colliers who had taken-up drawing, painting, sculpture, and model-making. I’d written about the valleys in the pre-industrial period and its paranormal history in The Appearance of Evil. I last dealt with the post-industrial era fifteen years ago. in a set three collagist drawings:

IMG

2.00 pm. I dealt with a flurry of emails concerning a forthcoming viva, before investigating how I could establish an analogue/digital connection between my cassette deck and a MacBook. Unfortunately, the ‘line out’ from the Hi-Fi doesn’t link to the deck. Think again. I fixed a direct line connection between the earphone socket of the deck and the mic input of the MacBook, and recorded on 96000Hz and 32-bit (float). The quality of the recording is better than that of the original playback. I’ll need to consider what I’m hearing this evening, while sourcing sound archives for recordings related to the South Wales coal industry.

7.30 pm. Listening. The discussion with my grandfather took place in a communal area of the hospital, against the crass banality of an insistent TV commentary. Few patients, as I recall, paid any attention to it. I asked him questions to which I already knew the answers; he’d told me these stories years before on numerous occasions. I wanted to hear them again, ‘for the record’. Rarely does he answer without being overwhelmed with emotion. His speech is shallow and choked. As a younger man, Pop’s voice carried against the wind from his backdoor steps to the top of the tip, when he called me down to ‘dinner!’. In looks, he reminded me of Robert de Niro playing an American-Italian mobster:

1951-06-(a1)-(1)

I suspect that the recording has little potential for development. It’s the disjunction between the TV broadcast and my grandfather’s narrative that is most striking. But this isn’t what I’m looking for. And I won’t know what I’m looking for until I hear it.

In parallel, I sourced the National Museum Wales, British Library, and other public institutions with sound archives. A number are cutting back on staff during this period of austerity.

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