8.40 am: Off to School:

After communicating the weekend’s preparation of marks and scripts to various co-ordinators, I prepared copies of the marks sheets for the morning’s degree show ‘walkaround’:

The purpose of the exercise, in which all staff together tour the exhibitions, is to ensure parity of marking across all the medial disciplines: a ‘cross-check’ (as they say on airlines prior to take-off. Whatever that means). This procedure will, in turn, be scrutinised by the External Examiner tomorrow. So, all in all, each student’s work will have been assessed three times. Today’s ‘stroll’ took three hours to complete.

After lunch, I pressed on with the PhD Research Monitoring reports (with a little Otomo Yoshihide in the background for company, and a chunk of dark, chilli chocolate for comfort and solace). I find it both instructive and inspiring to immerse myself in the work of a single guitarist (substitute any type of creative practitioner) for a period. One ought to be acquainted with both artists and their artworks. There are few things more encouraging (particularly, when one’s own work hits a brick wall) than reading artists’ biographies and autobiographies, and discovering that they too have smashed into, and through, obstacles in their way.

Evening. The sunlight of the parting day poured into the studio:

My task was to remain constant: reports were waiting to be written, and they’d not get any fewer for my staring out of the window. Onwards and sideways. The reports, to my mind, needed to be summative, diagnostic, prescriptive, encouraging, and supportive. I’m gratified by the work that our PhD Fine Art students are undertaking. Each is working in a world entirely different to that of the others. Supervising them is a very rich (if exhausting) experience.

At bedtime, I’ve begun reading:

I felt in need of a refresher course.