Yesterday. From 9.00 am to 5.00 am, the MA Vocational Practice students convened for the last time in order to deliver their end-of-module assessed presentations. Wisdom finds its mouthpiece where she wills. I sat at my students’ feet on this occasion. Their honesty, generosity of spirit, commitment, and insight were always impressive and sometimes deeply moving too. These students had plumbed their depths, humbly acknowledged their unknowing, and been chastened by their perceived lack of ability. To such only will lasting and enriching success be given. There are times when we must first despair of ourselves before art extends a hand to pull us forth from the pit. During my 24-hour open studio event, somewhere between 2 am and 4 am in the morning, I reached the bottom of the barrel of ideas and possibilities. Only then did I discover that the barrel had a false bottom. Beneath it lay potentialities that I wouldn’t otherwise have discovered had I not come to the end of myself.

Today. 7.30 am:  New light:

8.15 am: I completed assigning tutorials to slots in next week’s timetable. 9.00 am: Postgraduate affairs come to the centre of my stage for the next weeks. The annual (dreaded and distressing) Research Postgraduate Monitoring process was begun. These days, there’s far too much scrutiny of the inscrutable, and too little of those dark and despicable things (in oneself and the world) that need to be brought into the light. In the background, I continued processing variants of a sound for one of my PhD Fine Art students, completing student registers, corresponding with external examiner, and mapping yet more ‘things to do’. (As always, I kept open a space in my mind for imagining my future.)

I was eager (to put in mildly) to act upon certain realisations that occurred during the 24-hour event. The urgency was as much felt through my body as it was fulminating in my mind.

10.15 am: Off to School to interview a prospective PhD Fine Art applicant. En route: the east window of Holy Trinity Church:

Following the interview, I held the final timetabled, third year Exhibition tutorial of the academic year. Jakob’s ship in a piano:

1.00 pm: The annual lunchtime meeting for the allocation of exhibition spaces to the undergraduate fine art students. The smaller contingent permitted a more generous disposal of the real estate this year. I enjoyed the banter.

2.15 pm: Back at homebase, I responded to the email generated by the morning’s engagements. 3.00 pm: I reviewed, again, the sound files that I’d produced on Monday and Tuesday. Ordinarily, one should not be swayed from a course of action once you’ve set your mind to it. A exchange with a colleague:

I began to reassemble the studio not as it was, but as it shall be for the next stage of ‘The Talking Bible’ and ‘New Song’ projects. The space was Spring-cleaned along the way.

7.30 pm: My afternoon’s studiological manoeuvres continued.

Some principles and observations derived from today’s endeavours:

• Any mode of creative practice – however quirky, spontaneous, and instinctual – must submit to a discipline in order to have integrity.
• Any mode of creative practice is undisciplined when the artist doesn’t know what they’re doing.
• Any attempt to return to past ways of working, thinking, being, relationships, and ambitions is unwise. Those things were not how you remember them, in any case. Nor would they be, now, how and what they were then. One cannot rewrite the past by trying to relive it.
• Nevertheless, there are times when the past comes towards us (of its own volition) from the future. On these occasions, we should run to meet it.
• Like many visual art forms, the splendour of the stained-glass window is appreciable only from the inside, looking out. (Make of that metaphor what you will.)
• It won’t always be like this.
• I’m content with who I am, but not with what I am.