this year, i’ve been working extra hard at my poetry. i’ve been taking absolutely every opportunity i could grab to write, perform, and submit my work for publishing, and hey, i have something to show for it! in april, i took part in ESCAPRIL, a month-long series of writing prompts which had me writing every single day. i managed to complete it successfully and not miss any. during april i posted these poems to social media every day, sharing them as soon as they got finalised in my head.

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about how i relate to gender. i think generally, i don’t really relate to gender – for a long time this has been the reasoning behind using exclusively they/them pronouns. when i started using they/them pronouns a decade ago, i saw it as an ‘opting out’. a statement that i did not want to be contained within that paradigm, that i saw gender as an oppressive construct which was coercively applied to me with expectations i could never fulfil.

as you probably know, i spent the last year and a bit doing an artist practitioner MA with middlesex university. as you do not yet know, because i only just found out and this is me telling you – i passed! yay! this means i can actually share my research with you! my project was called Fear, play and getting things wrong: Understanding emotional responses when collaborating in improvised music settings and it’s all about the internal experience of improvisers in group improvisation.

this week arts council england updated some of their policy wording1 to threaten organisations which host artists or artworks that could pose ‘reputational risk’, warning those that chose to go ahead with hosting these risky political statements that they might be stripped of their National Portfolio Organisation (read: funded) status. with this move, ACE made explicit something which a lot of us had felt creeping in under the door (and really we all should have seen coming a mile off) which is that: if you want your artmaking to be funded by the government, it needs to prop up the government’s point of view.

i was checking in on threads the other day and i noticed that almost every single post on my feed was some variation of ‘dear algorithm, please show me XYZ users’. i must have interacted with exactly one of this type of post and instead of showing me people like the account i had interacted with, i got to see posts which were all along the same kind of lines, each listing a different bucket of signifiers for content they think they might want to see.

great news! i have set up a mailing list which will auto-post new things from this blog! it’s a solution for all of you who enjoy getting emails about things (perverts) instead of cool, calm, collected RSS… if you followed my short-lived substack experiment, i migrated your email over to the list already. you’re probably getting this in your email inbox. hello. i will be nuking that substack profile forthwith.

it’s been a while since i reflected on my MA, so i’m checking in. i’m now in the final phase of the course, which is an independent research project. the provisional title of my study is ‘fear, play, and getting things wrong: understanding emotional responses when collaborating in improvised music settings’. as is my wont, i’ve probably gathered a bit too much data than i know what to do with! i’ve completed the data gathering portion of my project, which consisted of semi-structured interviews, a group activity, and a focus group immediately following the group activity.

i’ve been trying to identify the specific pang i get when i see news from people i know, or even more so people i used to know, who i remember having quite tense conversations with about the nature of what’s ethical and responsible for society in an arts practice, who are now doing really well and getting a ton of opportunities1. to start with i dismissed it as being simply jealous, which would be fair enough if it were the case.

EDIT: literally 6 hours after posting this i got an email that said i didn’t get shortlisted, but I’m still really proud of the video and you can watch it at the bottom of this post! towards the end of last month, i decided to knuckle down a bit and really focus on sending in applications for things. it’s the currency of the art world – funding applications, competition entries, open calls – it all operates on this ‘bid’ system where every artist who’s seen a particular ig post makes a cute little document which presents the best side of themself that day and shows the judging panel what-for.

how does capitalism alienate us from each other and ourselves? an introduction to my system which articulates the contemporary condition as a layer of performance vs a layer of action and integrity. lately i’ve found myself sharing the link to the original version of this text more and more often. it feels like it crops up in almost every conversation - about art, politics, kindness. at its core is a construct i’ve been building to understand why so many people act in ways which don’t serve them: the layer of performance, vs the layer of integrity.