I am noticing some characterful windows in my neighbourhood.

I watched Audrey Diwan’s film of ‘Happening’ (2021) on Saturday and recognised a feature of the kitchen of the abortionist: an enamel ladle rack.

I have a very similar one which I bought nearly a year ago and which has not yet found its place in our home.

I can’t seem to get it onto the wall. So I take it upstairs to my office, complete with the attached ladles, when it is getting in the way in the kitchen.

And then I take it back down to the kitchen when it is getting in the way in my office.

Sometimes it ends up halfway down the stairs on the landing and stays there for a while until I decide what to do with it.

I was inordinately excited to see one like it in the film. It was a bit like seeing a blouse I own appear in ‘Nymphomaniac’ (Lars von Trier) worn by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

I like to reflect upon the ridiculous and irrational aspects of our relationships with objects. I am deliberately making this my review of Diwan’s film because for me it was a stand out moment. Obviously we could talk about how well the film captures the spirit of Ernaux’s text etc etc or not, or about the performances, or how well it reflects that moment in France’s history and political life but that would be less interesting to me than looking at and considering the juxtaposition of the enamel ladle rack in the film and the real one which is mine and which floats around our house.

Link to video: shadowwalking

[For some reason I can’t get this video to play. Will come back to this in a while when I’m feeling a little less frustrated by it.]

I had the idea to tell a story, and I had started drafting how I would tell it, in my head, but less than a minute later and by the time I had sat down to write it on my computer, it had vanished and I can’t remember which it was. It was one of the incredible ones, the kind I often think no one would believe but I found, just now, in the bathroom, in my mind, the words to put it down. And now it’s gone.

I have put everything that happened to me, just as it happened to me, as drawings, into a glass case underneath a rock ten feet by twelve feet by eight feet in size at an undisclosed location in the countryside.

Image is called ‘foundation’ since I made it on art foundation, it displays women’s complexions under foundation make up and seems like a mulch of women’s faces, the foundation of society. I like the discoloured, yellowing, old sellotape marks. I made it by placing Sellotape over magazine images then using a pencil tip to rub over the faces so that the tape acts like a transfer medium.

I decide it is high time I dusted my dressing table.

Everything is covered with a thick layer of dust, not a good look for a dressing table consisting mostly of mirrored surfaces.

I take off all the perfume bottles and other accumulated objects and put them on a tray ready for dusting.

I photograph them and the glass shelf they have been taken from, which is reflected in the main full-length mirror.

I am reminded of my idea of reflecting on why it is that French words are romantic in themselves and photograph the large bottles, saved from my Mum’s dressing table, when we cleared her house: ‘bien-être’, ‘Femme’, ‘jardins de bagatelle’, ‘AMAZONE’.

I am astonished to notice my foot in the photograph, something I hadn’t planned.

I rephotograph the perfume bottles with more of myself in the mirror, being careful to pose in such a way as not to allow any compromising details (!) into the image.

I remember photographing perfume bottle tops when I was on art foundation back in 1990. I am astonished to find that I can reach behind me onto a low shelf to retrieve a ring binder containing photographs of these experiments from all those years earlier. I am more organised than I am prepared to admit to myself. I remember quite clearly not knowing why I was taking photos of perfume bottle tops back in 1990. Quite often on this project I get the feeling that everything in my life has been leading to this point.

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Yesterday’s sleep was fitful. I awoke rather early – soon before 5am. On my way down the stairs to the bathroom I looked out of the small window out onto the street and saw what I took to be at first glance a ghost. A figure of a man standing squarely looking at our house. I’d like to try to describe the feeling of thinking he was a ghost. It was a mixture of delight and horror. He was a big chap, tall, well-built and yet on the first glance he seemed weightless and like a relief stuck onto the flat plane that was the street scene. The street lighting at that time of night rendered everything pale orange and he was part of and yet distinct from everything around him, also coloured pale orange. [on reading through this account, I find myself trying to remember if any shadows were to be seen in this light, if everything was as flat as my memory tells me it was. Excited that I was seeing a ghost I retracted my foot from completing its action and continuing to step down to the next tread and stopped on the stair where I could best see out of the window. Even now I am amazed that I made that very quick decision to look at the figure given that, were it a ghost, that would seem terrifying to me. Curiosity and the need to disbelieve any ghostly possibilities were what made me stop to look again. When I did I saw his figure continue to stand, feet slightly apart, face on to the façade of our house but then his head inclined slightly and I saw that his left hand was attached by a lead to a small, dark dog. He was just a man out walking his dog in the early hours. One reason I had seen him as a ghost is that he had been filling the frame in which I am used to looking in anticipation of seeing a ghost. When I get up in this way to visit the bathroom early morning, I usually look out of this window to the street and beyond, across and over the flint wall, searching the view to see if there are any ghosts abroad. This mainly since S. told me that one day he had seen three nuns float along near one of the buildings then disappear into a wall. As he told me this story of his experience I felt the pleasurable tingling in the back of my neck, which is where my friend J. who is a Shaman and can see the dead, says they enter and leave the body through a kind of trap door. She is very matter of fact about this. So matter of fact that I sometimes think it rather a pity that her extraordinary abilities inhabit such an ordinary place in her own account to herself about what she gets to experience by dint of whatever particular gift she possesses.

The man tugged slightly on the lead to encourage his dog to start walking again and they both turned on their heels and headed up to the top of the street by which time I had lost interest in them both, the tingling had ended and I reached the bathroom door.

I must draw him as I saw him as a ghost and try to convey both his solidity and flatness in that pale orange light. How he seemed like a relief (as in solid within a plane). How his figure asserted itself within the frame of my expectant looking. How the expecting to see something plays such a part in the conjuring of ghosts.

Looking for a photo of this item which I made (in 2008?) Eventually, I attached it to the end of a long wooden stick and it hangs about my studio. I think of it as my flag of surrender. Ingeborg Bachmann, author of ‘Malina’, extraordinary novel. I used to think of it as probably untranslatable but an English translation came out just a few years ago. I gave this translation to a good friend of mine, N, as a birthday present but she has never mentioned it since.

Whilst searching for this photo I came across some other relevant ‘waymarkers’ from the past.

This poster which I made from the cover of Toril Moi’s book about Simone de Beauvoir. It was a simple crop and I had it enlarged and printed in black and white as an AO sized poster. I put it up on the wall outside my studio, the corridor space, for one of our APEC Open Studio events. (Year? I need to get organised and date and archive all my work.)

And this, an exploded image of tape made by ironing a transferable print out of the image of the ball of screwed up tape onto a screwed up sheet, then opening the sheet out and cutting the sections of the printout free. I’d forgotten I’d done this. Reminds me of Cornelia Parker’s ‘Cold dark matter’ in some respects.

And this, object, traffic-flattened tin can, attached to the lining of an old curtain (from my Gateshead Granny’s house) next to a cut out of a printed image of my hand holding the tin, photographed from the side to show its flatness. Three-dimensionality, into two-dimensionality back into three-dimensional materiality.

In Blackwells Bookshop on Broad Street, I go looking for Ernaux texts. The modern languages section is much degraded since the hedge fund which owns Waterstones took over Blackwells as well. A boxed ‘market’ of ‘sale books lines the inside perimeter of the Norrington Room and foreign language texts are squeezed onto a few shelves in one corner. French, which previously inhabited several bookcases to itself on the second floor of the shop is now restricted to one side of a bookcase. A couple of Ernaux, which I’ve already got: ‘Le Jeune Homme’ and ‘Les Années’. That’s it. But next to her I find a Duras which I don’t know. A bilingual ‘No More/C’est Tout’; writings leading up to just a couple of days before her death, it says in the blurb.

At breakfast, on Sunday morning I am chatting to L and K who are telling me about their trip to Vietnam. Photos of places they have seen. They mention the house of the Chinese-Vietnamese lover, Duras’s lover, and show me a picture. Astonished that MD should come up in conversation I get up and pull the book from my bag and tell them about it. They find this coincidence remarkable. On the train home I start reading it, in French, then English, comparing the texts. Sparest of spare writing. Then I read one of the prefaces which mentions the date of her death, 3 March. The same date as today, now yesterday (now three days before this edit). I quickly photograph the preface and zap it to K, who replies that, not only that, but 3 March in a leap year because the editor mentions 29 February as well, as the date on which Yann Andrea gave him the pages of her writing. This year 2024 is a leap year. “very spooky” I reply to K, “but what does it mean?”

I recently worked out that ghosts interest me because they are positioned at the overlap between fact and fiction. They exist as the accounts that people tell of having seen them, otherwise . . . not? To those who claim to have seen them, they are inexplicable facts. They are practical because they do not take up space. The collective undead do not amount to clutter.

Talking to J about the idea that ghosts look just like us and walk amongst us and we can’t distinguish them from anyone else. Walking along the Cowley Road on Sunday morning I pass a figure in full brown monks’ clothing, which looks rather bulky and neither like tailored contemporary  raiment nor like imitation fancy-dress attire. As I pass he turns with me and when I look back he is facing me. He is standing at a bus stop, making him seem particularly ordinary. I want to take a picture to see if he shows up on the photograph, to test if it’s a ghost, but I don’t because he’s looking right at me and it would be obvious. The ethics of taking photographs of ghosts.

I think of this reply to K, which I could have sent her yesterday.

She asked for an explanation of a sculpture I had sent her an image of, ‘Motherboard’.

I sent it to her on the train coming back from Oxford because we had been exchanging messages about our Mothers. I feel sad that the image of the sculpture has not worked for her. She has only seen a two centimetre rendition of it on the screen of her phone. Whether she zoomed in or not, I don’t know, whether she noticed the reflection of me, in the mirrored surface of it, taking a photo of it, I can’t know either. I told her that it was about my relationship with my Mum. Her reply is: “Looks like a heart. Other than that you might have to explain it to me.” That the work needs an explanation makes me sad.

I wake up just now thinking about the explanation of physical works that need to be experienced in the flesh, viewer-to-sculpture, sculpture-to-viewer and about how the explaining of them in words is inadequate. That translation that takes place that is not only inadequate but impossible and which is also a betrayal into Logos, the tongue of the Patriarchy.

Interesting, as I type that, now, how I notice how dangerous that feels for me, towards myself, to write that, in language, that fear of the power of the Patriarchy. This is one reason I needed the safety of the password to protect this space as I was initially keeping this blog. Now, editing it for making it public, I feel bolder. What the hell.

I didn’t reply to K. I had already told her that my phone battery was about to run out and that there were no charging points on the train, which was true. So I let it hang. Much like the sculpture hung, on a wall, after I had made it, two metres high for others to make of it what they would, given that it was on show in the past and then became a photographic image of itself, on a screen, pinging backwards and forwards. It’s also an image I use on my business cards. ‘Motherboard’ on a piece of card, ten by four centimetres big alongside my name and contact details.

So I think of this reply now, at 3am when I wake in the middle of the night, to send to her:

“The day after surgery, an anxious spouse asks the surgeon how the procedure on her husband had gone. He replies: “We won’t know if it has worked until you and I sit down together and I explain to you what I did.” I don’t understand this yet but I feel it is approaching some kind of relevance.