Absurdity by Canvas

Issue 8

Absurdity

Issue 7 Theme: Absurdity

welcome 2

Editor’s note ‘Absurdity’ is a term that our team agreed represents the ludicrousness and irrationality of our time. The dynamics of our society, as we know them, are shifting and this state of instability has created feelings of unease and restlessness, a mistrust generated by our media, politicians and world leaders. Because of this, community has never been more necessary. By focusing on collaboration, Canvas hopes to convey a message that enunciates the importance of supporting each other. The theme has led the Canvas Team in many different directions, from writers exploring the absurd within identity, art history, and the everyday, to student artists experimenting with immersive environments and bold, expressive forms. The fashion team produced collaborative shoots with two of ECA’s students, whilst our art panel have been busy with studio visits, chatting to artists about promoting community effort in the art school. As well as the pages in this issue of Canvas, don’t forget that you can find extra articles, student exhibition reviews and other insights on our website. Thank you,

Editor’s Letter

Aisling Ward Editor-in-Chief

TABLE

By Imogen Richards

-4Inside joke

- 26 Daniela Groza

-6Cindy Sherman & The Visual Absurdity of Identity

- 30 Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show Review

-8Mad, Bad and Stupid

- 12 On View - 14 Imogen Richards - 16 Student Interviews - 21 Sara Jolly - 22 Drifting Celluloid - 24 Hannah Robinson - 36Katerina Fletcher - 43 Evie Edwards

Culture 3

- 10 Jody Mulvey

TS...

Fashion

Art

- 20 Their World, Mind Hold - 32 Boast Your Creativity, Not Your Car - 34 Balm Well Carvery - 38 Absurd Modern Couples - 42 A Window Too High - 44 The Veil of Nonsence Poetry

By Jody Mulvey

Contents

- 44 Oratory

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Yves Klein and Institutional Critique On at least three occasions between 1959 and 1962, Yves Klein performed his seemingly absurd and irrational piece Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, in which he sold these ‘zones’ to willing collectors. The zones were areas of empty space that he deemed to hold a certain aesthetic quality only comprehensible to those who possessed enough artistic knowledge or instinct. According to Klein’s stipulations, the transaction had to be completed in the presence of a gallery director, an art critic or a dealer. The buyer was required to burn the receipt to gain full possession of the zone. Upon receiving payment in gold, the artist would dispose of half of this by throwing it into the river Seine. This flamboyant performance may be considered a playful interrogation of institutional attitudes towards art, dramatising the processes of valuation and sale.

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Klein’s critique focused on the commodification of art by institutions. He called attention to the idea that the success of an artwork is determined by its monetary value, dependent on variables such as the reputation of the artist or the gallery it is exhibited in, rather that on its beauty or craftsmanship. By transforming the sale into a performance, he highlighted the fact that art has a financial role, which in this case overrides its aesthetic role. In fact, as the sale is the only aspect of this artwork that could be experienced, its commercial value is integral to its existence. Klein exposed the idea that financial transaction is not merely a side effect of institutionalised art, but rather an essential element. Challenging this notion, he

broke the economic cycle of the artwork. In burning the receipt, the only material residue of the work was destroyed, denying its resale and preventing it from generating greater value over time. The buyer was left empty handed, the gallery had nothing to exhibit and there was no more money to be made. A flaw in this idealistic practice may be found in the fact that Klein retained half of the gold as personal profit. In accepting financial reward from the collector, Klein still benefitted from the institution. This may compromise the work’s conceptual purity in the eyes of some viewers. It recalls Andrea Fraser’s concerns expressed in her seminal essay ‘From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,’ where she notes that artists are the direct beneficiaries of the

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institutionalised art market. She also argues that works engaged in critique are ironically marketed towards the institution for this reason, and fail to detach themselves from institutional demands and validation. This idea can certainly be applied to Klein’s performances, which were arguably dependent on the legitimising gaze of the dealer, the critic, and the gallery director as a marker of value. Without this institutional validation and its participation in the ceremonial sale, we may question whether any collector would have actually paid for the work. In a similar vein, Klein was embedded in institutionalism in that he was an artist accepted and revered by institutions. Through the patenting of his own colour, International Klein Blue, which acted as a trademark throughout his oeuvre, Klein arguably had one of the strongest personal brands of any artist working at this time. He even incorporated this signature into Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, noting that the gold could be burned instead of being thrown into the river, as ‘gold burning makes blue fire.’ Through this self-promotion, Klein transformed himself into an art-historical institution, putting the validity of his critique into question.

“...the gallery had nothing to exhibit and there was no more money to be made.” From an alternative viewpoint, reliance on his fame and on the judgement of authoritative figures for the work’s success may only serve to emphasise the irrationality of institutional practices. While Klein described his work in terms of high-minded artistic ideals, talking of aesthetic qualities only perceivable to an elite audience, these immaterial works may be most easily understood as ridicule or parody. In this light, his demand for institutional validation of such an absurd ritual performance became a mockery of those who obeyed in response. After all, these institutional figures are accustomed to participating in the sale of artworks whose values are similarly ascribed to the names attached to them. This valuation of power and status over taste is a major point of contention explored throughout the practice of institutional critique, and Klein uncloaks this through his successful sale of empty space in exchange for gold. Further to this, the ritual and ceremony involved in the transaction may be construed as a mockery of the spiritual elitism of the art world and the veneration given to the artist. Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility closely mirrors the arguments laid out in Fraser’s essay. The ephemeral work refutes traditional studio aesthetics and clearly challenges ideas of the preservation and commercialisation of art. It is firmly placed within the institutional sphere, as a financial asset, an object of reverence and a concept in art historical academia, and this may complicate the way we understand it as a critique. However, this does not necessarily negate its critical potency. Fraser ends her essay by arguing that the artist, trapped within the institution, has a ‘role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions.’ In submitting to art institutions, Klein may be considered to challenge them from within.

Words: Anna Gilroy Art

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Cindy Sherman and the Visual Absurdity of Identity Cindy Sherman, one of the most renowned contemporary artists of our time, does not shy away from ridiculous and irrational imagery in her self-portraiture photography practice. Sherman’s method revolves around the act of dressing-up, donning a plethora of wigs, prosthetics, discoloured makeup, outlandish costumes and foreign, distorted poses. Sherman disguises herself as different characters while also using these tangible mechanisms of her performance to explicitly reference her characters’ statuses as stereotypes of themselves. This trend is more prevalent in her later works from the 1980s spanning into the 2000s. In the 1970s, Sherman’s photos evoke a more authentic feeling, not yet adopting surrealist imagery but choosing to tackle the creation of tropes in a less staged manner; blackand-white women are captured frozen in an eerie and more seamless blend of reality and fantasy. Later, however, Sherman approaches subjects such as fairytale worlds, historical portraits, fashion, middle aged women, and clowns with a more fervent desire to exist right on the edge of reality and fantasy; her images become all the more grotesque and titillating because they straddle both realms so well through their employment of the visually absurd. Intense colours contrast against

each other, the waxiness of fake breasts and sculpted cheekbones seem to almost drip off the print, and sumptuous fabrics drape themselves over her body. Yet her eyes peek out beneath the weight of the obvious facade and shine bright, always belonging to Cindy Sherman, even if her varied appearances do not. She simultaneously becomes her characters whilst exposing them as tropes who are unreal and out of this world. These physical transformations that rely on bizarre exaggerations are the crux of Sherman’s absurdity; through the visual technique of ridiculousness, illogicalness, and otherworldliness, her work becomes a testament to the artificiality of persona, to the ability of ‘dress up’ to create and exist in an unreal yet legitimate identity. This creation of identity seems more relevant now than ever in the age of social media and the digital presentation of the self. The cultural powerhouse that is Instagram relies on people’s distillation of themselves into tropes profitable in a cyber-market of views and likes. Selfies are not organic but meticulously fabricated vignettes of an identity that the selfie-taker wishes to embody. These images more often than not rely on a new kind of visual absurdity, one that has become normalised and circulated throughout 2010s culture. To be ‘Instafamous’ is to adopt the technique of ‘dress-up’ in a way that differs from Sherman’s photography because it declines to acknowledge its artificiality. This new dress-up is comprised of trends like ‘Facetuned’ and usually fake-tanned skin that glows so flawlessly it seems unhuman; surgical enhancements that plump lips and breasts and sharpen jawlines, cheekbones, and noses; layered makeup comprised of intense contour and highlight to erase any blemish; perfectly styled hair that emanates softness and silkiness; contorted poses that emphasise exposed ribs, unbelievably tiny waists, and no fold of flesh out of place; and fantastical fashions that only the holders of ‘Instafame’ could possibly afford. These trends are visually absurd because their outlandish exaggerations of contemporary beauty and status are so far from the imperfect reality that people physically embody. Unlike Sherman’s pointed exposure of this act of identity creation, however, the Bella Hadids and Kylie Jenners of cyberspace prefer to exist in this masquerade as if it is reality. Their manufactured features are exemplary of the bizarrity of the 21st century ideal of female beauty, and yet

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“They employ the visually absurd in their ascent to Instafame and yet refuse to acknowledge the artificiality inherent in this absurdity.” Integral to Cindy Sherman’s work is the continual re-examination of women’s societal roles through the identities she creates. Perhaps her dedication to exposing female stereotypes through the technique of visual absurdity can help us in recognizing and amending this performance of beauty ideals online and its absurdity of hyperbolic perfection.

acceptance of this inflicted trope and an incorporation of it into one’s identity. By examining Sherman’s work, we can recognise these elements of the visually absurd in posts to which we tend not give a second thought; we can look at Bella Hadid’s Instagram and see the ridiculousness, the illogicalness, and the otherworldliness of the perfect persona of female beauty and sexuality she has created by physically and digitally manipulating her appearance. The visual absurdity of this appearance manipulation exalted on social media hurts women in very real ways, their self-esteem becoming tied to an artificality that is not acknowledged as such. Thus, through looking at Sherman’s works and appreciating the way she walks the line between reality and fantasy in a manner that exposes female stereotypes through the explicit act of identity creation, we can begin to deconstruct what we see in front of us on our phones everyday. We can live more fully in reality while also coming to recognise and appreciate fantasy and visual absurdity. Words: Sophie Nardi-Bart MA History of Art, 1st Yr Art

Bella Hadid, connecting…, Instagram, October 2018.

For example, in Untitled #359, part of her Headshots series highlighting middle aged women’s strive for “sex appeal,” a woman blankly stares at the camera. Her overdrawn lips, thinly penciled eyebrows, visible makeup, unruly hair, luscious velvet dress, and parade of gold necklaces are more evocative of a satirical exposition of women’s perpetual desire and necessity to appear youthful and sexual than an earnest

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #359, 2000.

they lack the self-awareness that Sherman and her shining eyes embody to understand the trope they are playing into. Or, if they do understand their role in this creation, they simply lack the compassion to care.

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Mad, Bad and Stupid. Bad Painting became a well-known artistic movement in 1978,

following an exhibition of the same name curated by art critic and auctioneer Marcia Tucker. The title belies the reality that what was actually on show was really good painting. This irony is a thread that weaves together the work of artists who have made and continue to make bad painting that is otherwise extremely disparate in terms of both style and subject matter. However, ultimately, what links these artists together is their steadfast, avant-garde commitment to challenge traditional modes of style and the omnipotent judgment of ‘good taste’.

Magritte, La Famine, 1948 What the title of this exhibition came to signify was painting that challenged traditional art historical practice. However, in no way did bad painting begin or end with Tucker’s exhibition. René Magritte, for example, had a break from his unmistakable style and facture with his Sunlit Surrealist and Vache pictures that are often viewed in relation to bad painting. From his Vache series La Famine depicts a chain of heads, painted in loose and casual brushstrokes, appearing to eat one another - a pessimistic comment by Magritte on how during times of famine people may be reduced to cannibalism. The childish, spontaneous and cartoonish style is worlds away from the characteristic steadyhanded, photographic clarity of his most widely known works. Such an absurd break in practice is enough to make one to laugh, and it is unsurprising that not a single painting sold. Magritte’s Vache paintings were deliberately conceived to provoke the Parisian public and the pompous members of the art scene who had disapproved of his attempt to redefine Surrealism following the war.

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The works from this period are a paragon of bad painting; the willful badness of his paintings were a way in which he could overcome the boundaries set by an overbearing, conservative art scene.

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Where critics found the workmanship of bad painters to be uninteresting or crude, Marcia Tucker found a fascination; reveling in their ability to switch styles and subject matter in order to transcend the established art scene. Seeing the continual potential for bad painting to provoke and challenge, Danish curator Rasmus Thor Christensen created an exhibition in 2018 titled New Bad Painting with the desire to explore the concept in contemporary art. Much like the first exhibition, the divergent styles of the artists prohibit any kind of classification of a school or movement. From the soft, hazy, fleshy, human-like figures of George Rouy, to Coline Marotta’s flattened figures imbued with references ranging from Egypt to Hockney, the only similarity between the artists is a dedication to the medium of painting, through idiosyncratic expressions. Talking in an interview, Christensen felt that what this exhibition was able to do was to create a space of freedom to explore personal aesthetic tastes. As such, we can begin to see a commonality between makers of bad painting throughout art history. This comes in the form of provocation, a challenge set up by the artist that they want the viewer to take up - one where we test our comfort levels and let our own bodily intuitions guide our responses to their work, rather than the aesthetic preconceptions that have been prescribed by art institutions and critics. Joan Brown, Woman Wearing Mask, 1972

Whether painting in the early twentieth century or in 2019, what becomes clear is that these artists have, and always will be, rebels with a cause, ready to shake up the art world one bad painting at a time. From the original press release of Marcia Tucker’s 1978 exhibition Bad Painting, it was noted that the work on show ‘discarded classical drawing modes in order to present a humorous, often sardonic, intensely personal view of the world’. Of those included in the exhibition, Joan Brown jumps out as an artist unafraid to paint an ugly picture. Though her work may have been regarded as ugly or unpolished, she was unflinchingly personal in her paintings of kissing couples, hybrid animal-human portraits and domestic scenes.

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For Brown, bad painting appears to have provided a freedom from oppressive, conformist attitudes about art and aesthetics, and this freedom allowed her to be introspective in an extraordinary way. Tucker herself wrote of Brown’s defiance against traditional aesthetic appreciation in her 1972 painting Woman Wearing Mask, calling out its absurdity. And indeed it is, with a lingerie-clad woman in red high heels painted with the face of a purple cat. But, however absurd it may be, there is something exceedingly down to earth about Brown’s work that manages to get under your skin and make you feel uneasy. The personal implications of her work suddenly become clear once the laughter has worn off.

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Jody Mulvey MA (Hons) Fine Art, 4th Year Fine Art student Jody Mulvey explores materiality, shape and colour within a space. Instigated by a vast series of drawings, Mulvey creates immersive environments which consume the viewers in an array of vivid colours and ambiguous, organic shapes.

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Instagram: @joddddddy

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Section

5. MC3

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ON VIEW:

Focus Scottish Photography

City Art Centre Anna Gilroy

In Focus, showcasing City Art Centre’s photographic collections, maps developments in Scottish photography since the 1840s. It brings to light Scotland’s important role in the history of the medium, both in terms of technological progress and in aesthetic exploration. Through displays on the origins of documentary photography of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, early creative explorations into calotype and wet collodion processing and the illusionistic potential of digital editing, Scotland’s social history and changing urban landscapes can also be traced. The exhibition’s arrangement means we are not directed through this history chronologically, but encouraged to travel through the space in any direction, seeing contemporary works in lightboxes alongside the gallery’s oldest surviving prints. The achievements of 19th century pioneers of photography are paralleled by the digital developments of contemporary artists, highlighting Scotland’s continuing contributions to the art form.

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Maud Sulter, Terpsichore, 1989

Until 12th May 2019, free admission

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NOW | Monster Chetwynd, Henry Coombes, Moyna Flannigan, Betye Saar, Wael Shawky Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One) Kelli Staake

Student’s sculpture from the Storworlds Exhibition, The Writer’s Museum

The Writers’ Museum Sarah Renard

Storyworlds is a tiny but uplifting exhibition tucked away in one of Edinburgh’s smaller museums, The Writers’ Museum, a 17th century building just off the Royal Mile, with characterful winding staircases revealing rooms which celebrate the Scottish literary greats, mainly Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Conceived as part of Scotland’s Year of Young People, 2018, and also in collaboration with Lothian-based paper-cut artist and printmaker Tessa Asquith Lamb, the work featured in the exhibition was made by art students from various secondary schools across the city. The paper sculptures produced take inspiration from Scottish literature and language, from Treasure Island to Harry Potter and beyond. Each miniature paper-cut scene, enclosed within its own individual glass dome, deserves close inspection so that the intricacy and delicacy of the carefully crafted paper forms can be fully revealed and enjoyed. The interrelation of art and literature present here and the injection of something young and new into a historic setting offers a little burst of creativity to engage with and, hopefully, be inspired by.

The exhibition as a whole synthesises the work of five different artists into an display that is present, forward-thinking and meaningful, exemplified in the work by Betye Saar. Her piece Mojotech asks the viewers to leave a votive offering in front of the altar, and the floor is littered with the everyday detritus of modern life. The fourth iteration of the NOW exhibition series questions medium and tradition in a powerful way. Until 28th April 2019, free admission

Monster Chetwynd, Bat Opera, 2014

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Until 12th May 2019, free admission

Storyworlds: Paper Sculptures by Edinburgh Young Artists

Visiting NOW is a transcendental experience. Monster Chetwynd’s art leaps from the walls, both through the bright three-dimensionality of her sculptures and collages and through the sheer power and technical perfection of her paintings. Chetwynd’s art is heavily performance based, and the exhibit includes videos of her large-scale and energetic productions. Props like huge papier-maché salamanders from the performances line the walls, helping bring the manic energy of surreal group performance into the room. The last room in the series showcases her series Bat Opera, a delightful and impressive collection of bat portraits in oil reminiscent of Constable clouds.

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Imogen Richards

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These are select works from a series of mixed media explorations made with acrylic, oil, soft pastel and oil pastel. Although Imogen primarily draws inspiration from the 90â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Club Kid scene, contemporary drag costume and surrealist fantasy films, the work at its core is inherently intuitive. Responding to each previous mark made, Imogen experiments with expressive, illustrative forms in combination with bold, grotesque texture to create varying surfaces and tones. The drawings particularly reflect the pleasure the artist takes in unrestricted, spontaneous mark making to create an essence of a world more vibrant, garish and energetic than our own.

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Student Interviews: Leah Harscoët

Tell us a bit about the concept behind the two pieces. They represent functional objects, but use unconventional materials; can you explain this further? These two pieces were made just over a year apart. With the umbrella, I was really intrigued by the idea that an object can exist to challenge the function it is perceived to possess. I took an everyday object, stripped it of its functionality, and turned it upside down. The yarn is acrylic, so it’s plastic like the waterproof fabric of an umbrella, but because it’s been constructed differently the original function has long gone. As for the bag, the making was very slow, but that was exactly the point of it. I fell in love with tapestry just over a year ago, as the laborious nature of the medium really caught my attention. Taking an everyday, throwaway object like a plastic bag and spending days on end weaving its likeness, this work seeks to challenge the mass production and disposable nature of objects produced today. Reflecting on the pieces now, I think they actually have a lot in common. Functionality is a theme that seems to come up again and again in my work, and I’m really excited to keep this conversation going.

How does the term ‘absurdity’, or the idea of unconventionality, relate to your practise more generally?

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My practise is part of a growing movement by contemporary textile artists who seek to challenge what we view as ‘art’ by using materials and techniques which have traditionally been considered ‘craft’. The gendering of artistic practices still exists, and this makes things more complicated than they need to be. If we class textile work as ‘art’, does it then assimilate into the dominant (that is, masculine) standard of what ‘high art’ is supposed to be? Even then, textile art is given its own separate category, so whilst in some instances it may fit with more traditional and so-called ‘serious’ media – like painting and sculpture – it does so awkwardly; it still doesn’t quite fit in. My work exists to contest the notion of the textile as a soft, delicate, functional entity; a notion which exists due to the medium being seen as ‘feminine’. My work embraces the unconventional, the queer, the grotesque, and the absurd. I don’t want to make ‘pretty’ things, I want to raise eyebrows. It’s a bit weird, but I like that.

Interview by Arabella Bradley

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Models: Maria Wiik and Isabella Neergaard Petersen Styling & Direction: Sarah Green, Ellie Jeans, Aisling Ward Photography: Arabella Bradley

Can you sum up these pieces in three words? Soft, but not.

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AMY WITNEY SCHOLES

BITC H CRIT Interview by Maria Oliver-Smith

Interesting, as within the painting studios, there has been discussion around whether tutors are upfront enough about our work. Do you have a specific desired audience you wish to reach through BitchCrit?

I have said everyone and anyone (all years and subjects), it is mostly focused on Art subjects as Design students do things differently, but it’s so valuable to interact with people from different year groups, different ages, and different backgrounds. I feel like there isn’t really a focus on the value of community in the art school, and to me peer interaction is such an important part of making work. As a photography student in your third year, could you introduce your practice with reference to any particular themes or subject matter? I mainly do portraiture, fashion and editorial. I play around with a lot of different themes, my main concerns are with inclusivity and representing cultures, subcultures and bodies that aren’t necessarily included in mainstream publications or historically in photography. On the idea of inclusivity and bringing people together, what were the reasons for starting BitchCrit?

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It was inspired by my foundation course where the tutor interactions were pretty brutal. In response to that, we wanted to create a supportive environment so that we could help push each other on. When we split up, we felt that our courses at art college were lacking constructive crits or the sense of community. My friends at DJCAD started hosting informal crits- pushing each other forward and asking questions and enquiring about each other’s work as an addition to their course. I was inspired by this as an addition to what we get or don’t get here as part of our course.

What were the outcomes of the first session you had? The funny thing about the first session was that we were all really nice. BitchCrit is a bit of a contradiction as a name as it was never intended to be mean or bitchy. I feel like people are worried about being honest or saying what they think, it can sometimes feel personal and intrusive. There has to be a separation between personal bitchiness and productively helping someone push their work forward. BitchCrit creates a supportive space, but it is also supposed to be constructive. Student-wise, there was a large mix of photography, sculpture and intermedia and we were all introduced to approaches particular to different subject areas.

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;There has to be a separation between personal bitchiness and constructively helping someone push their work forward.â&#x20AC;?

In development, as more sessions occur, perhaps there might be more opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration?

Do you have any future aspirations for BitchCrit? Apart from this being primarily a crit session do you feel like it might develop into something bigger? Collective exhibitions or events? I would like to use the social media side of BitchCrit to signpost people to different resources about how they can get the most out of crits and feedback and how to deal with criticism. BitchCrit is intended to be positive and casual but it can be hard getting feedback on your work. The idea of a collective show would be amazing, we could incorporate learning into physically putting on an exhibition.

If we create something more casual than the crossyear crits provided by the art college and it is peerled and everyone is on an equal standpoint, then I think the opportunity for collaboration would prove easier within this relaxed environment. 19

What about other student-run organisations, thinking outside of ECA, for example Embassy, have you had any involvement in organisations such as this? It is not something I am involved with at the moment but it is something I would like to move towards. Being apart of organisations and collectives should be encouraged, anything run by people from a different standpoint than long-running, established institutions interests me. There is something to be said for collaboration and creating a sense of community, both in and out of the art school. In the Painting studios everyone works alongside each other and there is a lot of conversation as everyone is working so closely together. Do you find that in Photography, where obviously there is a different studio organisation, you have the same sort of relationships with your peers? I feel like in Photography there are good vibes but we have a different sort of studio culture than what I expected in art school and I am not sure whether this is specific to us. A sense of community has perhaps been missing in recent years which I find frustrating. That is why student-run initiatives are so important because they feel more accessible, you can bring people together to have conversations and discuss your work in a more casual environment.

I think the idea of creating an online resource would be a really valuable one. Even if it turned into a physical resource like a publication. When can we expect the next BitchCrit? Hopefully very soon, it depends on the availability of people who wish to participate. I would like to provide a structure but allow the timings and the sessions to be controlled by everyone who comes along, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fluid.

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Their World, Mind Hold

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Settle in the muck of your mind An all consuming but fading call from younger days is cooing there the days move their measure, ruled without markings and leave you in cloudy waters. You can’t shape, hear, or properly form them. Although flecks of warmth flicker around and tickle your inner skin Don’t mistake that they are all brittle though Bendable, twistable, deformable but their disappearance can leave a strong tang in your mouth… they don’t want to go quietly

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sometimes they have to though, sent back away These forgettings weave and sculpt your sadness, because to bring them back full is beyond your reach cling onto the warm ones instead I live here, please try to wrap and embalm me and prolong my time parting casts a cloud that would replace me Your memory is big, wide and untidy So when i am blurry, warm me up so you can put balm on your sores

By Ellie Beale MA (Hons) Fine Art, 4th Year

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Artwork by

Sara Jolly BA (Hons) Painting, 4th Year

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D DRRIIFFTTIIN NG Nitrate film was the primary medium of early cinema between the late 1880s and 1948, but by the early 1950s it had been completely replaced, due to its volatility, by new acetate film known as ‘safety film’. Inherently flammable and chemically unstable, the dangers associated with nitrate film quickly became widely known, particularly after a deadly fire at the Paris Bazar de la Charité in 1897, which claimed 126 lives. Nevertheless, cinema’s explosive popularity ensured its continued use for the next fifty years. Due to the fast turn over of cinema, early films were rarely preserved or even archived at all, as once they were worn out by the projection equipment most were discarded.

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In the early 1960s Davide Turconi, a film historian and collector, decided to create an archive from what remained of cinema from the first decades of the twentieth century. He discovered the film collection of Abbé Josef Joye, a teacher in Switzerland who used second-hand films to enliven his classes in the early twentieth century. It contained over 2500 nitrate film reels, many in dazzling colour, although almost all were in an actively decomposing ‘sticky and wet’ state. Turconi decided to cut individual frames from the rapidly deteriorating films so that some parts of them would survive. He meticulously selected which frames to cut on a rewind bench, and then stored each clipping separately as the nitrogen dioxide emitted by one fragment can accelerate the decomposition of another.

Photo: Unidentified Nitrate, c. 1920 (Personal Collection)

In the 1950s and 60s, ‘preserving’ silent films required an audience of academics and historians viewing barely projectable decaying prints in order to conserve the film as a memory. The film was shared until its destruction, with decay central to these screenings as immense losses were made visible. Now, unfortunately, the projection of nitrate is prohibited, with the exception of specific venues sanctioned by International Federation of Film Archives. In spite of this, I propose new analogue slideshow screenings of the still frames as a new method of viewing and sharing them. In these, I seek to resist the drive towards a totalising archive, one which does not accept multifarious viewing methods and the loss associated with each.

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Liable to spontaneously combust above 40 degrees and react in unpredictable ways, nitrate film reveals its analogue materiality. According to the art historian Margaret Iverson, celluloid films’s analogue nature, a ‘continuous form of inscription involving physical contact’, assures an ‘ecological’ evolution, one that is open-ended and not necessarily defined by original criteria or intent. Turconi’s physical collection of frames reveals nitrate film to be an unstable entity; they are defined as sites of loss and irreversible change, which have the potential to create new meaning, rather than the consistency of one stable image created in the process of digital reproduction. As seen in Unidentified Nitrate, the typewritten text is in the process of drifting across the film’s viscous surface. Far from static, the celluloid is amidst a process of analogue translation by which it becomes archived as traces of memory.

CELLULOID CELLULOID Art

Ben Caro

Art 24 Absurdity

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Hannah Robinson MA History of Art, 2nd Yr

Daniela Groza

AEON 3rd Year Jewellery Student

What are the inspirations behind your designs? The inspiration for my pieces come from ancient architectural structures that have been deconstructed over centuries. It’s interesting to see how nature has shaped them over time, leaving us with a series of fractured silhouettes that archaeologists have to piece together in order to reconnect them with their historical roots. The title of this collection – Aeon - reflects the notion of time, meaning infinite or eternal. It consists of a series of interchangeable jewellery pieces which have been pieced together in unusual ways, combining architecture of the past with modernity in the materials. Talk us through your working process. I really enjoy working digitally, so I used 3D printing for this collection. I’m extremely passionate about sustainability and ethical production, so I’ve used 100% recycled silver, natural dyes like charcoal, and have grown copper (electroforming) using copper waste. How would you describe your work? My work connects the digital (man-made) with the handmade, as I use them both equally. 3D printing typically evokes minimal, geometric forms, so I tried to challenge this by creating organic, ancient-looking structures, reworking them by hand after printing to give a more decayed effect. To summarise, I see my work as unconventional and bold. In what ways do you feel your jewellery is unconventional? It is unconventional in the sense that I combine organic, ancient forms with modern features, giving life to the contemporary design process. Interviewed by Ellie Jeans Models: Maria Wiik and Isabella Neergaard Petersen Styling: Sarah Green, Ellie Jeans, Aisling Ward Photography: Arabella Bradley Jewellery by Daniela Groza

Models: Maria Wiik and Isabella Neergaard Petersen Styling & Direction: Sarah Green, Ellie Jeans, Aisling Ward Photography: Arabella Bradley Earrings by Daniela Groza

Edinburgh Charity

Fashion Show 2019

Fashion

Words & Photography by Arabella Bradley 31

The creative team have chosen the theme â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Solsticeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; for this year, to reflect on the idea of growth and new opportunities, which was clear from the plant-lined runway the models walked down at the show. Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show is a great initiative, and an exciting night to be a part of for the audience and the team.

Edinburgh Charity Fashion Show is not your average student-run fashion show. The organisers co-ordinate editori shoots, host events in the run up to the main show, and source garments from graduate designers across the UK. Their aim is to create a performance which brings together fashion, art, and music, and to provide creative opportunities for all. This year, their chosen charity is Penumbra, who work to alleviate mental health problems in adults and young people in Scotland; something which the organisers feel is a prevalent issue in the universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s student body (and of course, in society more widely).

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IMG: ROSIE MATHESON PHOTOGRAPHY

Boast your creativity,

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not your car.

Maisie Williams’ hands you a flower with her new app, ‘daisie’. By Lila Pitcher

Culture

MA History of Art and English Literature 4th Year

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“I find it difficult to feel the dazzling world of Hollywood at my fingertips - even when Maisie Williams stands right in front of me.”

In order to counter-attack this unpleasant thought, I made my way up to ECA on the 6th February for Maisie Williams’ introductory event on daisie, an app she co-created in 2017 to facilitate communication between people in creative careers. When the Game of Thrones actress walks in, it isn’t followed by bodyguards or hidden behind XXL sunglasses. Williams takes her place behind the microphone after casually tugging at her beanie - she might as well be one of us students, thank god. Her entrance makes the evening’s purpose very clear: this discussion will not be about her fame nor the Game of Thrones’ anticipated ending. This talk, just like her application, is aimed at the specific gap in the creative market that awaits us upon leaving University. Effectively the Instagram for creative careers minus the ‘toxicity of social media’, the mobile application enables people of creative professions or interests to connect with each other without being stopped by a wall of expensive institutions, auditions and agents… daisie acts more or less as a satnav offering us to ‘avoid toll routes’: our friendly yellow brick road into the creative industries.

Although the application is still being developed, different features will include finding opportunities based on location, showcasing portfolios and work, building a network… For those who, like me, would go for a swim in December rather than pick one single art, the app offers the option to divide profiles in different sections based on varying interests. While users will have the opportunity to share their profile onto external social media platforms, Williams strongly insists on her wish for this app not to breed fame and cliquey environments.

“The focus of the project is collaboration.” As Williams explains: ‘actors are only as good as their writers’ - finding like-minded people to collaborate on a project remains the best way to gain experience and make their work multi-dimensional. This trail of thought is important, it seems, in an environment where competitiveness is bred through misleading ‘my-lifeis-fab’ social media posts and University group projects dictated by peer reviews. What if our fellow artist was not our threat but our teammate? What if someone else’s success didn’t mean less space for another in the market? While daisie might not stretch the percentage of creative career opportunities available in the world, it will certainly make them more visible, diverse and inclusive.

Here goes the truth: no matter how much I study my colour-coded class notes, I feel no closer to unlocking the door to creative careers. Of course, this might be due to my hovering state between two different schools or indecisive tendency to love both writing and history of art. And singing. And acting. But, let’s be honest, our professional transition isn’t elucidated by 4 years of analysing the meaning of a brush stroke. In fact, my vision of post-graduation work life in any creative industry is shaped at 85% by the scenes from The Devil Wears Prada (will I have to blackmail JK Rowling into giving me her next book early for my boss’ angry kids? Nightmare). Jokes aside, University students’ incapability to identify what professional life entails is an issue that we facilitate by spending academic years secluded in the library. While we trudge through our last months in school fantasising about popping champagne outside of McEwan Hall, we forget the possibility of our celebrations ending with a big ‘what now?’ spelt over our forehead.

If you also cannot feel the dazzling world of Hollywood at your fingertips, at least you now know where to look.

Culture

Absurdity 34

Balm Well Carvery

Culture

Four hundred and two years ago, James I and James VI graced the Toby Carvery at Liberton. Following “a feast of tender, hand-carved meats with all the trimmings – including towering Yorkshire puds, golden roasties with all those lovely little crunchy bits, and plenty of freshly prepared veg, all crowned with proper gravy”, they, the royal wees, James, emerged from the amber warm glow of the carvery, and strode proudly into the crisp blue air of an Edinburgh winter. His stomach was full. A short walk around the car park was needed to stretch the bowels before the long drive back to London. Between two royal lengths of tarmac, he came across a stretch of grass pronounced by an item of masonry.

engagement with our historical past. Every parcel of land is abundant with history, the marks of past folks, and our memories of them as pictures of ourselves. However, we live in times dominated by consumerism and (un) real estate. Local places are torn down to create placeless spaces, chains of chains, where every link looks the same. However, it is a testament to place, its power to evoke, to remain anchored in a sea of instability. Absurdity has to happen in a place, everything does.

Anyhow, on our walk we came across the Toby Carvery at Liberton. We didn’t stop for food but I wanted to show this valued national establishment to my American friend. In the car park there was this strange looking chest high structure. It turned out to be the “Balm Well of St Catherine”. This well contains oily water which was reportedly brought to the site by St Catherine from Mount Sinai in Egypt. Since the 1500s (and earlier) people have come from as far as Poland to be cured by its waters. In 1617 James VI (or I, whichever way you look at it) visited the well and asked for it to be repaired and steps be built so that others may be cured by it.

I took a photo of the well on some MF film, then added a segment of a Toby Carvery’s menu to the bottom of it. I also wrote a wee story to explore this seemingly absurd and contradictory relationship between a royal well and a generic chain restaurant. It gives me some faith that this catastrophic global consumerist capitalist monster still needs to occupy a place to exist, and that by engaging with these places we can challenge its hegemony. Our personal narratives, cultivated from embodied memories, can overcome these seemingly monumental economic forces, even if only for an instant.

How absurd is that? In the middle of a Toby Carvery car park, a chain restaurant on the outskirts of Edinburgh, sits a royal well, a continental site of pilgrimage. Contemporary Britain is home to absurd landscapes, the product of neo-liberalism’s

If we can still recognise the absurd, then we have something to hold on to at least.

Words: Brennig Hughes MA Environment, Culture & Society

I went for a walk the other week with my housemate from our home in Bruntsfield to the Frankie and Benny’s at Straiton Mains a couple of miles away. There’s no better way of experiencing Edinburgh than by walking to an out of town shopping centre, hungover, and having lunch at a chain restaurant. Even though these sites are imported from global boardrooms, each one seemingly the same, catering to ‘universal’ tastes, on closer inspection they have a lot more character than many places in Edinburgh’s city centre.

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KATER

Humaning, 2019

HER

Art

Flipping Ads, 2019

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Free Food, 2019

Taxidermes of Taxidermists, 2019

Art

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Modern Couples: The Absurdity of Art-Making and Love-Making - Tabby Carless-Frost

Art can be, and often is collaborative. From the artist colonies of Europe to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Medieval artisan workshops to the Basquiat + Warhol collaboration, art has always been better with friends. But what of love beyond the platonic? Art is, in one sense, an intimate practice. A considered portrait can reveal the innermost depths of the human psyche, while the nude engages intimately in the physicality of the body, even recalling the action of tracing its form in gaze and execution, but we do tend to think of the intimate relationship as artist and muse. It isn’t typical to think of romantic love linking two artists in a mutually beneficial relationship of creative expression. Instead, a sense of turbulence, of lovers in anguish, underwrites how we think of these relationships and, in the end, this atmosphere retrospectively politicises those relations by relegating one individual as the spurned victim of the love affair and the other as the unaffected user. As a response to this sentiment, the Barbican exhibition ‘Modern Couples’ attempts to explore the more diversified face of artistic love.

A direct parallel between art making and lovemaking is clear throughout, connecting all lovers with artistic creation. Duchamp calls the working art space he shared with Maria Matins ‘the studio nest’, ‘our monastery’, a sacred space that brings together love, art and transcendentalism. Working together in this clandestine ‘cage’ suggests that this dual artistic-romantic relationship could superseed the artistic colony, become the new collective by reducing the group format of central Europe down to just the couple. Maybe in our post-internet age, this notion is be reduced further into just the individual? Similarly, Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst’s house in Arizona functioned as an isolated lovers-artists workshop. The shared house becomes more than just shelter, it becomes a nest, a place to cultivate a three dimensional canvas to express love in the domestic domain of collaboration. However, the exhibition skates over the frase ‘cage’ used by Duchamp, a whitewashing technique that seems readily observable over all of the Barbican’s rooms. Though the space his letters discuss is obviously a home to the both of them, his

Culture

Centering an exhibition on artist couples creates a cultural document with amorous and political dimensions Centering on ‘Art, Intimacy and the AvantGarde’, the space excavates the relationships of over 45 couples, thougth fragments of poetry, letters, drawings, paintings, novels, film, and sculpture. It seems the Barbican is as preoccupied with the diversity of their media as they are with their conception of the elasticity of the term ‘relationship’. If nothing else, the exhibition really is diverse and expands the parameters of what it means to love someone, whether it be an infatuation, an obsession, a friendship or mutual respect. Though the number of relationships covered is extensive, there is a sense that each couples’ essence is compressed, forcibly, into a few snatched lines of poetry or superficially summarised on the explanatory plaque accompanying a painting. However, by utilising such a wide range of media and such a varied interpretation of the term ‘relationship’, the Barbican manages to open up a conversation about the avant-garde’s attitude to love that is acutely relevant to 2019.

language gives away the West’s ‘cult of the woman as object’. He asks her to ‘isolate [her]yourself with me’ within the ‘cage’, of which the subtext is clearly expressing his desire to contain her, confine her to the space he can control and separate her artistic individuality from the world and amass it within his own. However, the exhibition curators thought that this was not an interpretation worthy of mentioning, nor was any interpretation offered. Moreover, the quotes from the various artists were left to adorn the walls like works of art themselves, minus any attempt to unpick their ramifications. Many notions of love are explored throughout, from the forbidden to the friendship, but one was particularly provoking. Quotes from Andre Breton were scattered on many of the walls, extracts lifted from ‘l’Amour fou’ (Mad Love) or his 1928 novel ‘Nadja’. Breton’s concept of love was deeply bound with the Surrealist mentality, one which championed chance encounters, indulging subconscious desire and cultivating obsession with a love-object.

However, Alfred Stieglitz offered his partner, Georgia O’Keeffe, ‘a life’s work to express you’, a sentiment both ambitious and hyperbolic, but one that certainly expresses an attitude towards love that is more developed. The love-object of Breton is replaced by a self-standing lover of equal or superior emotional and intellectual depth in their own right, quite apart from the projected mirage of the surrealist subconscious. However, the female is still objectified, even in the form of Duchamp’s alter ego Rrose Sélavy, a play on the phrase ‘eros is life’. Duchamp donned feminine dress and adopted a character that fascinated many artists, poets and musicians. Yet, this just feels like another instance where affecting shock in the bourgeois is privileged over true progressiveness.The cross-dressing was less artistic expression and more political agenda; a reaction to the predominantly male cohort of the Surrealists who were feeling ever threatened by the building feminism of 1920s Paris. Rrose is not a trans heroine, she moreover reflects the narcissism of the male collective in that she becomes Duchamp’s own ideal lover. He even manages to usurp the female object by bypassing the female, using himself as an empty vessel to curate into his own obsessional object. He becomes the new Pygmalion of Greek myth, falling in love with his own work of art, his synthetic woman, himself.

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Breton states ‘only love remains beyond the realm of that which our imagination can grasp’ precisely because the power of sexual love is so deeply bound up with notions of desire and because desire relies on, by definition, the eternal evasion of attaining the object of desire, or else the desire ceases to be desire. Desire and love must be intangible, beyond our grasp, lest they lose their defining feature of longing for their object. In the context of Breton, the female becomes the ideal ‘surreal object’, turning the men of the movement into flaneurs, obsessively walking the cities of Europe on the lookout for a female receptacle to project their self centred desires onto. His novel, of which original publications were exhibited, centers on his chance meeting with a girl called Nadja, yet she is not so much a person as a state of Breton’s mind, we might wonder if she even exists at all. She is simply a vessel for Breton to pour his ‘Mad Love’ into, a obsession which ironically reiterates the unreality of obsessing over a love object which is more a reflection of the obsessor than the love object. It is essentially narcissistic, using women as vehicles to access their own subconscious and relegating the female to an idealised object, certainly not considering her an artistic equal.

The Pygmalion idea binds the artist and the lover, art making and love-making. Hans Bellmer acknowledges that ‘desire shapes the image of the desired one’ and artists are predisposed to image creation. Hence, centering an exhibition on artist couples creates a cultural document with amorous and political dimensions. It provokes us to ask if we can ever fully appreciate a lover, ever know truly someone in isolation from our own projections. It moves us to the same conclusion that we are often faced with when confronting a work of art as, in the same way that subjective perception shapes an artwork’s meaning, our desires shape how we see and interpret our lovers. The Barbican exhibition has as many difficulties, omissions and misunderstandings as any relationship. It forgets some of the important difficulties of history to make the overall message of the exhibition more palatable and it certainly attempts to include too much in the name of diversity. And yet, it does open a discursive space to explore in greater depth how we think about artworks and lovers, to be more conscious of our projections, and to approach love with more altruism and more joy.

Gustav Klimt, Tod und Leben, 1915/16 (print), 1931

Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst, Barbican

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In life eye contact is a superior In western cultures eyes

ORA

What if eye contact were a bridge

Art

Oratory, is an exploration of my relationship with death. I confront the boundaries of time, death and subject and object, looking at cultural rites and personal speculation. The piece comprises a multi channel film and accompanying spoken word performance. Having lost my grandparents at an early age, death has been something I can pinpoint specifically in thoughts present throughout my childhood. This perspective is at the foundations of Oratory, considering myself as a manifestation of my grandparentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legacy. Considering what is inherited: names, features and belongings and the philosophical topic of death and my personal beliefs.

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language, bridging people are often closed posthumously.

TORY By Georgia Gardner MA (Hons) Fine Art, 3rd Year

between the living and the dead? The orchestrated image created in Oratory is allusionary to historical and cultural death rituals. I specifically looked at the death ritual of the Philippine Tinguian tribe (posing their deceased relatives on their favourite chair in their favourite clothing) and the Scottish omen that one’s doppelgänger is the harbinger of death.The absurdity of the doppelgänger alongside experimentation with self-representation is significant to the self-reflexive quality of the film, beckoning self-analysis, metaphorically meeting my own gaze and simultaneously the gaze of the deceased. Art

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A Window Too High By Tabby Carless-Frost

Culture

Arrows flow, crossing out A human scrawl and Your notebook has no order. Why not? This thicket of thoughts is dark And through the jangle threads You hear the wind’s rioting tam-tam Plucking them, threatening to snap them clean. Sonnets from the studio and the white walls Still feel like a film set Or a stage. Four walls and a window too high To see anything more than white sky. All the lotus flowers taste of dust And the plastic grapes and apples Have been bleached by the sun. Sanitised history spits in your eye and Dostoyevsky pushes by you, giggling. And you think: ‘At least he had the epilepsy’ You’ll never get that close to God. So, you just say ‘thank you’ from floor, Still on the wrong side of the Underground.

Venus Postcard

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Arnolfini Postcard

Artwork by Evie Edwards MA (Hons) Fine Art, 4th Year Art

Absurdity 44 Culture

‘The White Knight’s Song’ featured in Lewis Carroll’s novel ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There’ 1871 follows the White Knight singing to his companion Alice about an encounter with an elderly man on a summer’s evening. Through the tactful use of the nonsense verse Carroll creates a fantastical landscape allowing his readers to escape into the world of childlike enjoyment, thus subverting the conventions surrounding poetic language and logical meaning. Yet hidden beneath the lighthearted humour that is at the core of this text, it can be argued that Carroll provides elements of a social reality that align with concerns within our own mortal world. Despite each occupation of the elderly man being fabricated by fantasy, in reality the reader is reminded of the prospect of ageing, but also the extremely low pay of a hardworking elderly man. It can also be interpreted that Carroll’s cunning use of the nonsensical veils a direct satire on the intense emotion explored within the works of Romanticism, again creating a spectacle of entertainment for his readers.

By rooting the poem within the theme of nonsense Carroll is establishing an exciting and colourful backdrop to the Knight’s encounter. From the very beginning as readers we are enticed by the element of possibility ‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’, the pronoun ‘everything’ invites us into the first stages of the song. Furthermore, as a key characteristic of the nonsense verse and in the usual manner of a melody, the reader is encouraged by the continuous fluidity that runs throughout the narrative. ‘Sitting, sieve, sail and stormy seas’ the use of sibilance allows a steady motion to its movement. This is further reinforced by the consecutive rhyming couplets, again allowing a steady but playful beat to its light-hearted momentum. This is substantiated by the alternating meter of Iambic tetrameter and trimeter, yet this juxtaposition also resonates a level of uncertainty for the reader or a lingering feeling of the unknown which perhaps can be associated with the curiosity that surrounds the anticipated excitement of a fantasy world. However towards the main body of the poem the continuous rhyme subtly begins to break, ‘tale’ and ‘rill’ and ‘eyes’ and ‘button’s’, thus reinforcing the unsettling yet exciting composition of the nonsensical song.

Lewis Carroll

Olivia Wyman

The veil of Nonsense poetry: Social Reality in ‘The White Knight’s Song’ by Lewis Carroll

Moreover, the nonsense verse allows a complete imaginative freedom for Carroll’s readers. He forms images that transgress the restrictions placed upon ordinary human thought. The elderly man speaks of his unusual occupations creating ‘butterflies’ into ‘mutton pies’, ‘haddocks eyes’ into ‘waistcoat-buttons’, digging for ‘buttered rolls’ and searching ‘grassy knolls’. Each is an invention rooted within nonsense but remains entirely captivating. Substantiated by the whimsical rhyme scheme, the language used allows a holiday for the tongue ‘coin of silvery shine’ and for readers of the time, particularly in the case of adults reading to children this would have permitted a return to the innocence and excitement of childhood.

Culture

Overall, on a surface level ‘The White Knight’s Song’ is a reflection of a personal encounter that has had a deep-rooted effect on its narrator. At the heart of this poem is the powerful play that surrounds the nonsense verse, it enables for us readers to em brace fantasy, evoking the feeling of light-hearted and whimsical enjoyment. Carroll also draws parallels with our own reality, despite the lack of logical reasoning there is a familiarity to nonsense that merges the binary between the fantasy and our own reality. Moreover, with the heart of this poem rooted in humour Carroll tactfully uses nonsense not only to excite various emotions from his readers but also perhaps to satirize the works of Romanticism. By this he is embodying the poems true nature, it is there to entertain and enable a moment of fantastical escapism.

Carroll not only contrasts but amalgamates our reality with the fantasy and therefore suggests, contrary to human belief, that fantasy is very much a party of our own lives. In alignment with the title of the novel withholding this song ‘Through the LookingGlass’ may be a reference to the realms of fantasy being a mirror of our own reality.

Through the Looking Glass

Its wacky yet wonderful nature is entirely liberating. By doing so this reverses any sense of the ordinary ‘right hand foot into a left hand shoe’, the image provided embodies the theme of nonsense, it opposes the subject of tradition and provides a strong binary to the seriousness of reality. This sense of Creativity is a central characteristic to the song with Carroll himself being an inventor he invites us in to a product of his own imagination. It is also interesting to see in stanza seven ‘(he gave a wink)’ that this gesture is bracketed alluding to the known playful identity of the poem, It is as if Carroll himself is winking at his readers therefore highlighting the deliberate removal on the fixed order of things and the welcoming of emancipated enjoyment. As literary readers we often search particularly within poetry and song for certain truths or meaning that align with our own lives. Yet this poem transcends the rules of literary tradition, its purpose is essentially to provide an escapism for its readers by bypassing the laws of our own mortality and allowing a leeway for creativity.

This exploration of a grounding mortality is exposed by the way in which the elderly man explains each job description subtly commenting on the hardships of his working life ‘the way I get my bread’. Each description is halted by a reference to low pay ‘copper halfpenny’ and ‘Yet two pence halfpenny is all / they give me for my toil’. The small sum Halfpenny is mentioned twice evoking a less than satisfactory comfort of living, it is interesting to see how he has placed the words two pence and halfpenny next to one another as if there is a sense of gradual reduction.

www.canvasjournal.com @canvasedinburgh

Editor-in-Chief: Aisling Ward Deputy Editor: Lila Pitcher Art Editor: Anna Gilroy Deputies: Sarah Renard, Kelli Staake, Eleanor Maskatiya Culture Editor: Tabby Carless-Frost Deputies: Iona Penrice, Devian Maside, Emma Lake Fashion Editor: Arabella Bradley Deputies: Sarah Green, Ellie Jeans Production Team: Michelle Hui, Cathleen Kong, Marcus Wong Head of Art Panel: Maria Oliver-Smith Art Panel: Celia Higson, Amber Brown, Hannah Draper, Gabriel Morantin, Daniel Turner, Francis Driscoll, Charlotte Cocker Social Media: Jody Mulvey, Kenza Akroum Advertisement: Frederika Dalwood Events Manager: Lulu Swanborough We would like to thank the History of Art department, paricularly Richard Willliams, for their support and generosity in helping to create Canvas.