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11 search results for "sketchbook"

Blogging is my sketchbook: reflecting on the creative process and open practice

When I was a young teenager, I asked my parents for a (mechanical) typewriter for my birthday so that I could type my journal, plays and poetry – on coloured paper mostly. I didn’t have the internet. When I was an art student, my sketchbooks had pockets, windows, some smelled of strange colours or oils I had tried out, some trailed plaster dust or were covered with fabric. I also had a blog filled with…

Curiosity and the cat

Last week I went to see Gwen John’s major retrospective, Strange Beauties at the National Museum in Cardiff: Gwen John: Strange Beauties is a once-in-a-generation exhibition, bringing together rarely seen works from Amgueddfa Cymru and collections from around the world to celebrate her 150th birthday. It is the first major collection of her work in over forty years. It tells Gwen’s story as it’s never been told before — revealing new ways of seeing her life…

Having a Career

When I came across Kin Lane’s post Having a Career I felt inspired. His post prompted me to think about whether it’s worth having a career, and what that means, and if it matters. These words in particular chimed with me: However, now I see having a career is about me. It is about owning my own professional narrative as much as I possibly can. I consider a career adjacent to entrepreneurship or running your…

Finding my podcast voice

It’s been 18 months since I first launched my podcast, and this academic year I have stepped up the pace with a new episode every week. 65 episodes later… I still enjoy the process of making the podcast and it’s been very, very useful for my professional practice. It’s also a (for me still relatively) new way to sharing my work and I have tried to find the right tone in this medium, tried to…

Five: Flippers as totems of professional practice

Shortly after I drew the Travelling Monument Kit I started a new sketchbook and that turned into a whole series of works, photography, drawings, sculptures and, I suppose, travel, too, all centred on swimming flippers and entitled ‘Travels with my flippers’. The flippers became another layered metaphor, and worked for me on many levels: The beach under the city streets…Inspired by the writings of the Situationists International movement I have written about in a previous…

Four: The Travelling Monument Kit

Signpost: This is a post from the Neon Flaneuse blog. The Neon Flaneuse is a blogging project for which I write about art, anthropology and edtech. It’s part of my professional practice but a project I pursue in my own time. Nearly two decades ago I had an idea to create a Travelling Monument Kit. This is the original drawing which I still have in a sketchbook somewhere even though the actual suitcase I made…

Introduction: Encounter in the edtech sprawl

It was a rainy night and the neon lights of the arcades were reflected in the pools of water on the streets… in the air was the smell of wok fried herbs and spices from the street food vendors and a chill wind was coming up from the docks. Above the rushing crowd of late night shoppers and workers hurrying to the train home stood the towering office blocks and residential high rises. … Welcome…

Being grounded in itinerant professional practice

Recently, I have started writing a series of blog posts with my colleague Martin Hawksey. It’s an interesting undertaking in which we take an open approach to leadership, to sharing our perspective on leading the organisation we work for through a period of change towards adopting a virtual mode of operating. And it’s got me thinking on parallel lines about my own professional practice and how it’s developed over the last 20 years, from being…

Open CPD, Visual Thinkery, art school: my week made me think

This post is inspired by two things I did this week: first, taking part in Wednesday’s @LTHEchat on the topic of Open CPD with Chris Rowell and second, reading my weekly delivery of Visual Thinkery in Saturday’s newsletter. Both are highly enjoyable, interesting and rewarding so if you haven’t already I strongly recommend you take a look. Both of these activities made me think about being online and what I do when I am online.…