For Beltane

i

A warm welcome to the first bluelead blog. I hope you and your loved ones continue to be safe and well during the ongoing lockdown.

This safe space has been created within the new blueleadprojects.com website yet operates as a WordPress site nestled within, which will enable me to talk about process and inspirations when making cross-form art projects and the ability to upload-musings-as-I-create. The website has been seven months in creation and huge thanks go to Carl Mills for the creation, coding and design.

Just like an illuminated manuscript that may never be completed in the monks lifetime, so I pose the question, when is a website, a collection of fragments of 20 years of work, ready to show? Indeed, what is a work? 

I look to Matthew Goulish who describes work as ‘an object which is infinite and singular. By infinite, I mean that the singularity of the work, which allows us in fact to refer to it as work, is itself comprised of infinite events.’

Work can be life. A website as an organism constituting an event.

When will the website be ready to show?

If it breathes it lives. Let it live now and grow.

ii

Lockdown feels like a critical time in human evolution with vital new fragments of emergent ‘truth’ we can empathically sense. Like the whole planet is shifting and striving to find a path through the pandemic, towards an even more vital sense of meaningful whole, into which our new found fragments may fit.

In-between home fooling my eight and thirteen year old whilst attempting to work from home, there’s been some fragmented reading time. A return to books previously read including Ervin Laszlo’s Science and the Akashic Field, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, John Langdon’s Wordplay and a plethora of poetry including Coleman Barks’ translation of Rumi, The Glance. 

These conglomerates of cloth and paper and ink and leather and glue and thread hold a key to the new poetic characters that lockdown has gently allowed the time for me to start writing. I’m excited and thankful to have the space and time to allow these to grow and to present in this new digital homestead.

iii

Part of the process of going through archives, is finding those things that you’d forgotten you once did whilst hopefully finding the things you set out to find. I had experience with both whilst sending the content to the developer. 

At 22 I found myself working as a 2nd AD in the film industry, mainly in London. Music videos, feature films, BBC promos and ‘early’ video games. Here’s some embarrassing shots of me and David Williams, before he became David Walliams on the Ubisoft Dreamcast game Deepfighter. 

To cut a long story short, it was a week long shoot at Haliford Studios, Shepperton in Dec ’99. We’d auditioned the actors at my friends house in Shepherds Bush and from the moment I met David he was utterly despondent and for want of a better character, Mr Grumpy! The only time he smiled was the last day of filming when wet suits (aka space suits) were taken off for the last time and we all said Goodbye. I was delighted to see him SO happy a few years later when I turned on the telly and saw him doing what he LOVED in Little Britain. Every time I see him on the screen or I pick up one of his books from my daughters bedside, I smile.

….

For me it has been a colour; Blue

that’s what I love

I’ve always been writing for you

that is what has been true.

Stay safe x

Claire