I wish:

This is how I exist: my art feeds my life (not only furnishing it, but nourishing it), whilst my life depends upon my art (since it sets me free). The hardest thing about studying for an MA in Fine Art is that everything I produce is summatively or formatively assessed. There is ongoing and eternal judgement. So my art can’t set me free anymore (unless I achieve the mark I desire). And yet, it still does. This is because I utilise my art practice as a critical, sensuous, transformative and therapeutic method of material thinking. This is no longer confined to painting. I am experimenting in new mediums. Last term I made a 16mm analogue film, Touché. Now I am making sound art from the pulse of my heartbeat during 90 minutes of bikram yoga. This is going to be an installation piece. Next term, for my major project, I plan to create another installation — using sound that is amplified at a rate to make it tactile. I’m going to create a wall of sound.

Meanwhile I continue to try and boost my employability — ever hankering after that elusive job, in a a super-competitive market, with ongoing recession and funding problems meaning that it is almost impossible to find and make my career. I will to succeed (not necessarily confident enough to say that I will succeed, since I am so ambitious and I don’t know if I can ever achieve my dreams and goals, but I have desire, determination, persistence and pluck. I will — I have will (to power), which is a combination of hope and drive. This is directed towards my meta-need, which is that I need to feel needed. I can achieve this, I think, through finding a teaching job, establishing my career as a lecturer and a writer, and making art that really touches people. I would also like my art, my books and my words to help people who have experienced suffering. There is an ethos behind my entire research enterprise and my pedagogy as an arts educator.

Alongside the MA FA I am taking the PG Cert in Higher Education, to gain a qualification in teaching. I am also teaching part-time in the Art and Design department at Cambridge Regional College. My lectures and tutorials here concern the history of modern and postmodern art, with dabblings of contextual studies and theories from the philosophy of art thrown in to elucidate conundrums posed by conceptual or performance artists, the YBAs, or Dada (for example).

I have 2 books coming out this year, both with Bloomsbury. One is an edited volume, Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/deleuze-and-the-schizoanalysis-of-visual-art-9781472531131/) the other is a monograph inspired by ideas I began to develop my PhD, and from my deep understanding of the transformative, therapeutic and ethical effects that making an artwork can provide for us all. This book is called Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics. So watch this space for launch parties!

I am looking for further teaching opportunities — in any field that has to do with art, art history, art theory, critical theory, aesthetics, philosophy of art, continental philosophy and/or modernist or contemporary French philosophy. I need to be observed as part of my PG Cert. and I want to expand my pedagogical experiences as a lecturer, tutor, supervisor or mentor.

I also want to help people who are suffering from eating disorders or other psychiatric illnesses. I want to show them how art can help us make sense of the world, and describe how making art can open a healthy way of managing life. Yoga also helps. I am a fanatic yogi. This is my performance art, and moving meditation. I am creating an artwork on this theme at the moment (from my heartbeat, as I mentioned above). Thus, as you can see, I have humanitarian aims as well as scholastic.