Amulet #39 - One Bite At A Time

Today I'm blogging another amulet from OPERATION CATCH-UP (made in March 2010) and this one I can give a very specific date to, as it was made as a birthday present for my long-time collaborator Hannah Jones (the other half of LOW PROFILE). This amulet consists of 3 fridge magnets specially made to hold Hannah's "Schedule of Dreams" to the fridge in her kitchen.

As you can see from the snippet of said 'Schedule' shown in the photograph, Hannah is quite a busy person. She has often found herself overwhelmed by the number of things she has got going on at one time and makes a series of lists and schedules for herself to keep feelings of panic at bay. For this one, I took the well-worn advice that answers the question "How do you eat an elephant?" as a starting point. At the moment (when I find myself again in a time of having lots of different projects on the go at once), this amulet seems quite apt.

You'll be glad to know that Amulet #33 (the one that reminds me to finish what I've started) is working really quite well. I've been wearing it everyday since I made it and seem to be achieving lots. You never know, I might even get to the point where I have a new nickname and become known simply as 'The Finisher'! This, however, is possibly a long way off...

Amulet #38 - 1x500+5x100

My friend Ria Hartley is embarking on a project. An excellent project. A project that she has wanted to undertake for a long time. Ria intends to spend 14-days-straight traveling on trains around the island of Great Britain. Unlike a regular tourist, Ria will not be leaving the train stations she arrives in, she will remain confined within them for all of this time. During her time on the trains, her routes, choices and decisions will be swayed by chance encounters and personal exchanges

I think this is a project with a huge amount of potential, and I have become really interested in how Ria is making this happen. Rather than approach standard arts funding bodies or research boards, she has adopted a crowdfunding model where patrons (anyone willing to invest £10 or more) enter into a 'contract' with Ria when they part with their money. This is a challenging way to secure project funding - challenging because it takes vast amounts of energy and enthusiasm to make people aware of your project and convince them to 'invest' in it, but also in that it poses a series of challenges to our ideas about who the 'stakeholders' might be in the support of research and development of new work in the arts.



I have made this amulet to try and help her in her quest. When I started coming up with the idea for it (a few days ago), Ria still needed £1000 to achieve her target. In conversation I was helping her break this down into just needing to find 1 person who would invest £500 and 5 people who would invest £100 each. I'm hoping that the amulet might assist in some way. I've got my fingers crossed too.

Have a look at the website for The Train Project (http://thetrainproject.riahartley.com/) and of course, if you feeling generous, please do support the project!

Amulet #37 - Don't Let Plymouth Get You Down

This is another of the amulets I made sometime around last March (mid-hiatus on this project). It was specially designed for my friend Sarah (also the more recent recipient of Amulet #35) who was having a hard time at work in Plymouth at the time.

As readers of this blog may or may not know, I am a little bit in love with Plymouth. So much so, that I am currently working on a new project with my partner-in-crime (and other half of LOW PROFILE) Hannah called Would You Like This Badge?. This project (a series of badges developed in response to our experiences of living and working in Plymouth, thinking about how people view the city, from the inside and outside) follows on from our previous (slightly ridiculous) attempts to get people we know and like to move to Plymouth, by writing letters and making videos for them.

So, this amulet forms part of a series of on-going efforts I've been making to improve the experience of living in the city that is now my adopted home. Remember, if you need an amulet to protect you against the perils of your own city, do let me know. I am taking requests!!

Amulet #36 - Not The British Museum

My friend Cara is, to say the least, a little obsessed with archiving and archives. This is another of the amulets that I made last March or April but never quite got round to blogging about. At the time, Cara and I were studying together and both getting lost on our own research journeys. During a group presentation, in response to Cara's feelings of frustration at the difficulty of finding a format in which to realise her work (and communicate a complex set of ideas), one of our tutors said "Cara, you need to remember that you are not the British Museum".

I loved the sentiment of this statement - the notion that any of us might need reminding from time to time that we are 'just one person', that sometimes projects grow and spiral out-of-control more quickly than we realize, that we (as individuals) don't need to replicate things on the scale of large institutions and that any one of us does not need to cover absolutely everything. Some things are always going to fall by the wayside, feel too large to even start or have the potential to become too cumbersome to ever complete (ahem... still not letting myself off the hook for not finishing things though! - see Amulet #33).

However, over a year on, I'm not sure how well this amulet has worked. Have a look at Cara's current project http://instability-in-stability.co.uk (where she has locked herself away in her loft for the last 3 months, investigating and archiving every object it contains) and judge for yourself. As you can imagine, even this amulet has been described, archived and added to the inventory, as has Amulet #17.

Amulet #35 - Don't Get Your Heart Set On It

Last night, my friend Sarah and I were exchanging tales about our various past, previous and current romantic entanglements. Through our conversation it soon became clear that we are both often fallible to similar traits - wanting to make plans and have something to look forward to, and holding out for things to work out the way we want them to. After much discussion, laughing at ourselves and semi-ridiculous suggestions, I remembered that there was (of course) a song for exactly this occasion.



What I love about this phrase 'Que Sera Sera' is partly the shonky and very literal Spanish translation (Que = What, Sera = Will Be, Sera = Will Be) but also that the song gets re-purposed by hopeful football supporters ("We're going to Wemb-le-y). This one should stand as a reminder that no matter what outcome any of us would like to see, we actually have very little power over the end result.

This amulet follows on from another that I made for Sarah last March, (OK, so this is where the chronology on this blog is going to get a little too confusing... let's call it Amulet #37, and I'll post it in the not too distant future!) which is currently residing in Venezuela.

Amulet #34 - Resist Firefighting

When someone spends all their time putting out fires, they look very busy, and they have a great sense of purpose.

I think I made this amulet while in Celrà (Catalunya, ES) during a postgraduate research gathering I was part of, after making a presentation for my MA (sometime in March 2010). I think that is why I'm wearing a little "Well Done!" sticker. Looking back, I'm not exactly sure what the intention behind this amulet was now (my memory is far from good enough to stretch back that long) but I do remember wanting to make a series of miniature life preservation devices (following on from Amulet #32). This is a miniature fire blanket.

Since then, I have used this as an amulet to protect against what people who write about project management call 'firefighting' (appearing busy by jumping in to sort out day-to-day problem situations at the expense of achieving larger-scale projects). I think, gradually, I might be getting a little better at saying "No" to things (as advised by the ever-wise Goat Island in A Letter To A Young Practitioner), taking time and not allowing other people's panics and demands to throw me off course. As always, I still have a long way to go and probably need quite a few more amulets to help me get better at mindfulness in general!!

Amulet #33 - No More Half-A-Job Dobbs

Forgive me Father for I have sinned... it has been 533 days since my last amulet post. And you'll have noticed that I stopped posting at #32, which is pitiful. After a number of false starts at re-starting this project after its MA dissertation invoked hiatus, I am back on it.

A number of years ago, I earned the nickname 'Half-A-Job Dobbs' from my then long-term boyfriend because of my tendency to start projects with such eagerness, only to drop them or let them peter out some time later (before seeing them through to completion). Since then, this nickname has hung around in the back of my mind, niggling at my sub-conscious.

Earlier today I was thinking about how best to spend a rainy day indoors and thought about a range of things I have been putting off that would ultimately make me happy. As the king of the procrastinators, you can imagine, this list of mine is ample! However, I have decided that this blog is not a job that should fall off the end of the list indefinitely. In the 533 days that have passed since I last posted I have actually undertaken to make a range of different new amulets (not at the original overly-ambitious one-a-day rate), so my post today will shoot the chronological numbering system to hell somewhat, but catching up with the backlog of un-uploaded amulets was one of the excuses I was giving myself for inaction.

So, here it is - the new amulet I have made to protect myself from my Half-A-Job Dobbs-ness. I'll be wearing it a lot over the next few weeks in the hope that it will help me catch up with things on here, and rest assured reader, I WILL FINISH THIS THING!