Amulet #43 - Get Better/Stay Better

Over the last week, I've not been very well. After a nasty bout of food poisoning, it has taken me quite a while to get better. Over that time I have been semi-house bound, under strict instructions to rest and this has meant I have been watching quite a lot of films, videos and TV programmes online. It has also been the first chance I have had to really catch up with the footage and reports coming from the ongoing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York.

While watching Alex Mallis and Lily Henderson's short film Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.), I was struck by the way in which people in the movement are beginning to organize themselves to address daily and basic needs like healthcare, food, shelter and sanitation. Today's amulet is an echo of the red crosses worn in the film by members of the first-aid working group (theirs are fashioned from red gaffa tape), worn in solidarity with those who are protesting against social and economic inequality in the USA, an amulet to protect against forgetting how well provided for I am as a UK resident (a beneficiary of the NHS) and as a personal reminder to get better and STAY better.

Amulet #41 & #42 - Forget Me Not

My very lovely friends Sarah and Ulysses are both moving away... to different parts of the world. Just before they left I made them this pair of amulets to remind them of the times we have shared together and to protect them on their new adventures. This now officially makes Sarah the most-amuleted person I know (other than myself) as this is the 3rd amulet she has received (see also Amulet #37 & #35. She obviously needs a lot of protecting!

I obviously *should* have also been wearing my "Never Can Say Goodbye" amulet (#11) at the time too (how could I forget such a thing?) which I was wearing when saying goodbye to Ulysses last time (on leaving Berlin). All of this does give me faith, however, that all of our paths will continue to cross in the future... hmmm, that gives me an idea for another amulet. And so the world continues...

Amulet #40 - Play The Ukulele

I thought I'd just blog this amulet quickly, as I need to maintain the little bit of momentum I've got on OPERATION CATCH UP and because this is an amulet that recently had to undergo repairs. Around the same time that I started this project (yes, back through the mists of time in December 2009), I was given a bright green ukulele as a Christmas present. I am a little embarrassed to say, but I can still only play 3 chords. I know that all I need to do is practice, but somehow this still seems beyond me. The best inroads I have made were learning bits of the Leonard Cohen song Hallelujah when I was confined to bed with flu for 4 days last spring.

I made this amulet in March 2010 as a reminder to practice and to combat my recurrent excuse about having to tune up continuously. It is a uke pitch pipe and it has lived for a long time on my polka dot coat. This amulet (possibly above all others) is a classic conversation starter, with many folk leaning down to blow into it in a surprisingly intimate way. It has had so much use that I recently had to repair it (as it fell to bits).

I'm glad that this amulet combines a kind of cheeky sauciness with quite an earnest wish to become better at playing musical instruments. I can't help but feel that George Formby (my inspiration for wanting to learn to play) would be proud!

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!

Amulet #32 - Head Above Water

I had an email from my friend Itta who said she had stumbled across my blog and empathized strongly with Amulet #30, saying "I wonder what I am looking for, and if it really matters what I am looking for or what I will find, but I will find it, have to find it, so if I keep going it should appear somewhere, pop it's head out and say hello." Itta said that she would probably make her own version of the amulet to put in the pot plant on her desk to encourage herself to "keep looking".

I am really glad that these sentiments make sense to other people and this amulet is now winging its way to Itta, to help her keep her head above water and (as she puts it) to protect her from "the drowning effect of the too many questions my tutors will throw at me!"

I'm also very glad to report that Itta did create her own, very fine amulet and here is a picture of it...

Amulet #31 - Anti-rage device

Ok, so there are absolutely no excuses I could make that could justify the month-long hiatus I have had on this project. The MA deadlines just got too much for me, then I was away quite a lot, then I fell out of the habit slightly, then it was a month later... It is a shame really, as while I was doing my MA presentation in Celra, the amulets I just happened to have attached to various items of clothing had been attracting quite a lot of attention. I think there is something particularly 'useful' about the space created by these amulets - the excuse they provide for conversation and discussion of things to do with feeling protected.

Anyway, here is a long overdue and slightly out-of-focus photo of a special anti-rage device for my some-time fancyman, who needed something to signal his disapproval with others' behaviour on a hard day's park-rangering.

Amulet #30 - Don't give up just yet... part 2

My daily struggle with self-discipline continues! After staring at the blind that covers my shelves for far too long this morning in an attempt to delay getting out of bed, I though I might as well do something productive with the experience. Today's amulet is part of the "not giving up" theme that I am trying to think about this week and is also inspired by one of the 'encouraging banners' made as part of the Learning To Love You More project by Miranda July & Harrell Fletcher.

When I first saw a picture of the banner that said "You Will Find It", I didn't really respond to it but over the last few months it seems to be making a lot more sense. I think it has got something to do with not knowing exactly what you are looking for but knowing that it is out there somewhere, if you just keep looking.

Amulet #29 - Orchestrating Good Luck

I met with my friend Guy for coffee this afternoon and heard his fantastically positive retelling of his last few months, how he ended up going to Baltimore and will be co-presenting a paper with some kind of scientific expert in his field of research in Prague in a few months. He has obviously been doing a very good job of getting in touch with 'the right people' and telling them about what he is doing.

And what is his secret? He just writes to them or rings them up and tells them how interested he is in what they do and suggests that they should meet to discuss their mutual interests - good eh? So, I thought I would make this particular amulet as a reminder of the phrase he says he always keeps in the back of his mind (some words of wisdom from his Dad) - "Shy Bairns Get Nowt". I like it...

Now, there's just the simple matter of acting on it - I'll see what I can do!

Amulet #28 - Anti-hibernation

After two full days of not leaving the house (apart from a trip to the Co-op at the end of my road to get milk, cake and biscuits), I thought it was about time to make an amulet to remind me to "go outside", to leave the house more regularly and generally resist the temptation to hibernate! This is a very cute felt cuff I made while giving Amy's friend Julia some refresher knitting lessons yesterday evening.

All this computer-based stuff (preparing presentations, reading writing up etc) leads me to be far too sedentary and I'm sure I can't be alone in needing protection from this very specific type of harm.

Amulet #27 - Missing in action

This is an empty space where an amulet should be. I haven't made this amulet yet, due to sheer laziness (there is no excuse). Instead, I defrosted my freezer and watched 2 entire series of the mediocre (and yet, very watchable and quite addictive) TV series "The Book Club" on 4OD.

Amulet #26 - To combat crochet frustration

After yesterday's excellent CROCHET CLUB at Hannah's house, I was determined to make an anti-frustration amulet for my friend Maddy, who found herself a little susceptible to crochet rage! I think this also heralds the start of a self imposed 'not giving up' week in relation to this 100 Days project - it can be quite tough going making one of these everyday, but it is really satisfying when I manage it. I think the discipline of doing it is a very important part of my motivation for starting but I really need to work harder to not fall behind so regularly!

I also don't quite know how I am going to keep up when I head off again next weekend for 10 days away - maybe a series of travel related amulets? Or working with one specific format? Hmmm - all this thinking out loud could be bad for one...

Amulet #25 - To combat apathy

This amulet was a direct reaction to the Tory junk mail that came through my door this morning (you know, the one where a slightly botoxed 'Dave' Cameron is pretending to be a doctor and making hospital-bound ladies laugh). The only political leaflets that seem to come through my door are from the Conservatives and the BNP and this worries me - A LOT! Over the last week or so I have also been surprised by the number of people I have spoken to who are not registered to vote. So, today's amulet is a step towards combating political apathy. I'm not making a plea for you to vote for a specific party (but, obviously, it would be worth finding out what the different candidates stand for first...), just simply to get out and vote.

If you live in the UK and are not registered to vote, you can do so by going to http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/ - seriously, no excuses!

Amulet #24 - Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Now, I'm not renowned for being much of a fan of the 'earnest ice cream singing cornet La Roux' (thanks Mr Brooker) but I do find the lyrics to Bulletproof quite heartfelt and since finding an acoustic session version on youtube last week, I can't quite get the sentiment of the song out of my head! So, I thought I'd dedicate this amulet to the idea of being cautious about being swept off your feet.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7pFQk5u7W0
(yes, sing along if you know the words)

And it has to be better than "I Will Survive"? Surely?

Although, having said all that, 'the red-haired one' does do a good job of wearing top notch accessories - have a look at http://www.fredbutlerstyle.com/ to see where some of them came from...

Amulet #23 - Anti-Mouse

Sorry to interrupt the run of love-related amulets but today's amulet needed to take on quite a practical purpose. The mice are back - this is Mousehunt 3D - much like playing Mousehunt on Facebook (I can imagine), but with real mice and in my actual house.

In the picture you can see the devastating discovery Amy made in her cupboard - a perfectly channeled void in her digestives (it's quite sculptural and impressive actually but, you know, made by mice!). Here you also see her modeling the new anti-mouse amulet that can be worn by whoever needs a bit of extra bravery when setting the traps. Fingers crossed that they will be full in a few hours.