So far this term, all 3 weeks of it, I have been struggling to juggle my balls and spin my plates. I always knew that this year would be the hardest academically speaking but somehow the sheer scale and also the dependency on other people to deliver products on time and to budget in an un-managed programme was fighting my years of business led discipline. Couple that with the totally alien form of writing otherwise known as academic with the intransigence of a bloated bureaucratic health authority scuppering my initial documentary style project that had occupied some three months of head space then I can begin to understand why my own self-driven motivation and direction has taken a bit of a kicking.

Today, though, having cleared a mental block of archiving the current East Contemporary Art Collection early on owing to delightfully inclement weather that suits shooting in the Waterfront Gallery and parcelling up the Agile Business Conference 2013 shoot my mind wandered back to the dissertation subject and question that made me lift and open ‘Your Undergraduate Dissertation text book that fell open on Concept. For whatever reason I slammed it shut and dug out Keith Arnatt’s ‘I’m a Real Photographer’. The link was archiving – tenuous I know but it was his exhibition at Tate Britain that I saw with Keith Locke this summer that initiated my production of archive black & white work from my 41 year old archive. It was the consistent presentational style that had grabbed my attention back then but also some of his subject matter.

I live in an AONB, I photograph much that is mundane and skanky within an AONB. Keith Arnatt produced a body of work called AONB.

I now have my new degree project in outline mode and I have been recording both banal and beautiful all summer in both black & white and colour with AONB rattling around my head since way before days at UCS.

Bless you Keith Arnatt.