Amanda Williams - Portfolio

Yesterday was one of those days one wishes just didn’t exist. I spent the day supporting my young son through his first run in with surgery - the fear of the unknown, the vulnerability, the pain and then the discomfort of the aftermath. Worn out, wrung out and exhausted I got home to find the results for an another essay lurking menacingly in my inbox. Oh…

As, half expected, I was marked down again. This time I tried pretty hard to do the genderless thing - still irritated but needs be… The reward was that I did worse than last time. Why? For being “too creative”. Huh? This is fine art right?

OK, I’ll admit to the charge of scraping around trying to find a creative angle to a really boring topic - consider it a survival tactic. Boring, after all, can be made interesting if it has a purpose. Without any discernible purpose however… Well, I tried to make it interesting…

Boring I can do. In self directed study I waded through every single tome I could find on colour theory (you wanna debate Ostwald vs Munsell?). Everything from the local library system. Then interlibrary loan. Then the TAFE library - if I couldn’t take it out I went back day after day and read it there. Then I ordered in books from all over the world - including some really rare old gems. Not even expensive - probably because they’re so boring. After that I tackled anatomy… lets just say, that can be pretty dry too. The difference? It had a purpose.

So there, I’ve tossed another virtual firecracker at the haystack. Hopefully it’ll trigger some healthy debate in addition to the usual round of email, encouraging and insulting alike.

Right now, however, I’m out of here, I have an unhappy child to care for. A task which is pretty high on the list of things that are worth doing with life. One which also puts a sense of perspective on everything else. The contents of the inbox have thus been marked as “read”, glanced at here and now mentally filed where they fit in the hierarchy of past events. I don’t even have the energy to be disappointed. Discouraged? Well that’s another matter.

Amanda

Step by step a sense of disillusionment has been creeping into my study over the past month. I definitely hit the wall today when I received the results for my first ever university level essay. Not happy.

OK so it’s probably a borderline A. Still not happy. Why? Because I worked my a** off on that and expected an A. The mark down came because I wasn’t politically correct. One can’t talk about what “man” has done in history in an academic institution, one has to use non-gender specific language. They come down hard if you don’t. I didn’t, so they did. Grrr…

Now, I’m female therefore I know about gender discrimination from the wrong end of the stick and, I can tell you without any doubt, that politically correct genderless language doesn’t make me feel any better. In fact, it makes me feel worse because it sounds like someone is wasting lots of tax-payer money putting a bandaid on a broken arm. Besides which, in this instance the essay topic was “the decoration of Islamic Mosques in the 7th & 8th centuries”. What’s the likelihood that the ladies were getting a look-in on that? I reckon my genders were correct. Pretending, via language, that they did get a fair deal sounds like a slapped face to me. Double grrr…

I am now a uni student. I suppose I’d better grow my hair, take up smoking of interesting things and roll out for the protest rallies… OK, maybe not. Besides, I already have long hair on account of being too cheap to pay for haircuts when I’d rather spend all my budget (and then some) on art materials and books.

(OK, ancient history here - I was a uni student once upon a time - studying maths, smoking interesting things, hollering at protest rallies, seller of Prosh papers and a founding member of the Manic Depressive Society no less. [Nothing to do with Bipolar, it was all about running great party nights at the Guild’s expense. Largest club on campus they tell me, lasted 25 years.] Those clues are a dead giveaway for locals. Survivor of ref food - the trick was to drown everything in gravy. Is the gravy still free?)

The enrolment process through the Open University was easy - too easy - there must be something to trip up the unwary - says she - looking over shoulder, double checking emails etc, gasping at what this is going to cost…

If you’re interested, online enrolment closes on Sunday night even though phone and fax enrolment finished half an hour ago unless you’re prepared to pay a late fee, in which case, you have until next Wednesday. Yes, I cut it a bit fine - but then I was making a last ditch effort to resolve things with my alma mater (see earlier threads - here and here).

There are two units - yes only two - for a full time student. Wow, at TAFE we did eight. Now as an obsessive nut I tend to get really, really involved with what I do and found it so frustrating to spread my attention over so much at once. OK, I coped and maybe even thrived on it but there’s a good chance that this new timetable will suit me to a tee. The hours of study recommended for each unit are a lot higher which means more depth - no argument from me.

The units first up are:

• Visual Culture - for which I happen to have the text sitting on the bookshelf to my right ( I bought it out of interest a couple of years ago. I know, very strange - who reads art history as a bedtime story.)
• Printmaking - woo hoo - those how’ve followed this blog for a bit will know that I have an affair of the heart with printmaking in general and my old etching press in particular. How on earth are they going to teach printmaking by correspondence? I’d have enrolled in this just to satisfy curiosity.

Amanda