不知道 i don’t know

Wow, has it really been three months since I last posted anything here? So much has happened in that time!

The last post was following my second visit to China, for the opening of the show which my then girlfriend was working on: Beautiful New World. Since then the most important event has been that my girlfriend has become my wife and we have moved ourselves to Beijing!

When I get a chance to sit down and think about it (which is a rare occurrence these days) I really feel that this is the most exciting time of my life! We are creating our new life together, we have so many opportunities and I have my wife to thank for all of it.

Shi is currently working on her first exhibition at her new job, about which I’ll post more details later this week, and I am helping out on a new project that should be going live at the end of the month.

Everybody’s been so kind to us here, I really appreciate the faith they have in us. I hope to be able to fulfil all of our expectations – this is certainly the place where this will be possible and definitely the right place for us to fulfil our dreams.

…and this is what I said to Goldsmiths:

As much as Art excites me intensely and has been an interest and practice throughout my life, I struggle to understand and come to terms with aspects of it. I see this course at Goldsmiths as an environment in which to address and build upon those struggles so that I can develop an informed practice. I can see the course enhancing my intellectual resources and abilities, allowing me to articulate my excitement practically and meaningfully.

I pretty much ran the full gamut of artistic practices in an attempt to define my artistic practice, ultimately leading to conceptual/critical activities by the end of my BA. During my final year I worked on pieces which targeted various ready-made situations within the college, including my colleagues’ works, the library and gallery spaces. The resulting pieces were accompanied by or comprised of a series of talks addressing my problems with the situations and Art in general.

During the degree I was heavily involved with the work experience programme run by the college, spending time with artists, a couple of commercial galleries and an artist’s agent. I originally chose to do this as it keyed into my interests regarding the workings of the art-world. I was aware that here was the site of a broader perspective on art and the art-world than was available to me within the confines of the college.

This led me to work with the artist Peter Fend whose (semi-)deliberate conflictual activity and aesthetic production I had already become aware of and found of interest. We began a dialogue which led to my inviting him to exhibit in my Degree Show. We more or less worked in parallel producing this event, the final form of which was an installation of his pieces with a small book of Peter’s and my own writings. Perhaps predictably bringing another artist to exhibit was not popular with the University, but I was very fortunate to have understanding tutors who defended my work.

Leaving college led to a crisis of confidence in my work. This, in combination with my personal circumstances encouraged me to settle into employment as a graphic/web designer. A little over a year ago my circumstances changed again leaving me free to re-assess and reinitialize my concern with art.

On a practical level, the PGDip in Contemporary Art History will provide a strong basis on which to build my future activities. Goldsmiths always had a great reputation when I was at Middlesex University, and I enjoyed my visits to the site – there seemed to be a good community there. The fact that this course is concentrates on Contemporary Art is a definite bonus given my areas of interest and the College’s location in a major hub of the art-world make Goldsmiths a logical and attractive choice for me.

…and they said: “accepted.”

It’s been a busy few weeks:-

1. As result of actions stemming from the feelings that led to this previous post, on Friday 19 May I received an unconditional offer of a place on the PGDip in Contemporary Art History at Goldsmith’s College.
2. On Tuesday 23 May it was my 36th Birthday.
3. On Thursday 25 May I accepted the place on the course.
4. On Friday 26 May I handed in my notice at work.

The near future is looking like this:-

1. Friday 1 September will be my last day at work.
2. In September I will move back to London, possibly to the Brockley or Nunhead areas.
3. On Monday 25 September term will begin at college.

Onto the next stage!

I’m quite proud of the site I’ve just coded for the Cambridge Folk Festival (client: Cambridge City Council). This work was done as part of my day job at Cambridge University Press.

The original branding is done by Adrenaline Creative. Based on this, I created the website design for last year’s Festival but kept it quite basic as I only had a week from brief to hand-over. This year I had a slightly longer period to update the site to follow the new poster design and incorporate some other changes requested by the client.

The most obvious change was to convert the navigation from a static vertical list to a horizontal drop-down menu system. This was based on the excellent Suckerfish Dropdowns menu by Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb at A List Apart. Behind the scenes the code had a complete overhaul to ensure it validated as XHTML Strict (validates as of 25/3/06) (all my sites are coded to this standard nowadays). It was also an opportunity to apply everything I’ve learnt about CSS and XHTML in the year since I last coded the site.

One of the requests from the client was to make the site easier to maintain, so I’ve placed greater emphasis on re-useable code in this version. Each page is made of five basic areas, four of which are the same on every page, so are pulled out of the code as separate files (Server Side Includes). This means that every page on the site can be updated just by editing a single file. The header, navigation bar, sponsor’s list and footer are all saved as these Includes.

One concern I had was that the navigation would be difficult for some people to use, so in the body of the Website Map page I used the same Include file used for the navigation, but added some new CSS rules to style it in a more straightforward way. I think this demonstrates the power of combining Includes and CSS.