MASS OBSERVATIONS 2016

Hi,

 

It's time to post some introductory writing by our students online, from their First Week. I'm back again, but I've never left the blogosphere, because I'm here (www.robertsheppard.blogspot.com) all the time (it seems). Every year I share a (different) page from the great artist Ian Breakwell's Diaries as inspiration. Sometimes I mention Mass Observation as a 1930s movement but usually I don't. Here's a video of his diary, or rather the development out of a small part of his diary, the everyday, the quotidian, to use a fancy word. This is both an exercise in perception (active looking, listening, feeling, smelling) and a model for the daily act of writing we call your writer's journal.

There's a personal side to this: this isn't something that I've simply made up as an exercise to use every year (although it is that too, and a good one: please look at the previous years' entries, all ten years of them). I am an obsessive diarist and have been at it at continuously least since 1969; but I also try to produce a daily act of creative writing, working my way through books of images, or whatever. Some of these are simply keeping me 'writing fit': others become raw notes for poems and prose pieces. (And my diaries too I've used in a book called Words Out of Time.)

But I've always been fascinated by Ian Breakwell. I saw him read once and show films (in all probability the one embedded above) and was always fascinated that a visual artist would find that his most extensive and enduring work would be not his art work (though SOME of the diaries are art works, as you can see on the film) but an act that started as a record of the day to day.

After we look at the page, I'll send you off, into your own writing futures.

Robert Sheppard