Untitled

Untitled - Julie Clarke 1992: Colored pencil and digital images glued onto Arches paper.

What makes me frozen, stills me in the quiet of the morning, makes me incapable of writing on this blog with more consistency, is not that I have nothing to say, 'heaven forbid that she actually be able to be silent,' but that I have too many thoughts and therefore fixing upon one thing can be most difficult. So, as ideas float in and out, traveling as they do, one point to another, leaping back and forth in time ~ earlier this morning I was thinking of nothing but the 90s and then moved on quickly because the 90s were filled with love, loss and disappointment; I remain in this, perhaps that, no, not that state. Here I am then, writing, but not really writing of anything. Love is the Devil DVD, which belongs to my friend Shaun, jumps out at me reminding me that I still haven't watched it and then I think, why can't I find Charles Roberts book Infected Queer: Notes of an Activist, I know it is somewhere in the bookcase, I distinctly remember covering it in plastic to protect it from dust. Everything so tidy and yet some things are just difficult to locate. It took me ages the other day just going through old photographs to find the ones I was looking for. It's easier with digital technology, because most of the photographs I've taken over the past few years are on my computer or stored on disk. I'm wondering as I look around me how many books I've bought but never finished and wondered why this is so. It's fascinating, the things that you find when you are looking for something in particular. I still have half a sheet of fake gold leaf I used in an artwork in 1997 and little green socks with metallic thread I bought in 1984. I wore them recently and although they have a run in them I haven't had the heart to throw them out. All the things I've given away or discarded over the years, heaven knows why I've held onto them. Never quite sure about these stream-of-consciousness type writings, I think perhaps they betray us in the most disconcerting way, because as we write and type and look over what we have written we see the strange minutia of the day, the disconnected, but somehow coherent musings of the mind. So, I'm looking through drawings and digital images that I made in the 90s  (I thought I'd thrown most of them out) and I found the one above, which is mostly hand drawn with digital images of a DNA helix pasted onto the paper. I read this image as my interest in the body, art and technology, however am interested in the severity of the females face and wonder if it is a reflection of my own at that time, although I did not have short hair. I'm unsure whether any of this has been productive, perhaps not all activity need be, perhaps it is enough to understand that the past is always there, just lurking in the background, but it is the present time that is important.