St Ives & Penzance

Hello! My reasons for not blogging pertain to the same 'crisis' thing I had back in summer. I consciously took a break from sharing stuff instantaneously, and consequently, I've allowed myself to think and make things and go places without the nagging thought that I may only be doing so to have something to blog about. I've done this blogging thing for so long now (all of my _____teen years) that it began to feel innate to share stuff and trace all of my references. I think I found myself questioning how much of myself was real any more. I found I wasn't allowing myself or my blog to evolve naturally due to this now instinctive consciousness and analysis. Around this time I watched an interview with Simon Amstell where he stated that he began to look for comedy in situations almost before living them. He said he sought out comedy in everyday life to be able to use in his shows 'scarily quickly'. This kind of precedent is mirrored in my blog (but obviously not with comedy (instead with fashion and colours etc)).  I began to wonder if I was forcing things, and the notion that I may have become dependent on validation scared me a lot. 

Many people have written before about the fact that seldom things are original (some Tumblr quote says that striving for authenticity is the more important alternative) and apparently this is heightened with the prevalence of the internet now, which is culpable for the relative dissolution of subcultures (things change too fast) eg Courtney Love on Miley Cyrus. Again this legitimacy archetype applies. Too many things to question. This all came to a hilt with a passing comment someone made to me over the summer about me looking young. It made me question my entire existence and by the end of the following week I'd cut half of my hair off and had begun purging one bag of rubbish from my room each few days. I have also restricted myself to wearing only black clothes for the past 3 months, partially for practicality (sixth form blah hate not being able to match clothes blah money blah) but also to rouse the expulsion of what I felt was somewhat fake from my life. In this time I feel I've grown up a lot and it's been a sort of a long awaited detox.

Anyway; I'm planning on returning slowly to blogging now but my posts may be different WE'LL SEE.

 One of the things that I did keep constant was keeping my camera on me, though it did take me about two and a half months to use up one roll of film (despite having used 1 roll a month for the past few months), again to counteract this am i taking my camera to take photos to ultimately share online mentality. Nonetheless, I now don't feel any particular rush to post in real time and I've had the photos below for over a month without the compulsion to share. I think of it as more of a choice to put this here now rather than more of a mandatory obligation.

SO, I went on a trip to Cornwall from the 7th - 9th of November. It was an art trip with school so I was with my art class and I had to take photos for my sketchbook anyway, hence why some of them are quite random. If so it's because I drew something that's in them or whatever. Also don't fret I am not transitioning into becoming a plant blogger. It just so happened that a lot of Cornwall is green. One of the three plants I bought at the Eden Project is already dead so I'm definitely not cut out for that life.

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Gardens

• 1, 2, 3.  Where there was a room full of botanical miscellanies that even I fawned over despite being my lowly un-plant blogger self.
• 9, 14, 15, 18.

Newlyn Transition 10

• 4, 27. This was an open space for artists so we were able to talk to them as they worked. 
• 12. Mary-Ann with an artist who was forging copper wire bulb sorts of structures.

Beach/St. Michael's mount

• 5, 8. Collecting things from the beach to draw later on at the hostel (writing this out feels like annotating my sketchbook for the 100th time).
• 17. Ellen and Mary-Ann drawing St. Michael's mount.

In/around St. Ives

• 6, 7, 10, 13, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28.

Eden Project

• 11. The ceiling of one of the biomes. 
• 19. Cacti in the temperate biome.
• 23. Ellen drawing.

The main point of this trip was to visit galleries and make copies of pieces we liked and to generally make our ideas cohesive by the end of it to form the basis of a project. I didn't really fill many pages/get much done compared to others but I can actually tolerate what I did manage to get done for once (this is rare). The Hostel we stayed in, which was a huge old Georgian house, was supposedly haunted, and the food wasn't too bad either, so it was a generally good trip for one partially spent on a cramped coach or out sketching in miserable windy weather. 

- Hollie