“PHONETICALLY SPEAKING” To reflect the fast pace of world news, my blog is probably best served as a stream-of-consciousness text. Fast and unadulterated. With this approach, and on first encounter, text might not seem to scan. This is because I am dyslexic. Instead of keeping the proof-readers busy, I would rather let my blog updates of my visual work stand as a record of my experience of dyslexia, which I am keen that you now get to enjoy too. Unlike some news outlets, I hereby excuse myself the need for a ‘corrections’ section! The excitement of a new language is something I’m quite familiar with, and it is with this ‘joie de vivre’ that I am delighted to guide you through my thought and work processes, more phonetically (than fanatically) speaking.
Stooden Prtest
This image illustrates the frustration of students facing crippling debt through higher tution fees, lower grants and government taxes on future earnings before a single penny has even been earned. It’s as if the progress made in the 1960s and 70s to open up higher education to a wider cross-section of society never happened. The Con-Dem Coaliton betrayed election promises made to students ensuring the opposite – that a university education is only affordable for the rich. Education should be available to everyone on merit not wealth and it should be adequately funded. Funding education would be a better and more moral use of the hundreds of millions of pounds used to fight colonial wars abroad such as those in Libya and elsewhere.
During these protests armed riot police provocatively attacked a severly disabled wheelchairbound protestor called Jody McIntyre because he was allegedly ‘rolling threateningly towards them’! He was attacked and dragged out of his chair. Not unsurprisingly, that incident sparked a riot when Jody’s brother, friends and fellow protestors would not stand idly by while outrageous brutality was meted out to him.
Other oddities were a police van, curiously left unlocked and unmanned in the main street just before the protest was due to arrive, which was predictably attacked by indignant students thus providing the Media with suitably violent headline pictures to miss-characterise what had begun as a peaceful protest.
Artwork is available to purchase part of the Borrington’s Empiricull Almanack vol II of 13 original prints and individually as a archival inkjet print.
(Digital versions are available by request for articles which the artwork compliments)
