Props can act as a starting point, suggesting narratives, lives of their own. Likewise, titling the work can either kick-start a project or hinder it if slavishly adhered to. One artist may use a title to help frame the work, another may let the work be suggestive whilst others let serendipity intervene.

As discussed in Field Notes, notions of home decorate my room of research, my books of scribblings and sketches. The quote above, presents a cave as a magical haven stumbled across, and in the spirit of the steam genies I will be twisting through my home using it as my cave, illuminating nooks and crannies with with my cameras and writings to see what materialises.

A speaker I came across shone light into the many corners of his talk. Philip Tabor sees distinctions between the home as a subjective construct and house as a metaphor for the meta-physical body. Buildings are referred to as bodies, which he dates back to the Roman period. He begins with Lacan's (Freud/post Freud?) mirror-stage experienced by young children to begin his exploration of house and home. Essentially this stage enables the child to distinguish the self as a primary concern and the world as the other; spatial awareness, an interior and an exterior. So we have a conceptual and physical boundary; the self and the body. We also have Tabor continues, skin which serves as an envelope or picture-frame to separate our interior (self) from the metaphorical interior; things, objects (clothing, possessions, nationality, dwellings) which we use as extensions to ourselves. An interesting analogy he uses to crystallise the enmeshing of the two is burglary. Burglary is an assault on the self, an invasion and penetration of the physical house and the metaphorical self in relation to the house and idea of home. My work in relation to some of these ideas is to invite a glimpse into a private world based around a home, inspire a sense of secrecy and discovery akin to finding an ivy-clad doorway perhaps slightly ajar; dual concealing and beckoning.

Johannes Vermeer, Dutch painter of exquisite 16th century interiors, is drawn into Tabor's idea of the interior and its interiorness in both physical and metaphorical senses. His comparison of Vermeer's paintings with photography I found intriguing. In the past I have approached and treated photography as though each tiny negative was a still-life painting; sketching compositions and arranging the "painting" for the camera. With Vermeer we are lured into the intimacy, security and comfort of his centuries old world; alien yet familiar. We can't see the outside world, our eyes are the paintings within Vermeer's that look towards the external world. Unlike Vermeer's paintings, my work doesn't offer any peep-holes to the outside world, only telescopes on the interiors themselves. My telescopes allow the viewer to see objects in various scenarios, inviting symbolic or intuitive readings; images built up with layers.

Gothic cathedrals as information rich objects provided a point of interest and reference for the development of my ideas. The notion of the windows being a poor-man's bible; each stained glass panel depicting Christian cosmology for the non-reader; each panel built into the fabric of the cathedral creating a huge structure of symbolism, light and colour - a storybox for people to walk, sit and contemplate in. As Tabor continues in his lecture, Gothic cathedrals were explicitly designed with theology and philosophy in mind, particularly of the schools of St Aquinas and St Bonaventure. They believed light to be a substance; an embodied spirit. Light spreads divinity; light is in all of God's creations; light comes from

Bill Viola, revered US video artist, is someone I had only seen one piece of work by: The Messenger in Durham Cathedral. He had installed huge screens dotted around the insides of the building, a naked figure floating in water contaioned only by these screens - seemingly the only physical structure holding forth the water about to flood the place with less orthodox spirituality. Years later I was re-introduced to him, not his visual but written work. In his book, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-94, in one chapter he talks about human sensory overload and how we desperately try to sift through the information we are bombarded with to make sense to ourselves and others. In an interesting expansion on the idea of human senses as limiters or sieves, he helpfully points out the difference between information and garbage: they are both man-made but information is something we want to keep as opposed to the garbage we want to discard, but concurrently both can be seen as troublesome. He goes on to illustrate by way of a Sufi analogy; a heavy load of pottery and a heavy load of books weighs the same for the donkey. Creating a mass of work first and then whittling it down to the core body seems to be a method for handling the sheer amount of information accumulated through this Masters course. A lot of information I have looked at has not made it into this learning journal, partly because some doesn't bear so much importance and also allows me to focus on the salient information which also preserves some clarity and navigation for the reader and myself. Viola outlines the problem video artists have in deciding what not to record and likens the whittling away process as being akin to cutting or carving until you're left with a specific thing.

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