RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN

Hi.  I lost my job and I'm still living at home and I'm broke as a joke and I started drawing again.

IT'S ART, STUPID

I've been extremely, extremely, ridiculously, absolutely MIA over the past....year?  Which is actually a big fat gigantic lie.  I have been nestled in the security of my (shared, way too small) bedroom back at home in Northampton, meandering from one shitty entry level administrative data inputting job at a Nameless Faceless Banking Corporation to another (have you taken out a loan or credit card within the past five year?  If so, you may have been mis-sold a Payment Protection Insurance policy that you didn't need! Write me loads of complaint letters because the Midlands has nothing else apart from factory work and chain bars to offer a broke, hungry graduate!), generally trying to pack something of monetary value into my extremely sorry looking bank account, and crossing my fingers that something with magically and drastically change without me having to try too hard.  Which is going extremely well, obviously, because who wouldn't want to be 23 (oh, yeah, I got old), with an extremely useful and well received painting degree, living back at home and eating spaghetti hoops and toast for dinner?  The Dream. 

I also haven't created any new, decent art work since graduating.  I bought myself a big, cheap, non-branded drawing board from amazon.co.uk when I first lef the world of part time employment (which came about after a lengthy couple of months slumped in the dole office in town, adamant that I'd been applying to jobs and not just writing down my shopping list on the fortnightly form, as the new Channel 4 advert would have you beleive, and promising that I'd take all of the art related junk out of my C.V, because yeah, I know, it doesn't really have much to do with why I, uh, want to work in PPI and insurance) and finally managed to find somewhere willing to hire me for 35 hours a week.  I also got a new, awesome Rotring pen, which cost more than I really want to remember, and some paper that wasn't from the Works, or the bargain bin at WHSmith.  And I drew.  I drew for a week, and then I got frustrated, because I was drawing the same junk as always, and then I started to overthink my art work, and what direction I wanted it to do in, and then I started to overthing everything, and then I, evidently, flung myself into a gigantic, never ending black hole of small town despair about the state of my work situation, bank account, and life, in general.  Then I crawled under my old patchwork blanket that smells of stale cigarettes, marathoned Hey Arnold! on Netflix, and got drunk.  Because I'm an adult.  And I know how to deal with grown up situations with maturity and class.

The point of all this nonsense, I guess, is to say that I've pretty much done nothing of artistic importance in the past year, which includes even attempting to keep this damn thing somewhat up to date.  PPI has taken over my life.  It's horrific but true.  But I'm sitting in my room, still sharing it with my sister, still full with too much rubbish from when I was younger that I can't thrown away (I will forever maintain that I am a perfect candidate for the program about hoarders.  That or SuperScrimpers, anyway) with my stupidly expensive Rotring pen, and a battered old sketchbook in front of me, and I'm going to try, if nothing else.  To get all Serious Business for a brief, fleeting moment, this year has definitely not been what I wanted, expected, or needed it to be, but I guess the one thing that you can always say is at least you managed to stand up more times than you got knocked down, right?  Hopefully, this place will be getting some more action in the coming months.

THE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN: Good things at the Rag Factory next weekend

After spending all morning intensely hungover in bed, attempting to e-mail every single semi-creative graduate job in Northampton (so, like, two....maybe) and eating sunflower seeds and cranberries and other such shit that came in my free Graze box (don't worry, I'm hating myself a little bit for turning into That Kind of vegan, too), I figured why not make a really half-assed, shameless self-promoting post on my extremely over-trafficked blog?  I'm putting up a few drawings as part of a show at the Rag Factory next weekend.  It'll be better than the one in February for these simple reasons: I have decent enough work to show.  I'll actually commit to buying frames.  There'll be NO. BLU. TAK.  Man, now I look back on it with intense hindsight, February was a hot mess.  Ya live ya learn.  And it's free if you print this flyer out (ignore the big ole £5 on the poster, I'm supposed to collect money from the sales but I'm having a rare moment of human empathy and figured, why not just let people have the dang thing for free?  Appreciate it while it lasts guyz!):

 

 Oh, and there'll be booze.  Lots and lotsa booze.

THIS SHIT SUCKS: Must be the Midlands

So, somehow I managed to graduate on Monday July 18th:

(Awesome quality photograph of the standard hat throwing malarkey stealthily highjacked from a friend's facebook)

However, prior to this commenced the start of the Final Weekend at 117.  Kirsty arrived in da city on Saturday afternoon, around an hour after I decided to take a deep breath and charge down to Camden in the hope of finding a grad outfit before the rain started.  Obviously I found no clothes and a monsoon started on the walk back to the flat.  However, after the imminent arrival of K.Mckee, we headed over to the Vintage Kilo Sale at the Rag Factory to dig through piles of clothes in an attempt to secure some gems.  Kirsty found a sweet white Levi's jacket and I bought a denim skirt that's too small and an olive green shirt that has no buttons.  Swings and roundabouts?

Despite my best attempts at securing some kind of money making deal in London (the vintage market 'job' in Camden did. not. go. well), I am currently sitting in my parent's house in the heart of Northamptonshire (born and bred, yo) in my pyjamas, wondering how the hell it's come to this...'this' quite obviously being the fact that I'm the ripe old age of 22 and living back at home, still sharing a room with my sister and attempting to sign on to the dole for the sixth time in a row.  On the not so shitty side of things, I've  started using InDesign and Illustrator more since coming home (obviously to appeal to employers and be all commercial and shi'), check out the new banner for my super professional website guy:

And so, I guess now would be a good a time as any to bid a final adieu to North of the river: farewell NW5, it's been real.

LONDON I LOVE YOU BUT YOU'RE BRINGIN' ME DOWN: Lacking some serious forward momentum

So around a month ago, right in the middle of setting up for the show, my laptop suddenly decided to become riddled with a million different kind of viruses (viri?), even worse, ones that restart-safe mode-system restore couldn't fix.  This led to me having to close down the entire thing, restore it to factory settings (which in turn wiped EVERYTHING that I've been saving and working on for the past three-ish years) and subsequently throwing myself full-throttle into the pit of despair.  Along with my entire iTunes catalogue and many a drunken Archway era video, I also lost all of my documentation of the previous years work, along with some awesome/creepy/AWESOME serial killer video collage projects I was working on.  Due to this, I have no new or different work to show here, so instead, I come bearing gifts of the 'shit that didn't make it into the degree show' kind, mainly in pen and ink form:

All masterly hotlinked from my way more serious and way less interesting professional website, Rebecca Higgins Art.  These were mainly based around the idea of chemical and physical imbalances, being 'under the microscope', and the link between the body being dissected, and the mind/reasonings behind why we do the things we do being questioned (and lots of other wordy bullshit, too).  Basically, I miss drawing, as in, really crazily miss drawing, and I want to keep at it and not become a grumpus who spends all of her time in bed eating entire boxes of cereal in one sitting whilst watching every episode of the Simpsons ever.  The recent Camberwell Illustration graduate show (fanx Creative Review/luv u CCW), as well as being pretty damn impressive, managed to make me feel inferior and lazy in regards to this, but I guess at least it's giving me the push forward to pick up the old Uniball and quill and attempt to make something halfway decent happen.  Sweet!  These mini/anti-laziness epiphanies seem to be happening like clockwork recently: on my not-so-distant-future list I'm also including the following:

• Move back to the sunny midlands, save up some dollar, move back to London by the end of the summer (and believe me, North West definitely ain't best-South is calling me back again)
• Start up a collaborative project/blog with the wonderful K Higgs and K McKee
• Apply to the Triangle Arts Trust and attempt to live out my insanely unrealistic pipe-dream of working/living in New York for as long as my Visa will allow me
• Learn some more sculpture techniques-tights and stuffing gets mega old, mega fast
• Get out of bed more often/still manage to avoid everyone, the perfect balance still hasn't been settled