I Am Still Alive
I’ve been asked in a lot of different contexts whether I studied writing at university. The thing is, I did and I didn’t. There was no Bachelor of Creative Writing at my university when I attended it, there was however a Bachelor of Writing, but in order to get the credits to graduate with that degree I would have had to do more classes on journalism and various other topics I had no interest in. So instead, I did a Bachelor of Communication, largely because I’m a huge fuck-up and as a degree it was broad enough that a lot of classes I’d already done would count toward it. So, as well as a large focus on writing, I also did classes on film and some on digital media, digital art, and visual art (as well as a marketing class that I flunked because I stopped going after the cut-off date where you could pull out of the class. (See above RE: fuck-up.)
For my main project in that visual art class, I put together a series of photographs of my eyeball when I woke up. At the time I was working at a supermarket, supporting myself through uni by stocking shelves and what-not. Most of my shifts started at 5am, sorting out the shelf “facing” before the store opened at 8am. Needless to say, the eyes featured in my photos were often red and bleary – one morning I wasn’t even able to open it properly for the photo.
It was an anti-capitalist piece of art, obviously (I have been on my bullshit for a very long time), commenting on what we are forced to do to our bodies and lives by a system that relies on our exhaustion for its endless growth.
