Hi all,

Another occasional missive from my seeming sabbatical from the online world. If you subscribed to this for updates from my art life, here are three bits of news.

1

I’ve got two pieces in the Artefact Winter Open group show, where all residents of Stirchley can submit work and pretty much all of it will be accepted. It’s usually a glorious hodgepodge of styles and media that reflects a community in a delightful and often amusing way.

Hello,

This is the very occasional newsletter from Pete Ashton to which you subscribed at some point.

It’s been a while - I’ve mostly been deep into co-ops and composting this year and not writing much - but I have an event coming up this weekend! In a venue!

As some of you will know, my good friend Andy Howlett finished his feature documentary about Birmingham’s old central library this year. He decided that 5 years of feedback and long conversations about Birmingham meant I’d earned a Executive Producer credit, and so now I’ve executive produced a movie.

Hello,

This is the irregular newsletter from Pete Ashton which you subscribed to at some point.

I’m trying someting new, again, because that’s what we do here. where I write a short-ish response to something I’ve read or watched. I try and have it done within an hour, ideally less, and get it out right away.

Hello, reader of my words.

Hope you are well. This is a long one so make a cup of tea (or skip it and read something shorter instead).

Hello,

This is irregular newsletter of Pete Ashton, also available as a blog, to which you are subscribed.

Thanks to those who let me know that they liked the new format. I’m still not sold on the emoji’s but the act of choosing the triptych entertains me enough to continue in this vein.

This newsletter from Pete Ashton to which you subscribed at some point is also available in blog flavour.

Hello,

This is the newsletter from Pete Ashton, which you subscribed to at some point. Blog version here.

Well, hello there.

This is the irregular Pete Ashton newsletter by Pete Ashton of peteashton.com

Hullo!

Hope you had a nice summer. Mine was good… I think? Memory is pretty atemporal these days. We’re on holiday in Wales this week, which is lovely. Here’s an image I made of the beach at Llanbedrog.

Hello,

I’ve been writing a fair bit recently and it felt good to do so. Lockdown was rather paralysing and all-consuming at first but as this new-weird-normal becomes a bit more normal, though still very weird, it’s pleasing to look back and my output and be happy with it.

Hello,

Since I last sent my newsletter (to which you are subscribed for some reason probably long forgotten) I’ve posted a few things to my blog which you might not have seen.

Whales on the Hudson (30th April, 400 words)

Hi there subscriber to my personal newsletter. Here are some words for you that are also on my blog.

Closing the Covid browser tabs

I’ve been in a bit of a slump these last few days, knowing I’ve got things I could be doing but not finding the will or energy to do them. The warning signs of a depressive period are there so I’m going to try and head that off by just doing that might not have any purpose other than to shake my brain into shape. Sort of like jogging around the park.

Hello newsletter subscriber person,

Somebody noted the other day that I hadn’t written anything about [gestures at everything] which they felt was surprising, and yes, I have wanted to do the textual equivalent of , but I’ve been a bit busy.

Hello you,

I’m coming out of the other side of an annoying winter cold (as an aside, catching a stupid cold when there’s a full-blown media panic about a flu virus going on is pretty weird because of course you don’t have the danger-flu but even so, at the back of your fuggy mind, eating away…) which means I’m having periods of lucidity but not enough to actually do anything important without needing to lie down, so it’s perfect time to write that overdue newsletter.

It’s February 2020. It’s cold and wet and nobody really knows what’s going on, but we’re going to try and make the best of it.

Hello you,

This is the irregular newsletter from Pete Ashton, artist, covering stuff he’s up to and pointing to things he thinks might be of interest. Please unsubscribe if you’re no longer interested, or forward to your friends if you think they might be.

New Art - The 1972 Project

Hello,

At some point you subscribed to my newsletter. I’m Pete Ashton. Hopefully this is still of interest but if it’s not, the unsubscribe button is down there. ↓

Hello!

Been a while. I spent the summer doing a fair amount of admin and plotting and am now ready to Start Some Stuff through the autumn. This missive serves as an update to where I’m at and a clean slate.

Possibly the big news is I finally retired my Twitter presence after 12 years actively posting stuff to their service. I outline my reasoning here but simply put, it wasn’t fun anymore and Twitter isn’t good for society so I don’t want to participate in that. This means I am no longer active on any commercial social media, which feels good. It also means this newsletter and my blog are the primary places I post stuff now.

Pete Art News

Many of you subscribed to this because you want to know when I’m doing art-related activities. Here are some of the art-related activities I’m doing soon.

Dead Shrines

Hello.

We watched the Bohemian Rhapsody film last night, wanting something a bit light and fluffy after a long week, and wow, that’s a terrible piece of film making, framing some amazingly well shot scenes. Its flaws are well recorded by this stage but that disconnect between the recreations of the stage shows and of off-stage life reminded me of First Man, the Neil Armstrong biopic.

I often have a Wikipedia page for some concept or idea open in a browser tab. It gets closed when I’m done with it, so the longer it’s there, the more useful it’s likely to be. Currently I’ve had Imagined Community refusing to be closed every time I trim my browser down, so I guess it’s a good one to dig deeper into.

Imagined Communities is a model for looking at how nationalism can work across a whole country of millions when we barely know a few hundred of our “fellow citizens”. A nation is a socially constructed community, imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group, amplified by the media which promotes a common vernacular language, starting with print moving away from Latin around the 16th century.

The origins are interesting, but what really intrigues me is the fluidity of it all, the fact that something as seemingly concrete as a national identity is really anchored by the shifting sands of language.

Hello you.

I realised it’s been months since I wrote anything for myself, and that might explain why I’m feeling a little constipated in the brain-department, so I need a method of loosening all those ideas up without the pressure of turning them into coherent explanations or statements, and that’s what this ever-evolving newsletter is now going to be now. A place where I sketch out stuff that’s floating through my brain in the hope that it’s useful both to me as an exercise and to you as something to ponder.

where typos will be corrected as I notice them.