Finally!! I have been locked out of my blog for two years, eternally confused with the accounts I have set up, it was worse than arguing with a traffic warden.

In the last two years, I have met and married my husband, completed commissions, developed my studio practice and I have discovered TED.com. That's where I am now.

Does the tail wag the dog?

I was very surprised to find that Chester's flag and ears had got the chop. A pudding bowl haircut, his tail with wedges cut in it and his ears with wedged layers. As a springer spaniel, I'm sure he isn't too concerned with his looks but it will be while before I think he's as pretty as he was. It's not about looks though - a dog's tail provides balance and hair can warn of obstacles, so it's more about his effectiveness as a gun dog. He doesn't go hunting much these days but he does chase the pheasants resident in the nature reserve nearby (they are used to being roused) and I hope his enthusiasm for springing around hadn't been dampened.

Jeremy Deller, http://sacrilege2012.co.uk

I was asked recently what exhibition I had seen and what I thought of it. Normally a very sociable question, this was an interview situation, and although the question was reasonable it made me squirm. I hadn't been out the door recently, and Jeremy Deller's Sacrilege came to mind. It even came to Southend On Sea, three miles away from where I live, and I didn't go out the door to see it. I didn't see the Olympic Stadium, or Frieze Projects East...

Anthea Hamilton and Nicholas Byrne
Love
Location: Poplar Baths, E14 0EH

which I thought were great fun. Maybe more adult in content, these inflatables were less populist and more informed by everything else. I didn't see those either. Darn.

Deller's touring project has been well documented - 'offer your images to the gods' - he has linked a flickr account so it's the shared experience of "hey, there's me in this whole great experience." I understand that 'reach' is really important - getting those who do not normally participate in the arts to enjoy an art experience, and I do see the enrichment of a shared cultural experience (etc etc) but what do we need to do to obtain that reach? Providing a shared experience with social media platforms - Deller may be bringing the mountain to Mohammed with his list of tour dates and mystically-flavoured website. Does the tail wag the dog?

I still have my shoes on

Manet's Olympia, 1863

Well, it was a question posed to me in the course of conversation - what sex and intelligence have to do with each other. I don't really know. I'd love the time to do a bit of poodling around - there must be aons of intelligence out there exploring the nature of relationships and Do Rocket Scientists Do It Better.
Snow has fallen heavily last night and today it's a chore to wade through it, getting from here to there and back again, but everyone's out and about, snow is sociable that way. Equally sociable, the Private Views this weekend at White Wall Space: Look Hear profiles Chalkleys' contribution to rock'n'roll photography: clean, cool, analytical, posed an emotive, moody in a theatrical way. It's a pleaure to see the quality of photography above the heads of yet another jammed Private View and it feels like a subversive pleasure.


Subversive pleasure: Manet's Olympia, a beautiful painting. She looks at you, the viewer viewed, her face a much discussed at the Mona Lisa's. The frontality of her gaze, her posture, her elegance: graceful portraiture. Controvertial for the depiction of her apparently brazen but gentle gaze; today we look at the camera as a flower to the sun, so in love are we with celebrity culture, and to turn our gaze away implies an overexposure, an impartiality, a romantic notion of another muse of mental place and space. Apparently.

Katie Surridge has just completed her residency, hence her solo show, at the Winch Room at TAP that opened on Saturday evening. Animal skins, reflective pools of water, bones in jars, there's a newness about this installation that will develop like a good wine. It deserve to grow, rot, and regrow, evolve and become the living microcosm that this shed-on-shed installation suggests. There's a comfort of home against the non-synthesis of flourescence. Utopia, dytopia, mysticism: mythology.

Having had a quick peek at types of intelligence, Gardiner 's unproved theories outline multiple intelligences, of which body-kinaesthetic is one. Does your left hand know what your right hand is doing? Well, there's the anwer, for me at least: a kind of knowing, rooted in the everyday, the practical, the ease at which we move through the world; as with Olympia, a sanctuary in the physical pleasures of life in contrast to the otherworldliness that we may gaze upon.