I had the dreaded Cross course crit yesterday.I hate the way those words sound together.It sounds like some kind of disease..must be the word crit,critter,cretin.not nice.Anyway it was certainly an interesting experience, even if i was the last presentation on a friday afternoon(most people had lost the will to live by this point). Anyway i finished 'em off! Highlights included Kate Davis calling me a hybrid (well in so many words)and me admitting to talking utter b*ll*$ks (in those exact words.)Pretty damn successful then.

I showed a clip of Jennie Livingston's 'Paris is Burning' (1991) as i'd been thinking about visibility/invisibility in my own work and how we can question the stability of binaries.Also i've been interested in Livingston's position in the film, how we experience her presence or lack of presence, as a white middle-class female director,on watching the film.The idea of the costume piece i had begun, which i showed in the presentation, was to create an ambiguous, intranslatable body. A body, which inhabits an inbetween space between notions of beauty and ugliness.An identity or model, which cannot be pinned down or immediately fixed from the outside.Although i was aware of the problems this would pose in the work, i'm glad i talked about this in the crit, because everyone's reactions really confirmed my suspicions and i suppose it's all part of the whittling down process. So i would say the experience has been useful, as a stepping stone, a transitory stage,even if it seemed a little too early to be talking about my work critically.