Amanda Ravetz

I'm a research fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University within MIRIAD, the research institute attached to the art and design faculty. A long time ago I did a painting degree at Central as it was then, and later a PhD in social anthropology with visual media.

I'm interested in observational cinema and recently made a film about the painter Ian Partridge. One of his works is included in Intuition, the new show at Whitworth Gallery Manchester curated by Bryony Bond (who Jordan knows from his Alchemy residency at Manchester Museum). Bryony has done a wonderful job of selecting work from the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Collection, recently donated to Whitworth. If Outsider Art doesn't sound very appealing - and its certainly a contentious term - you might just change your mind after seeing this show.

Brigitte Jurack (who teaches sculpture at MMU) and I were hoping to set up a project in Whitworth park for 7 Sights but sadly Whitworth said they were too taken up with other things to be our hosts, so we have to think again (they own the park, though they let it to the council on a peppercorn rent). Brigitte is at IMMA now doing a residency over the summer, so I need to have a scout around before she gets back and think about other possible places where we might do something. Brigitte's current work is about sculptural representations of youth, and since I did quite a lot of my anthropological fieldwork with young people we thought this was a good point of intersection between our two practices.

I'm looking forward to the meeting in September and seeing everyone there.

Introduction for Tim Neal

As I choose the title for this entry and looking at my name printed there I realise that I could and perhaps should at some point have chosen a pseudonym for myself. It feels so tacky to have a web presence - the coolest people I know just don't have one - it, the web, keeps all those bits of you that usually would be just forgotten by your friends and yourself and throws them back at you for ever and ever until the world comes to a startling standing still stalling stop and you finally get the answer to the question what comes next.

Now that's a reasonable introduction to me I'd say - depending on my mood. I was talking to, well rather complaining at, a close friend that she didn't want to speak to me about 'things' by which I meant 'ideas' - she replied that she found the academicspeak - the use of a technical vocabulary - off-putting. I don't think I do that. I am a sort of academic - meaning I have a reasonable tolerance of research, theory and if I knew the rest of this list I'd be a real one. I'm certainly not an artist although I once wrote this:

I'm a wolf without a taste for blood traveling in crush proof packs of twenty
I make sermons when I'm mounted and donate to war on plenty

and more like that a long time ago.

I still do the poetry bit on and off but I've become too interested in innate divinity for any reasonable people to converse with me. I've written many love songs and painted one landscape that I love and one bunch of daffodils that I almost love. Like Jeff O'Aberdeen and Ian D'Russell I am trained as an archaeologist but my main practice was collecting bits and pieces - although I love all that careful digging stuff it's just not as exciting as putting it in a pocket, washing it in the bath and dreaming of your first complete Solutrean blade. I left all that behind and I practice an anthropological trade nowadays. I'm completing a PhD looking at British people in a French village or perhaps more accurately a French village with British people in it.

I'm very pleased that this 7 sights project is up and running and I think the meeting towards which we will all gravitate will be extremely difficult to manage and challenging. There is so clearly work to be done at this meeting point of the sight and finding how to do this without just speaking academicspeak or reverting to obscene rhymes will be a test of our true mundanity.