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I completed another set of prints this week, again trying to lift the rust from a plate but again failing. However, the resulting prints were interesting so it wasn't all bad - I just need to look at whether I should print from the rusted plates now or use them simply in their own right.

This time, the reverse of the plate was that which was particularly rusted (because it was face up in the ground) and so it was from this side that I decided to try and take the first print.

The rust itself was particularly beautiful with some very nice red -almost liquid - rust-drops on its surface.

The resulting print however was a little disappointing. Perhaps using a heavier paper might do the trick?

Again I printed the other side which by now is so marked, it's difficult to remove much of the ink and so the resulting image is extremely dark.

The most interesting results came with a plate I hid in the woods. I left it for a period of a week, and although there didn't appear to be much on it, aside from a few patches of rust, it was only when it was printed that the extent of wear on the plate's surface became apparent.

This was the plate I used, and having taken the image I was interested in how I could see my own reflection, for the marking on the plate had reminded me of the surfaces of old mirrors. Seeing the marks revealed in the print led me think how interesting it would be to print some mirrors. Maybe past reflections would be contained on the resulting image...?

In fact, on the side of which I took the photograph, there is a shadow which could well pass for my image...

The following drawing is part of a series I've been working on regarding Auschwitz-Birkenau and the theme of pathways.

Looking at the picture, I was reminded of something which for a while escaped me. There was something about the tower in particular which I was sure bore a striking resemblance with another, famous painting.

The following is a detail from the drawing.

Looking at it closely, at the apparent anguish and suffering in the 'face' of the tower (the tower as suffering goes against all I have written about it so far: "...the gate house is different, it knows its time has passed but doesn't seem ashamed in anyway. Its almost as if it relives every moment in its glass eyes, glass eyes which are far from being blind. They don't reflect what they see around them now but rather what has been, what the tower wants to remember...") made me think at once of the painting I'd been thinking of, an image painted in 1937 and again, one of the utmost despair: Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'.

I have finally got myself into gear as regards moving into my studio at Magdalen Road and have now started to get some work done. I started with putting some pictures up on the wall (those I made after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau) and was struck by how different they appeared when shown all together. When I first showed them they were on two walls and all in a row, but having them all on one wall lent them a whole different - and more sinister - aspect.

They've always been rather intimidating images, but now there was something relentless and almost obsessive about them; as a group they seemed to talk more; but this was not a dialogue between the pictures and the viewer (me in this case, but I believe it would have the same effect with anyone else) it was now more like an internal monologue - the externalisation of a guilty conscience. I thought about wallpapering them to the walls which would I think strengthen their obsessive quality.

I also drew more of the 'collective views' which are interesting. They too have the same relentless, clawing quality, but do not have quite the same connotations of guilt which one gets from repeated and near identical images.

As I drew these images, I 'found my way' back inside the camp, seeing it clearly in my mind as I drew with my eyes closed. I followed the various lines, in particular the railways tracks, the wire fences and the telegraph wires. And as my pen marked them on the page, I began to think about their functions. The train tracks were a means to the outside world, they were defined by their end points - outside, beyond the camp - connected to the great European cities and the home towns of many who died there. The telegraph wires were likewise a means of communicating with the outside world, which for those in the camp was an impossible dream - something quite unreal. All I could think as I drew, was the 'image' of screams being carried down the wires. Sadly the outside world wasn't listening.

Having worked on the drawings for a while, I then began to work on an idea I sketched out a while ago.

I started working on the knot using the balls of string which I dyed last week and as I began to build up the knot I found that the dye hadn't taken properly which nevertheless produced and interesting effect as the knot grew.

Any work associated with the Holocaust and which is realised with fabric has certain connotations, but what interested me particularly was what I'd thought about whilst drawing earlier - in particular the telegraph wires. The cut strings trailing on the floor - which represent the cut threads of life - became telegraph wires in my mind.

Could I perhaps use wires instead of string?

Yesterday I carried on with the process I initiated two weeks ago, that of burying an engraved plate, leaving it a week and then printing the rusted version. Having dug up the plate after a second period in the ground, I was pleased with the resulting pattern of rust which I hoped would be lifted onto the paper by some of the ink during the printing process.

The resulting print from this plate was as follows.

The thing I realised with printing from such a rusted plate was the fact that the rust has quite a pull on the ink, and so once the paper has been through the press and one lifts it from the plate, it has a tendency to be left behind. With the print above, I was somewhat disappointed that the rust was 'drowned out' by the ink - hardly surprising when I think how thickly it was applied. Of course this is normal, but whereas one can use the scrim to take the ink off, and use quite a bit of pressure to do so, with the rust one doesn't want to rub so much (and thereby remove it) and so the ink remains too thick in these areas.

I took a second print of the plate without re-inking and and the texture of the rust was well preserved.

For the next print (after a third week in the ground the plate will be even rustier) I need to ink the particularly rusted sections less and perhaps moisten the rust to encourage it to lift off the plate.

As well as continuing this experiment, I also started working with photo-polymer plates. A photograph is printed onto acetate (with all black areas 'removed'/greyed) and this positive is then used to 'etch' the plate. The plate is sensitive to UV light and so this is done in a darkroom in a UV box. The light passes through the acetate and exposes the plate in the darker areas. When the plate is washed and inked, these areas then take the ink which is then printed onto the page.

In order to get a good print, one needs to make two or three proofs, the results of which are below (those on the left being the first).

The question I have to ask myself now is what does it mean to print these photographs as etchings? Something to consider over the next few days.

I have recently studied, as part of my MA in Social Sculpture, a couple of articles on the use of Goethe's Scientific method in observing both objects (Talking with History: Using Goethe's Scientific Approach with Human Artefacts by Jim Davis) and landscape (Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape by Iris Brook). Both these articles, whilst using different methodologies, share the same aim; to show how Goethe's approach to phenomena, can lead to an understanding of the subject (in these instances, an object and the landscape) which runs much deeper than a more 'traditional' objective view.

For his approach, Jim Davis uses "a series of questions that Floris Lowndes (2000) uses for organising one of Rudolf Steiner's meditation exercises." The questions in his methodology are (preceded by a defining keyword):

a) physical: What is it made of? What are its properties?
b) historical: How is it made? How is it used?
c) emotional: Why this design? What are my feelings about it?
d) creative: Who created it? Invented it?
e) desire/need: What need or desire led to its invention?
f) origins, background: What preceded it? What was its context?
g) archetype: What is the concept of the thing? Other forms?

These questions are, he explains, "are a set of 'canned riddles' that formalize and direct the conversation which leads from the physical objects to a form that can only be grasped imaginatively or intuitively. By working through the questions from a) to g), the process follows Goethe's 'genetic method' of proceeding from empirical observation to archetype."

I have written in detail about my application of this methodology in a 'conversation' I had with a Lira da Braccio in The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, but what I was particularly interested in, was how this method allowed me, through my imagination, to visit the past of this musical instrument more directly than I would have managed before.

The second article by Iris Brook, describes her use of "Goethean observation as a means of surveying and appraising landscape...". She describes her methodology as follows:

a) Exact sense perception: "...the observer attempt[s] to approach the object from a clearer, more objective standpoint.. This stage was called by Goethe, exact sense perception and is characterised by a detailed observation of all the 'bare facts' of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. It is an attempt to see what is present with as little personal judgement and evaluation as possible."

b) Exact sensorial fantasy: "The second stage of looking at the phenomenon is what Goethe called 'exact sensorial fantasy' (Exact sinnliche Phantasie). An aspect of this activity is to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, that is to see the phenomenon in time. This means no longer seeing the thing in an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with history. That history can be drawn from the phenomenon with the use of an imaginative faculty that cultivates temporal and physical relationships..."

c) Seeing in beholding: "In the third stage one attempts to still active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer. We attempt to step outside of what has gone before and make space for the thing to articulate in its own way."

d) Being one with the subject: "Being one with the object in this fourth stage allows the human ability to conceptualise to serve the thing: we lend it this human capacity. When the phenomenon being explored does not have the ability to think, it is the most participatory part of Goethean observation."

What interested me about Iris Brook's approach was how it allowed the landscape she was studying to reveal itself (its gesture), while Brook herself, through her 'perception, imagination, inspiration and intuition', becomes "one with nature", understanding the landscape's position within the wider landscape not only in a physical sense but also in a temporal one.

The phrase "one with nature" comes not from any book on Goethe (although there might be just such a phrase in one of the many available) but a book by Lucien Stryk on the Haiku of Massuo Kinsaku (1644-94) who later became known as Basho; it's in his collection of travel sketches, The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, that he writes:

"... All who achieve greatness in art... possess one thing in common: they are one with nature."

This phrase shares much with Goethe's approach, in that following the methodology as described by Brook, one does indeed become "one with the subject" which in her case was a "60-acre parcel of land that lies at the foot of the north-facing slopes of the Lammermuir Hills, 20 miles east of Edinburgh."

Stryk states: "Basho's discussion of poetry was always tinged by Zen thought, and what in his maturity he advocated above all was the realization on muga [no-self, selflessness, non-ego or ecstasy] so close an identification with the things one writes of that self is forgotten. As Zen's Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng (637-712), put it, one should not look at, but as, the object."

The forgetting of self and becoming the object, are absolutely the same as what Brook describes in the fourth stage of the methodology

One of Basho's disciples, Doho, writes of a conversation he had with the poet: "The master said, 'Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.'

What he meant was that the poet should detach his mind from self... and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and feelings whereupon a poem forms itself. Description of the object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings which have come from the object, the object and the poet's self will be separate things."

The similarities between this advice and that offered by Goethe is striking. Regarding the advice recalled by Doho, Stryk writes: "To give an indication of the influence of such comments on subsequent practice of the art, a contemporary haiku school, Tenro, possesses a creed, Shasei (on-the-spot composition, with the subject 'traced to its origin'), virtually based on the theoretical statements and practice of Basho. Tenro has some two thousand members all over Japan, and it is customary for groups to meet at a designated spot, perhaps a Zen temple in a place famous for its pines or bamboo, and there write as many as one hundred haiku in a day, attempting to enter the object,' share its delicate life and feelings.'"

Given my interest in memorials, I was interested to read on the BBC News site a story regarding the recently 'dedicated' memorial to Armed Services Personnel killed since the second world war.

What struck me most was the following line:

"There is room for 15,000 more names to be carved on the Portland stone walls of the memorial, at the National Memorial Arboretum."

There is indeed something particularly chilling about this fact, for it's as if the memorial itself is acknowledging the fact that we have learnt nothing from the deaths of those whose names are already inscribed on the walls, that's it's as much a memorial to the future as it is to the past; a memorial to those who at this moment are living.

Having completed my first two etchings, I decided to make another larger one, again using my Auschwitz-Birkenau drawings as a basis. The following print is the result.

What I have become interested in, is, as I wrote on my original printmaking entry, the plates themselves, not only as physical objects in their own right, but as metaphors for actions which later one remembers (the memories being the prints taken from the plate). Having buried a plate in the first week and taken a print of the rusted plate this week (which was particularly interesting) I decided to bury the plate from which the above print was taken, and this I did, burying the plate in my garden.

A week later, the plate was dug up again. We'd had some pretty heavy downpours so I was hoping for a good bit of rust.

Just the act of using the trowel reminded me of archaeologists gently scraping away the earth to reveal the hidden thing beneath the surface.

The plate itself was compacted with earth, underneath which was an interesting patina of various rusts.

Tomorrow I shall take a print from this and then re-bury the plate in the garden for another week. I will also start making more plates for burying but not actually printing.

In a session today on my MA in Social Sculpture, we considered the following three words: Hidden, Ignored, Denied. What do we understand by these words? Not simply in their meaning but in their relationship to one another, to us and to the world around us. As we began to discuss the words, it quickly became apparent that we had different views on their significance, e.g. which was the stronger word, ignored or denied? Was hidden a positive or a negative word?

Initially, I began to think about what hidden means to me, and, in my sketchbook, I wrote down that what is denied to me, I hide, or, to put it another way, I hide it because it is denied to me. So, far from (as someone else said) the word being positive, I started by seeing it as negative. When a thing is hidden, someone suggested, we embrace it, we protect it; much like we would a treasure. Of course I wouldn't argue with this, we do indeed sometimes hide what we cherish. And as I thought about it, I took the idea of embracing and applied it to the 'ignored'. I had started by suggesting that we ignore something in the hope that it goes away. The thing ignored and the thing hidden are both external to us (even if they are part of us), but the difference is that while we might embrace a hidden thing, the thing ignored embraces us, it hold us.

I then began to think about 'denied'. Is ignoring stronger than denial? One girl suggested that ignoring was passive and denial was something much more active, but as I thought about it, I began to see that for me, it was the other way round. Denial was the more passive of the two. To ignore something requires a concerted conscious effort, even if the act of ignoring is brief, the thing ignored remains with us for longer. Denial can be as simple as changing the channel on a television; we might deny time to the news of an atrocity for example. That is different to ignoring it; to ignore the atrocity is to give it space in our minds but not in our mouths.

The difference between ignoring a thing and denying a thing became something very important to me, particularly in relation to my work on The Trees, a project concerned with 'denial in the landscape of atrocity and suffering'. I thought about ignoring and how when I ignore something, I am in effect denying something in myself. If I (a subject rather than myself) deny time on the television to an atrocity, or a natural disaster like an earthquake, I am in effect, ignoring (or attempting to ignore) my own lack of concern - my apathy, just as a Holocaust denier is not denying the fact of the Holocaust per se, but rather, trying to ignore their own belief that it was no bad thing, that they got what they deserved.

Taking this further (the subjective 'ignore' and the objective 'deny'), I figured that if I have something about me I want to hide, I can ignore it, but with others I have to deny it. To ignore is to be silent, to deny requires words. It's easy to deny something when talking with another, it is, as I first suggested, a passive action. But to ignore something is almost a physical action, it requires effort and is anything but passive.

I wanted to create some kind of framework for considering how we hide, how we ignore and how we deny, and so I simply asked myself those same questions. How?

How do we hide something? By not talking about it. By not giving shape to the thing we wish to hide. To cover it, to deny it form. How do we ignore something? First we must acknowledge it. It cannot be covered, obfuscated, blurred. Its form must be clear, defined. And what of denial? How do we deny? Again, the thing must be defined in order for us to deny it, but whereas the ignored thing's form is of itself, the denied form is somehow changed. To deny is to give the thing a different form, to externalise an internal emotion in the guise of something else. For example, returning to the Holocaust denier; he denies the Holocaust so as to ignore his own hatred and prejudice; if it did not happen, he cannot be guilty. The same is true when someone we love is seriously ill. Often we will deny the illness by clothing it in something less serious so as to ignore, as far as we can, the possible (and feared) outcomes that we are considering. We often deny death, but we can never ignore it.

Of course there are different degrees of meaning in every word. There are passive and active ends of a word's spectrum of meaning amd words themselves occupy different places in other word's spectrums. Hidden, ignored and denied can all be placed at points on a spectrum of 'invisibility'. What I have outlined above is not a set of definitive meanings for these three words, but rather a way of exploring words, and arriving at meaning through a process of questioning, such as one might use when observing any other phenomema.

With the work I've been doing on trees at the sites of death camps in Poland, I found the following article, taken from the BBC News site very interesting.

The chestnut tree that comforted Anne Frank as she hid from the Nazis in Amsterdam during World War II has won a reprieve from being felled. Amsterdam city council ruled in March that the rotting 150-year-old tree must be felled as a danger to the public. Following protests the council has given those who want to save the tree until January to come up with a plan.

The tree was a ray of hope for the famous diary writer as she hid in the attic of the canal-side warehouse.The Jewish teenager remained indoors with her family for 25 months until they were arrested in August 1944.She died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp in March 1945.

The attic window from which Anne Frank could see the tree was the only one that had not been blacked out.In an entry dated February 23, 1944, she wrote: "From my favourite spot on the floor I look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind...

"As long as this exists, I thought, and I may live to see it, this sunshine, the cloudless skies, while this lasts I cannot be unhappy."

Ton Boon of the Amsterdam Centrum borough told Agence France-Presse news agency there was "only one Anne Frank tree" and it had been agreed to allow time for a possible rescue plan.

Experts say the 27-tonne tree is too diseased from fungi to be saved and the owner wants it cut down as he would be liable for any damage caused should it fall. The tree is adjacent to the building that now houses the Anne Frank Museum. A Utrecht-based firm, Trees Institute, has suggested a salvage plan involving treatment and support for the trunk and limbs.

Spokesman Edwin Koot told Associated Press: "The tree represented freedom... to Anne Frank. We must go the extra mile to try to save it."

Last week saw my first attempts at printmaking (etching) the results of which can be seen below.

Hard ground etching on steel plate.

Soft ground etching on steel plate.

The two techniques we used were hard and soft ground etching, both of which yielded surprising results, which, in part, is the beauty of printmaking, where the eventual result is never certain. Of course this might just be down to inexperience; I'm sure that professional printmakers achieve results which are wholly intended.

For the first print, I decided to etch a version of the drawings I made of Auschwitz-Birkenau, not so as to aestheticise the image, but to explore what could be gained from this particular medium. Would it bring anything new to my investigations? Despite the fact it looks like something one might find on a greetings card (itself an interesting point) the quality of the image interested me nonetheless - in particular the lines of the track and the fence where the ink had been left on the plate. The manipulation of the ink I realised could make all the difference - an obvious point perhaps, but then I had assumed that I would be creating a clean image with pure and crisp lines (something which I could certainly try in the future). But what interested me the most was the plate itself, the plate as an object in its own right, and, it's in this that I see potential for investigation re my work on Auschwitz-Birkenau.

As an experiment, we buried some of our plates (these will be dug up this week) so as to cause them to rust. I'd already begun to think of the plate and the print as metaphors for action and the remembered action, and the idea of something rusting or decaying synonymous with the past, where original, unrepeatable moments decay and the memories of those events are merely obfuscated reproductions; the original moment is only ever partially revealed.

The actual scratching at the plate in order to secure an image also interested me. There is something - violent is too strong a word - 'particular' about its physicality which, if the plate is the 'lived action', declares a degree of tribulation a regards its making, and dealing, as I do in much of my work, with trauma, the etching of an image on a plate and the 'biting' of the image into the plate by acid serves to emphasise this.

From this etched, 'traumatic' image, one can make facsimiles, but these copies - these memories or post-memories - are never the same (for one they are reversed), and as the plate decays so any prints will remove themselves further from the actual event. Of course, if no prints are made from the plates - if actions are not 'remembered' - then more possiblities arise.