Much of my work as Ina is really about head space.  I have never spent much time actually considering what life would be like if I got whatever it is I purport to want.  Given the lack of likelihood of me ever achieving aims, particularly during the last few years,  life has become a rather tragic comedy.

I see this in other people, even people who have got whatever they thought they wanted. It almost looks as if disappointment is a natural life process, so prevalent is the sense of aging doom.

So to further this concept of there being no glass wall – that even people in public office need to be considered ‘fit for work,’ rather than authority figures who are there to be criticised and abused according to circumstance and the whims of the bun-throwing backseat voting public, I have decided to create a dialogue with Boris in the form of interpretive dance.

I will be doing this whilst writing up Lucifer Ogilvie, and naturally I will be Ina Disguise.

In this way, not only will I amuse Boris, who can enjoy it instead of the daily snifter, as a preference,  I can inspire some thoughtless so-called adults who have been herded into a life of embittered misery and believe that it is natural to lose your spirits/health as you get older.  It is not.

The artwork for Boris is not currently up for sale as I am still working on it and I am not satisfied with my current channels.  If anyone was interested in it, I am sure I could have a chat with you, but I don’t do this work with financial aims at the moment.  I would rather get to the point of meeting an actual publisher at some point and settling down to some more serious work.

Naturally, since even a casual skimming would reveal that I have had a particularly nasty year and am about to have another one, I am not feeling particularly great in real terms.  The only good part really is that Boris is far less concerned about image than Wolfe was, so I feel a bit more liberated in terms of what I can and cannot do. Emotional investments are not very convenient when  it comes to this kind of work.

The video project will probably commence in the spring, until then I will be undergoing some preparation work and trying to balance at least two full time jobs. Ina Disguise is Fit for Work.

I have always been fascinated by people who habitually attempt to cheat on other people.

I have done it, in the distant past, but very quickly gained sufficient stature and notoriety that everyone was aware of what I was doing and nobody seemed to be that bothered.  Being considered so desirable that you have a few people wondering if they can distract you sufficiently to consider them as your only partner is a nice place to be.

What I can never understand is people who bother lying about it.  This seems tedious.  I am aware, because I have been with such people, that for some it is a kind of game to see how far you can push someone.  This is not particularly healthy behaviour, and it is a bit manipulative. It is usually easier to just leave and go find somebody else.

This goes for friendships as well.  It is easier to keep things honest, even if honest is not always what people want from you.  One thing you learn as an itinerant caterer, is that your entire life can collapse overnight, so you simply learn not to invest terribly much in one person.

There is an inherent grubbiness in a more superficial perception of the world. If you are not investing terribly much, then anyone who is is either stupid, or so different from you that they had no business being in your life in the first place.  This then becomes tiring, and inevitably the lack of stability affects other functionality.  Unless you have retained that ‘centre of the universe’ position I first mentioned, life becomes rather shaky and so do you.

Having lived through these periods, and seen many different interest groups, with considerably different value systems, I selected a kind of lonely nobility.  I try to do the right thing, and I try to avoid people in order to avoid doing the wrong thing to suit them. It is not particularly sociable, but this saves a lot of time.

This may seem very strange to anyone following the chain of thought that goes with my attempts to become more confident and less anti-social, but I think the way I am approaching other people now is better than it was before.  I used to drop everything if someone needed something.  I used to consider how useful I could make myself, and anything I wanted took a poor second place.

The current projects are of sufficient magnitude for this to now be irrelevant.  Smaller tasks from other people, designed to distract and confuse, are now easy to turn down and bigger tasks, for the larger projects are broken into things I can do every day.  It may seem strange to take on enormous tasks for people I do not know, but when they are more interesting, more challenging, and may lead to actual change they seem worthwhile.  I have basically made my absurd helpfulness bigger, more confusing and more abstract in order to achieve an even bigger aim ultimately.

Time will tell if I have selected the correct people to bless with my angle of change, but both Wolfe and Boris are sufficiently intelligent to figure out what is happening and why when the time comes.  It is going to take a long time.

At least is it less boring, even if it does seem odd.

Put the booze down and listen to the orb, Boris. Make it loud.

Looks like the old me is back.  Reading my post from earlier, it is like looking back a decade into cynical reality.  I guess the grief is setting in.

One of the great things this project has done for me is enabled me to network.  I am not a social creature as a rule, but promoting my stuff, when I can be bothered, has meant joining a lot of interest groups as this is cheaper than merely advertising, which is not cost-effective as a rule.

Today I have been entertaining some artists with reasons for my work.  We often ask each other what our work is about, which is good practise as artists all tend to be scruffy, disinterested, and socially isolated unless we are tremendously successful.  We all tend to make the same social mistakes until we are happy with our technical ability, which is, paradoxically, never good enough anyway.  Being forced by circumstances and the ongoing thought that went into the Wolfe project into creating Ina is the only reason I have shown anything to anybody.

My own work has been complicated by the fact that I do not lust after a sufficient number or variety of men.  Given that that is the only reason I am ever compelled to do anything, I really should have spent more time earlier in life just finding men to perve at.  I was more interested in work, and had a steady supply of them, so I guess in artistic terms I have been rather lazy.

Anyway, just to make you laugh a bit, here are some very simplistic meanings behind my work.

 The Misery Mandala

This is what extremely angry sex with me looks like.

 Funk This

This is what it looks like when I decide that I can’t do anything about my inappropriate feelings and need a few weeks to try and surmount it (pun intended)  There was a series of four of these for Wolfe, three of which I liked, one I really don’t is Lucky Heart, because it is about futility and the random nature of sexuality.

 Ormus Uranium

A word gag about the Ormus range of products, popular in the USA and parts of Europe, which are mysterious in nature.  Elements such as gold are very popular with people interested in advanced mysticism, but there is no reason why poisonous elements should not have ormus properties.  It was also a good excuse to send Wolfe flowers.

 Fertility and Intellect

This is a very old piece of work, made for a grumpy history professor I adored at university, who had one of the most punk chainsaw brains I have ever come across.  I do love a bit of mental violence.  It is about the difficulties of retaining your concentration on academic pursuits when you are fertile and female.

 Call me Al

This is for Boris, who has a public persona, and a private one called Al.  I am rather touched by Boris.  He is the best of a very bad bunch, both privately and publicly and deserves better.  The UK would benefit from encouraging and listening to him.

 Bordello Rhetoric

This is the only other piece in the Boris collection that is directly for Boris.  It is about the nature of a political career, hence the title.  It is rather glamorous and bold, which I think is appropriate for Boris rather than Al.

Rebekah Brooks is fit for work

The other pieces in the Boris series are about the nature of success and the lack of fit with actual talent.  Simply declaring oneself fit for a task does not make it so, and most of these pieces either involve scandal of some sort, or just having so much money that nobody is ever going to force you to starve to death, as is happening to several sectors of society whilst wages are lowered via immigration. This will be a lengthy and very expensive series.  Rebekah is sitting in my kitchen, where she actually looks fabulous.  I expected these pieces to be loud and garish in place, but as it turns out they are conversation pieces.  Experimenting with textiles, stone, beads and resin has been expensive, but tremendous fun.

I am not sure why Boris is getting so many rock pools, but evidently I find him more erotic than I expected.  It is very much a sub-plot in my grand epic and entirely fictitious romance with Wolfe, however, so I am not sure how this imaginary love triangle is going to develop in the medium term.

I will do a page for each piece eventually, but hopefully that goes some way to explaining how my creative brain works.

Much affection,

Ina