YES OR NO | REFERENDUM

As someone who has lived in Scotland all my life, the Referendum has been constant background noise for many years now. I have only been eligible to vote for 2 years now, and this was one of the first chances I had to do so. 

I will say off the bat that I am generally not really that interested or invested in politics. However, despite a lot of encouragement to do so from both friends and family, I made the decision not to vote. Because of this, I became subject to every single person I met trying to persuade me to vote their way (the best way), which almost always ended in exasperation. Bizarrely, my neutrality towards the situation also made a lot of people angry, particularly a friend of mine who proceeded to shame me with the "do you know how many women died for the vote?!!" spiel. Of course, I am totally thankful that I have the right to try to influence the country I live in, something that so many people around the world are still denied, but I also think that this should be a choice rather than an obligation. I think that if I had been forced to vote, as is the case in other countries like Australia, I would not have been happy with either decision I could have made. Quite simply, I was not at all convinced by either party's proposals, and therefore didn't feel it was right to vote for something I didn't believe in. 

I think, like almost everyone ever, I have slight trust issues with politicians. On one hand, I don't feel like the UK's current politicians really have people's best interests in mind and I feel a slight contempt towards the obvious social bias parliament; the majority of politicians are still middle aged white males from upper class backgrounds, who have a reputation for being entitled, greedy and easily corrupted. However I don't feel like this would really change if Scotland became independent; I kind of got the impression it would all just be the same thing disguised in different packaging. I did think that the Yes campaign had far better and slightly more honest intentions than Better Together, but as a young person who is just starting my career I didn't think that now was the best time for such an uncertain future. I think part of me secretly wanted them to win, but I was also kind of relieved at the result and not having to worry about what comes next.

An image named "hams-that-look-like-david-cameron.jpg" which I found on google.

I think that many people were voting yes just as a kind of 'fuck you' to David Cameron, being the butter faced prawn looking man that he is, and I don't really blame them. But by the end of the campaign I was so bored of people aggressively squabbling over who could shout loudest that I was ready to hit the next person who breathed another word of it.

ORKNEY

At the end of September this year, I went on the trip to Orkney along with the rest of 3rd year illustration. Although I've visited quite a few places in the highlands I'd never visited Orkney before, and it was the furthest north I've ever been. Having been to other islands like Harris and Skye, I expected it to be pretty similar. In some ways it was, though it was maybe not quite as picturesque and I was actually surprised at how built up and urbanised it was in comparison. However this made for some pretty interesting opportunities to explore several villages and the ancient buildings nested inside them.

A garden in Stromness.

One of my favourite days was the day we got a bus to the neighbouring harbour village of Stromness, which was extremely quaint and picturesque, where we spent the afternoon exploring its thrift stores and twisty little lanes, and ate lots of junk food on the harbour drawing boats. It was also home to several museums and art galleries - one of which had a wall dedicated to some excellent zines made by the local school kids. Some of them were pretty cute, and others were incomprehensibly strange/hilarious.

I don't know.

The main purpose of the trip though was to work with Papdale primary school in Kirkwall to produce a sea monster themed story book with their younger pupils. Although we had done a similar project last year in Edinburgh I was a little apprehensive since I don't think I'm really that great with children, however I actually really enjoyed working with the kids there (even though one of them insisted on drawing boobs on all my drawings).

Overall I'm really grateful I had the opportunity to visit Orkney and spend time with people in a place that is so drastically different from Edinburgh - it was kind of refreshing not having any phone or internet signal for a week and even though the weather was pretty bleak at times it was nice to spend so much time outdoors, which isn't something you get to do so often back home.

MUSÉE RODIN | PARIS

A video posted by Hannah (@hannahsneddon_) on Jun 6, 2014 at 1:07pm PDT

Earlier this year I spent a week in Paris. I visited several art galleries while I was there, some of my favourites being the Musée Rodin, and the Musée de l'Orangerie, home of Monet’s waterlilies. The Musée Rodin is a small gallery showcasing some of the most famous works of the esteemed sculptor Auguste Rodin, located just a few minutes walk from the southern banks of the Seine, next to Les Invalides, the incredibly opulent resting place of Napoleon (where I had spent the morning after climbing the towers of Notre Dame in the heavy rain). A large part of the collection is displayed in the beautiful gardens surrounding the main building, which is dotted with ornate water fountains and flower displays. 

Views: Les Invalides by Hannah Sneddon

Napoleon's tomb inside L'Hôtel des Invalides (click to navigate)

By the time we reached the Musée Rodin the rain had stopped but a heavy mist hung in the air and shrouded the statues in dew drops. I didn't really know anything about Rodin beforehand, other than having seen some of his most famous sculptures in art books, but the museum was totally awe inspiring nonetheless. The thing with Paris is that everything is so extremely beautiful, grandiose and luxurious that you become kind of overwhelmed by how much beauty you are surrounded with.

For me though the Musée Rodin was special because of the way that it interacted with nature and the environment in which the works of art were situated - it felt like more of an interactive and immersive experience than some of the other more traditional indoor galleries I had visited. 

On display they also had several of Rodin's incomplete works, which I found even more fascinating than many of the finished casts as it was like looking at a sketch in marble - it enabled you to understand the sheer level of skill and effort that went into producing his sculptures that was pretty inspiring.

HACKING IN ROSLIN

I'm not a particularly sporty person, in fact when I was at school I spent more time in detention for 'forgetting' my PE kit than I spent actually attempting to play hockey. I don't have much of a competitive nature and so any kind of team sport, either playing it or watching, tends to bore me to tears.

The closest thing I do to a sport is horse riding, which I do 2 or 3 times a year. When I was younger I had an embarrassing obsession with horses - I used to take lessons every week from the ages 7-14, but now I just do it for fun occasionally.

A couple of weeks ago I went hacking at Lasswade stables, near Rosslyn. It's a really beautiful area of the countryside - the trail is just over 2 hours and follows the river Esk though forests and up the foothills of the Pentland hills. Its also a great opportunity to see some wildlife; I was able to see a doe deer, wild boar, grouse, herons, and some kind of kite or falcon.

Although I don't get to do it very often (it's so expensive and you have to go way out of the city centre), I really enjoy riding. I sometimes feel conflicted about how ethical equestrian sports are; I'm totally opposed to horse racing and I find a lot of practices involved in other sports like dressage and polo pretty questionable considering they force animals to do things that go completely against their nature - but overall I feel like cross country riding is a fairly sympathetic way of interacting with horses.

JACK WHITE | SSE HYDRO

On Tuesday the 18th of November I went to Glasgow to see Jack White at the SSE Hydro. It was the first time I'd been to the Hydro since it opened last year. The same venue had been used the MTV EMAs he week before so I had been expecting the venue and stage to be enormous and elaborate, however upon arriving it felt a lot smaller than how I'd imagined it. The stage, following Jack White's aesthetic was fairly modest and stripped back, the only props being a set of lights bearing the triple stripe motif from his new album Lazeretto, and an old fashioned television.

There was very little dialogue between Jack and the audience, with the exception of a man who came on stage before the concert to request that everyone put their phones away and refrained from taking pictures, which tied into Jack's traditional style. Surprisingly the majority of the audience respected this request which was a nice change considering nearly all the concerts I've been to since the dawn of the smartphone era have been impossible to go to without having to peer over a sea of iphone screens. Because of this it felt like Jack had a stronger connection to the audience despite not interacting much, because everyone attention was focused on the stage instead of their phone screens.

Jack played several tracks from his range of past groups and projects, starting with Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground from his days as The White Stripes finishing with Steady As She Goes from The Raconteurs.

DEAD MAN | JIM JARMUSCH

Dead Man is a 1995 American Western film directed and written by Jim Jarmusch. Shot entirely in black and white, the film is considered to be a ‘psychedelic’ postmodern take on the classic American Westerns of the early 20th Century. The storyline tells of a northern city accountant in the mid 1800s who travels south to the small, hostile town of Machine for work. However, upon arrival the work is no longer available, and the events following result in him being wrongly accused of shooting a woman, and he is badly wounded in the process. A bounty is set upon him as a wanted man and, with the help of a Native American man he sets off to escape the lawmen which ultimately transcends into a strange journey, both physical and spiritual, as he slips into and accepts inevitable death.

Dead Man is a unique film which touches upon a genre which had for the longest time remained unchanged. Instead of going down the typical action-drama ‘wild west’ film, Jarmusch creates a dreamy, surreal land that seems almost reminiscent of early German expressionist films. This hallucinatory quality is reliant largely on the use of black and white over colour, which removes it one step from reality with stark, high contrast imagery and careful use of light and shadow. 

Von Morgens Bis Mitternaucht (1920)

Dead Man

The soundtrack - which was entirely improvised by Neil Young on the guitar - is also an essential part of what gives the film such a distinct feel. It helps set the pace of the movie at a slow but steady lull, an unsettling heavy pulse that pulls it once more from reality. 

The special effects used in the movie are fairly simple, keeping in line with the  low-key period feel of the film, however they are still very effective at giving the film a psychedelic feel. Jarmusch uses double exposure and long exposure footage, in addition to spiralling footage of trees and the sky to translate into film the fading transcendent visions of a dying man.

Despite this movie being a box office failure (it recovered only $1m of its $9m budget), I still thoroughly enjoyed this movie and think that Jarmusch achieved what he set out to make with this film. He uses a variety of visual techniques that effectively take the viewer into this mysterious, beautiful realm; a lucid commentary on the fragile boundaries between life and death.