VALDA BAILEY

VALDA BAILEY

23 stories

I make art using photography and mixed media. My practice leans into imaginative abstraction, exploring what happens when a camera is freed from the burden of simply replicating what's in front of the lens. I teach at https://fyv.art

Pedra d Ouro, Portugal

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VALDA BAILEY

Death by a hundred buttons

I read an interesting article on Ghost this week by a designer called Tobias van Schneider. The title caught my eye: ‘ Death by a Thousand Buttons’. A product rarely dies of one bad decision he says; it dies of “a thousand reasonable yeses”, each feature sensible on its own, until it does too many things and nobody can remember what it was for. The essay was about feature creep in software design. I recognised it, somewhat, uncomfortably, as being about the state of my various hard drives. Ge

VALDA BAILEY

On Waiting for Sebastião

In 1578, twenty-four-year-old King Sebastião marched into Morocco with an army and failed to bring either it or himself home. Doubts about his remains gave Portugal room to negotiate with the facts. The king, it was decided, was merely delayed. One morning he would emerge from the fog and rescue the nation. Within twenty years, four men walked out of the fog claiming to be him: one at Penamacor, one at Ericeira, a pastry cook from Madrigal who was hanged for it, and a Calabrian who tried it on

VALDA BAILEY

A Barkle in Wolf's Clothing?

When we moved to the Silver Coast we had the enormous good fortune to land in a village lavishly supplied with dogs. Even better, golden retrievers were already wildly overrepresented, even before Hannah, Walter and Arlo arrived to distort the figures further. Our neighbour has a golden retriever called Afonso. Her English is excellent, yet she refers to Afonso barkling every time we walk past. I think this is so charming I don’t correct her. She has apparently decided, not unreasonably, that A

VALDA BAILEY

A Recalcitrant .jpg

When is a photograph not a photograph? I suppose conventional wisdom might say it's no longer a photograph when it no longer presents a single, stable instant as evidence. Which pretty much describes everything I’ve ever taken since 2008. Apart from the current sunset obsession, obviously. Is it even a question worth contemplating? I am not really that invested in names and labels. Useful from the perspective of being able to identify the ‘how’. Doesn’t really tell the viewer much about the ‘wh

VALDA BAILEY

On the road again

Olá. Bom dia. Several people have asked in recent weeks whether we’re planning tours here in Portugal. We are, and they’re nearly ready (and when I say 'we', I do, of course, mean Terry Gibbins, who many of you know, and me, under the Bailey Chinnery banner). With Doug and Elaine doing all the unsung admin and organisation in the background. The route to getting settled hasn’t been entirely straightforward, as many of you know. It looks as if the rebuilding of our house after Storm Kristin wil

VALDA BAILEY

Watercress

I have a bunch of it in the fridge. It's the size of a small Labrador. That seems to be the way they sell it here. The old woman at the Sunday market had twinkly eyes and an apron like my grandma used to wear, so I didn't like to tell her it was too much. Consequently, I've spent an hour and a half cataloguing ideas for how it might be deployed. This isn't about watercress, though. Or twinkly-eyed Portuguese farmers. It's about displacement activities. I talk about my favourite all the time – s

VALDA BAILEY

It's the Atlantic, you know...

The Med is too sociable. The Caribbean is just a little bit too pleased with itself. The English Channel can be a bit sullen. And the Sargasso Sea is frankly weird. No. It has to be the Atlantic.

VALDA BAILEY

Me and my Knotty Pated Fool

I've spent far more time than is probably healthy trying to understand what a large language model actually is. Not how to use it – that part is easy enough – but what sort of thing it is. I will happily admit I wouldn't be without it. In recent months, it has helped me decipher lengthy legal documents, understand Portuguese tax laws, negotiate my way through a largely incomprehensible tax portal, push back in reasonably fluent Portuguese on a pitifully inadequate insurance offer, and handle do