MA Week 3 - Heritage, Memory and all sorts of interesting stuff

Reflection on taught session, Friday 16th October 2015

Creative Practitioner Presentation

Today it was Sharon’s turn to take the first session. I found more in common with her practice than with Annabeth’s from last week. Sharon is a milliner, which I’ll never be, but she is very interested in textiles, and with that, the “heritage” or “memory” aspect. Sharon also has a background which encompasses subjects other than art, and she described how she had sometimes felt “on the outside”, which I’ve felt a few times already during this course (but am working to overcome).

Sharon introduced the idea of using archives and museum resources to investigate narratives from the past. She illustrated that different views (lives) can give rise to different narratives, e.g. millworker vs millowner. This highlighted to me the difference between my narrative of de-industrialisation and Simon Fujiwara’s narrative for his “Aspire” piece produced this year (on display outside the new University library). According to the information board in the University Art Gallery, he views the de-industrialisation as a positive move, moving Leeds away from its dirty past into the “new, post-globalised urbanism”.

Sharon also indicated the importance of considering how your practice relates to that of any given institution – or indeed, how you make it relate – and how that could give rise to opportunities for collaboration. She presented information about students going into a mill, and how eventually students and millworkers began to educate and inform each other. The collaboration helped both groups. Again I need to let this play over in my mind. If I am producing pieces that relate to heritage, is there some opportunity here?

We viewed a film about the pioneering art educator, Tom Hudson, who went to Brazil where he tried to help people express themselves through art when they were suffering from the repression of the political situation there in the 1970s. The film was made by his estranged son using archive material from the NAEA – so once again an illustration of different narratives.

I hadn’t thought of accessing archives (e.g. Yorkshire Archive Service perhaps?) as part of my project, as I feel my own lived experience keeps providing me with enough source material to keep me going, but now I need to let the question of expanding my practice into enquiring into others’ lives play over in my mind. This also raised the ongoing issue of the narrative of your own memory. If you create works from your own past, whether from objects or simply from your own memories, does this start to create another narrative as you re-examine your memories? I think it probably does, and on top of that there is going to be plenty of potential for other narratives if people view and react/respond to your work.

Finally we examined some museum artefacts that had come from the Whitworth Museum in Manchester. They had come without any documentation as to their provenance. We examined some babies’ bonnets and a beautiful embroidered scarf and tried to identify any clues about where/why/for whom they might have been made. The idea of different narratives was underlined when I said I thought the exotic church, birds and houses on the scarf might indicate it was (from? a representation of?) Mexico, and my classmate thought it was from Turkey. We are, I suppose, constantly reimagining our past, and probably our present too. We assign new perspectives to old objects. We look at ads from the 1970s and think they are ridiculously outdated in their portrayal of women. We watch old 1970s comedies and can’t believe how politically incorrect they are. But life wasn’t bad then. Did we just take ourselves less seriously? Perhaps a little of that, although I know I have a feminist streak from growing up at that time and the dominance of the male world-view.

The more I write here, the more interested I am in all this about memory and reimagining and narratives. I think it already appears in my practice and probably will do so more strongly in future (if I ever stop writing and do something creative).