MA Week 29 - some inspiration from Lesley Sutton

Visiting practitioner : Lesley Sutton (www.lesleysutton.co.uk)

27^th May 2016

Lesley has been an artist/curator for 16 years and during that time she has made plenty of opportunities for herself. A really fascinating and inspiring talk.

She started by stating that “art has to make sense to your audience” – this helps them to connect, so observing current life can provide rich source material for this. This can move out into working with and in the community. “You    ->    Art    ->    Other” – what a simple and excellent way of envisaging it. Her art stems from herself, and so does mine. How can I open up my pylons and wanderings to others? Not sure yet… not sure if I’m ready to do it yet.

Lesley herself had realised that her practice was moving into the community and undertook a Community practice course at Staffordhsire University. From this she learnt the idea of “Social Capital”: trust, co-operation, cohesion – producing items for the common good. She articulated three types of social capital, and stressed the need to “tick box” all these criteria when applying for funding: 

• Bonding – close ties, family, friends.
• Bridging – loose friendships, clubs etc – people with whom you share a certain context
• Linking – reaching out to unlike people, vulnerable, excluded – these are the groups that funders really want to reach because working together increases our understanding of each other.

Lesley had previously decided to undertake a residency at Norton Priory Museum for her degree final project. She undertook this like a piece of business planning (so I could do this… I just need the artwork to go with it!) – working out how she could be an asset to them. She investigated the place and its history and sent them a proposal, which they accepted. Her advice was to consider what space might show your work and what boxes need to be ticked to get it in there. Research the space, approach half a dozen spaces, and be persistent!

She subsequently moved on to work with local galleries and local communities, all the time using the same idea of thinking how she could be, or produce, an asset to the gallery or community. For example, she produced some ephemeral garments which depicted fear or constriction. But she wanted to use these garments to tell people’s stories of child abuse. However the gallery saw this as too risky and difficult and was not interested in the proposal. This didn’t put her off, though, and she has had many successes since. One such example was “Stories of Cloth”, looking at the role of cloth in our lives. This brought together six communities, not all of whom could speak English, to explore a shared human condition and to understand one another – so, “life histories” in Bathmaker’s terms. Bringing together isolated communities and also women-only ticked boxes! This was a successful exhibition and it opened doors for her. She had lots of similar examples to this. Working with the community isn’t always easy though. There may be a tension between what the community wants to do and what the artist is being funded to do. Unsurprisingly, Lesley also had examples of this.

She commented that if you are curating, you need to know the space and how to direct visitors around. What do you want them to know? How are you telling your story? An interesting idea of narrative… so could I join with someone else for an exhibition and our narratives could complement and strengthen each other? That would be something to think about. She also mentioned the idea of the gallery as a vessel for other people’s memories. How do I plug into this? I don’t know yet, but again it ties in with the idea of opening up your art to others, as she’d mentioned earlier.

Lesly’s latest exhibition was a Lent and Easter mindfulness exhibition, “Be Still”, in various bigger Manchester venues (Cathedral etc) with some big name artists. Through her persistence and her excellence in her work, she has become quite a big name in the Manchester art scene. She is clearly a gifted women with a good deal of drive, but also a good deal of grace, and her story of making it happen was inspirational. I could see how she had done it, though whether I could do it is another matter. Perhaps by starting with small steps?

 

 

MA Week 28 - Pylon Abstracts and Salford Symposium

Reflection on the past week – 23rd May 2016

 

Some interesting experiences and work this week. I haven’t been back into the print room, unfortunately, because I was ill on my afternoon off. Shame as I had written a list of things to try out. However, I have been making some progress with some little acrylic pieces. 

I pursued the idea of working up the repurposed pylon monoprint from my Week 26 post into four pieces. As time is of the essence, I decided to work straight into acrylics rather than work with pastels or cut paper as I might normally do when planning and developing  a piece. I wanted to see how the colours and paint would work.

 

Pylon 1 : spot the constructivist influence

This is one of the results at the first sketch stage. There are two or three layers of paint and I’ve used some masking tape too. It’s fairly faithful to the original monoprint but it’s clear that there is too much going on at the top left and not so much at the bottom right. I’m therefore working on a second sketch which is looking much more balanced and which I hope will be OK to reproduce on board for the End of Year show.  

It’s interesting how the marks translate, or not. The “grubby” marks of the monoprint, which give a nice industrial feel, don’t work so well in the acrylic. The inclusion of marks of different thicknesses in the acrylic version gives the work energy and movement. Not that they lack in the original; I have just had to think differently about how to represent them and how to rework the lines of the original to get the piece more balanced.

 

Crit in transit

The original four sketches were the subject of a three-phase crit at the end of last week! I put a couple of them onto whatsapp and there were suggestions they would work up as linocuts – I’m not overly experienced in linocutting but I might give that a go later on in the year. Then I had a crit with two classmates on our way to Salford (of which more later), now known as the “crit in transit”. This revealed some ideas of day and night, of lights beaming out of the darkness, and a very challenging question of whether this represents what’s going on in my head (who knows?). Later, when I finally got to Salford, another two classmates kindly had a look. There were further suggestions of taking the pieces back into print, perhaps by monoprinting from or into them, of further layering, and also the question of trying to get them up off the page more. They do look 2D, but perhaps that’s how they’re supposed to look. I’m not going to be able to try all these things before the end of year show, but I am definitely up for trying a bit more layering and I’ll do that when I go back to working on them tomorrow. 

The Salford jaunt was interesting. We met with MA students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford in a place called Atelier Artworks, an old light bulb factory. It was a strange space; industrial, dirty, under-used, disused almost, yet alive with the studios of a number of artists. Because of being ill I hadn’t really had much chance to prepare, so my responses were very much that – immediate.

 

Salford Piece 1

 

 

I concentrated on shapes and colour and produced two compressed charcoal and pastel pieces. On both the bottom layer was a rubbing of the metal stairs. There was a lot of improvement that I could immediately see; if I’d thought a bit more about it beforehand, I would have positioned my various images on piece 1 differently. As it was they overlapped too much. A lesson to learn. Don’t get overwhelmed by the situation and jump straight in. On piece 2 I think the red is a bit too intense. I liked the colour of the two doors, bright red and bright emerald green (these were their colours in real life), but I wish I’d left it as a black pencil drawing on the red rubbing.

Salford Piece 2

On the other hand, producing these as immediate responses means there is a lot to develop – there are no filtered or refined ideas in there. The shapes and colours can be used in different ways in future pieces. I really wish I’d taken more photographs and made more rubbings of the stairs to use now I’ve got back. Another lesson to learn. Part of the immediate response also means that these pieces bear the imprint of the site; not only the stair-rubbings, but the fact that I sat on the uneven, cracked concrete floor to do them. This means the lines are not straight because the floor was so uneven; something that I couldn’t filter out as I actually did the work.  I am beginning to understand, and to like, a little bit more about responding to place through these experiences (the Armley walk, the pylon photos, the Salford Symposium). 

We had a crit in groups of three and one of the comments on piece 2 was that it was like looking through a window when there was a dangerous chemical incident going on. It made me see the piece in a different way and I liked it a bit more then. I think the first stage in developing something from this would be to take the stair pattern from piece 1 and work with it; this was the first thing that captured my attention as walked up to the space where we’d be working. 

There wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked to interact with the students from other institutions. I think most of the others probably felt the same as I did – slightly nervous, happier to stick with our own classmates. It would have been nice to have had an ice-breaker to get to know people and perhaps more time to view each other’s work. Having had the experience, I wish I could go back and do it again and get more out of it.

MA Week 27 - pylons and printing

Reflection on the past few days – 13^th May 2016

 

The week unexpectedly turned out really positive. I managed to get into the print room for an hour after work on Tuesday and pulled the first prints from the pylon plate. OK, it’s not the best drypoint ever, but it is certainly the best one I’ve done and the marks really worked for me. The blackness is good quality. I felt really happy when I peeled the first print off the plate. It’s visually communicating what I want to communicate. It’s also the first one I’ve done with the new etching needles and it was great to get off to such a good start with them.

 

Pylon print one

Today (Friday) I went back into the print room and worked into the plate a little bit more, to add a bit more detail. I then decided to try printing it in red. This linked back to the writing in red ink that I did last weekend, and this question of whether the red marks might be really black marks but in a different colour. I experimented a bit with double-printing, too. My conclusion is that the black works better. The red seems too light for the fairly light weight of the lines. The red isn’t really saying what’s inside me, either. So back to black, for now at least.

Pylon : red

Pylon : double print, red and black

 

Then I had a really insightful tutorial with my personal tutor, Sharon. I had become quite aware that my subject matter seemed to be hopping around a bit (buildings, cranes, pylons…) and wasn’t sure why this was, nor whether this necessitated further theoretical perpectives. After discussion I concluded that I am inspired by the industrial landscape (as opposed to the natural landscape) and these items are all part of that landscape. We also discussed the fact that I’ve taken photos of factories, pylons etc whilst on a journey, in those cases a car journey, but that this is not all that different to the Armley generative wandering. It is a response to interesting things whilst on the move. 

This may bring in theories of place. I’d looked briefly at phenomenology during the week and wondered if this might be the theory I needed – exploring lived experience?? But the discussion turned to the fact that we are shoehorning visual practice into theories used for other subjects, other areas of enquiry. I suggested we need theories of our own as creative practitioners. Quite what my theory would be, I’m not sure, but it would be something about black mark-making.

Sharon also challenged me to think about working with other people’s histories. Could I do this? I don’t know. What if their marks weren’t black? Should I be thinking about written and/or oral histories? Diaries? Soooo very much to think about.  

Sharon also encouraged me to continue to write reflections, whether on post-its or whatever, so that I don’t lose the sense of the moment and place and time of creating whatever I’m doing. So I’ve come home and started immediate blogging!

 

The advent of the pylons - time, place, lunch!

I took some photos of pylons on another car journey. This car was being driven by an old school friend, Fran, and contained another old school friend, Clare, in the back. Fran is a musician, amongst other talents, and we’d been discussing the creative process whilst en route to Clare’s house. I was telling her about drawing industrial infrastructure and that I fancied creating some work about pylons. So she encouraged me to photograph any pylons I saw. There was a monster one at the motorway junction for Clare’s place and this is the one featured above. Our destination was lunch with another old school friend, Moira. By the time we met up with Moira the other two had also become pylon spotters and were pointing out particularly picturesque pylons on the return journey. A creative by product of a lovely lunchtime!  

 

MA Week 26 - reflection on the last two weeks

Reflection on the last two weeks – 9^th May 2016

May has definitely felt better than April, and I am getting back into gear with both practice and critical thinking. It would be nice to say I’ve made good progress, but that’s probably overstating it… however, I have made progress.

Over the past couple of weeks I got back into the print room and did some more monoprinting. This time I used the arm rest as Lyndon had advised. I found it difficult to get a continuous line as the arm rest got in the way. I wonder if I should try a smaller piece of paper (A5?). However, the results were much better without me inadvertently rubbing my hand over the paper as I moved the pencil. I continued with the pylon theme, though I completely failed to blot the paper enough the first time round, but this still gave an interesting effect. I also had a go with some grey paper that had just arrived and this gave a nice “industrial” feel. I also had a “doodle” to see what effect I could get from rolling the pencil or deliberately rubbing the paper with my fingers.

 

Pylon monprint on grey paper

I reached a point where I decided to have a think about how to work into the prints. I had a bit of a creative block about this but eventually decided to try a bit of red acrylic and to think about the shapes within the pylons. This worked OK but seemed to go much better when I tried some looser, more fluid marks over the paper which had become textured from being inked by rolling the pencil. I think I will ink some papers this way simply as a background for working upon. Some of the shapes also looked a bit “Chinese”, which wasn’t totally unexpected as the abundance of items made in China is part of my theme of the decay of British Industry.

 

Monoprint/acrylic experiments

In the same delivery as the grey paper, I received some drawing nibs and decided to have a go with these. A couple of people (my tutor and a couple of classmates) had mentioned that my notebook could be an artwork as the writing is small and even. I had been resisting writing about my work on all fronts as part of challenging myself to priortise the visual, so using it in artwork seemed untenable. Anyway I decided to do a piece of free writing about writing onto one monoprint. It really loosened my mind. It occurred to me that I will freely admit that I think in words – so why don’t I make the words work for me, rather than allow myself to be dominated by them? By writing, visual creativity somehow opened up. This may well have been in part because I was using a new writing/drawing instrument, and also because I was writing in red ink rather than my beloved black. But it was at least in part because the free writing turned into critical thinking about whether the writing was subverting the artwork, or vice versa. From now on I will write as I did in the last two terms, but just not as much. Then I can see more about what I’m doing and why and where it’s going next, but not get overwhelmed.

Writing about writing

 I still wasn’t sure what to do about the monoprints so I cut up one of the grey ones and put it back together fairly randomly, then looked for new connections and marks I could make. The lines are rather thin, and the larger square seemed to fall neatly into four quadrants, but I could immediately see that I could work this up into perhaps some small acrylic pieces.  I hope I can get onto producing them this month, then they could go into the WIP show on 10^th June.

 

Re-purposed pylons

Also in my delivery of art treats were some etching needles, and I have etched a pylon into an A5 drypoint plastic, but alas I didn’t get time to print it. So that can be part of next week’s creative practice.  Progress and a way forward… didn’t seem possible in April!

 

MA Week 26 - creative practitioner presentation

Creative practitioner presentation, 06.05.2016

Adam Stone (www.adamstoneart.com) 

I’ve taken something from all the College staff presentations but this was the most interesting one for me. Quite a few things that Adam said touched a common chord in me. 

Adam had got into painting liminal spaces or “inter places” – places where you pass through, hospitals, motorways, and investigating the myriad narratives that are happening at any one time. He showed some images of his earlier paintings with their misty looks and areas of thick and thin paint. I really liked this idea of the urban landscape being the subject of Adam’s fine art oil paintings. The idea of chance, narrative, temporality all intersecting seemed to give voice to some of the things I’d been thinking, both overtly and somewhere more intuitively. He talked about the review of space and place and the idea of lived experience (yes! Someone else who believes that exists as a theoretical perspective in its own right!!). This he described as an interaction with place. I found in this also echoes of my own reading on heritage; perhaps Adam’s idea is to the present as heritage is to the past. (or is heritage constant? Is today, tomorrow’s heritage?). 

As well as paintings, Adam had made large pinhole cameras (including an hour on the 4^th plinth, which I never knew), and drawings walking in and around an area. He moved on to talk about phenomenology, which he described as the essence of perception, a direct and primitive contact with the world. He had made drawings investigating a lake. Again I had a feeling that this was something I’d been perceiving intuitively, for example with the developing work around the pylons. Why the attraction to pylons? Shape? Structure? Size? Why work and rework them? I still can’t really answer that. 

Adam is currently undertaking a PhD by practice at the University of Leeds. He talked a little about his research questions, and how it’s not as easy as it seems to focus and craft them. Something that seems quite focused suddenly moves off on a tangent. Some of his research is looking into psychogeographical approaches combined with artistic and theoretical ones, and how memory, can contribute to a sense of place. I find this really interesting, having flirted with the ideas of memory and psychogeography in my own practice. Adam went on to mention this preference of language over the visual in academia, which I have wrestled with so much on this course. He had no definitive answer, just like I don’t, but much like myself seemed to be juggling the writing and the making.

Adam is challenging his practice via his PhD . He described some of the techniques and influences that he is using to loosen his mark-making, particularly by setting himself time limits on some pieces. This has led him to question how much control he has as the artist, and how much influence the materials exert. Are we really in control as artists? Or is the paint or the brush or the ground the central actor? This was something that I think I had been feeling in the back of my mind and it was a bit of a revelation when Adam verbalised it. He also advised to stop thinking and start doing, challenge your habits, do smaller, free-er images, overpaint works. Experience is instant, so why are you spending a long time depicting it? Can painting a moment be a lived experience that depicts that lived experience? 

His PhD creative practice centres around a 1960s shopping centre in the centre of Leeds, the Merrion Centre.. It’s somewhere I’m familiar with, and I was glad to find someone else who wasn’t going miles to do their fieldwork, but was rather investigating the local and the familiar. As he talked and showed further images, it occurred to me that this was another example of heritage – a modern mall, based on the American model, something massively different in the 1960s – that we now just see as dated, and take for granted, in the mundanity of the everyday. The more I think about the visual creative celebration of the everyday, the more important I feel it is. In recording our everyday, we surely record tomorrow’s history. Adam showed some photos from the Merrion’s own archives and there were scenes I could remember. It underlined this feeling and also, again, the relationship between temporality and space. Adam also used these images to point out the layers or memory that the space holds. I know my own layered work has some influence from this perspective; we build up, we break down, we repurpose our lives and memories.  

Observing the space also leads to ideas of walking as a statement, and challenging the motives of city planners, which made me think that I really should read some of Tina Richardson’s work on psychogeography. Developments in the city centre force you to take different routes. Why not wander round and see what you see? Why not use a wander in one place and a focused walk in another place? Why is the OS map the definitive one? 

I found this talk very rich in ideas, and even as I type it up, I am discovering other angles.