MA Week 71 - Troubling Time

Reflection on the past week, 5^th June 2017

 

Preparation

Wednesday was spent finalising the paper for the "Troubling Time" conference on Thursday, 1^st June. I reused some of the slides from the "Grim up North" paper last September, and took my dissertation as my academic source material. The ideas was to do a talk of about 5 minutes then ask the participants to produce a visual work, based on the organisers' encouragement of contributions which “engage practically with their duration, with the aim of fostering methodological diversity”. In the end the talk lasted 7 minutes, and I felt that 10 minutes would be a reasonable amount of time to be able to produce the artwork and that this would work within my 20-minute slot.

 

The day itself

The conference itself was a fantastic day and I am writing a very deep reflection on it to hand in as part of my final submission. The speakers included PGR students and lecturers, many of whom are practising artists. They introduced me to concepts of temporality that I hadn't realised existed. In particular, there was discussion of capitalist notions of time; the regimented working day, driven by society. Contrasted with this were notions of doing less to achieve more, awareness of differing temporal rhythms, and the joy of the dérive. The reflection I’m producing will form a rich source of research material for me to develop once the MA is finished.

 

My Panel

My own panel, “Walking and Space”, was shared with two particularly excellent speakers, Bob Dickinson and Jo Lee. Bob is a PGR at Manchester Metropolitan University as well as being an established art writer and former BBC radio journalist. Jo is a Senior Lecturer in Graphic Design at Sheffield Hallam University. Bob's talk, “ART BUNKERS”, started by describing artworks being displayed in an underground bunker in Konjic (in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and ranged through many concepts of “bunkers”, including the way that artists bunker themselves in studios in old mills and the like in the more run-down parts of town. These then become gentrified and the artists have to move out. This made me think, somehow, of me bunkering myself away in the print room, forgetting to drink water or eat my lunch, completely focused on the artistic task in hand.

 Jo's talk, “Essaying time: photography, artistic knowledge and meaning in movement”, covered concepts of how artists work - very slow periods followed by bursts of intense activity - plus the idea of going backwards to move forwards, constantly repurposing and seeing anew. She showed a mesmerising slide show of triptychs of her photographs of the now-defunct Spode porcelain works. So many surfaces, marks that were just crying out to be made, a palimpsest of life. Interesting concepts around surfaces, what’s underneath, does it need to be revealed.

Jo had helped calm my pre-talk nerves and in the end things went well. After explaining my practice and my methods of layering and the way I use colours, I invited the participants to produce a piece of visual work that said something about that day. I'd taken along a selection of pens and pencils, some blank paper, an old road atlas - a nod to psychogeography - and pairs of scissors. I'd done a couple of quick sketches in the train in the way over and used this as an example - but none were needed. I'd been prepared for people to ask for further clarification, to do nothing, or even to argue - but none of this happened. Everyone got on with the task in calm, studious silence.

The responses were incredibly varied and complex and in all honesty I am still processing this in my little brain. The responses included a participant from Argentina who used portions of the sea from the road map to depict her first crossing of the Atlantic; a stitching together of various pieces of the road atlas index with a challenge to estimate how long it would take to travel from each place to the next; a clock with no hands; a compartmentalised version of the journey that I'd undertaken that morning, from Leeds to Manchester. I stuck them all in a sheet of A1 paper I'd brought along, rather hurriedly, so aesthetically it wasn't overly pleasing, but time was pressing on.

 

The artwork on display at the conference

The session overran wildly (well, about 5 minutes) but nobody seemed too worried about this. As I mentioned in my week 70 blogpost, I'd made some postcard sized business cards which I offered to participants by way of thank you. These went down really well and were very much taken in the spirit in which they were offered. 

 After the session quite a few participants came up to chat to me. Some were studying, or had studied at Leeds and had enjoyed the images of the city that I'd used. My Argentinian friend commented that she'd never seen this done in a conference before and was really pleased to be able to contribute to the collaboration.

 My initial reaction was to take the collaborative artwork and submit it as part of my MA submission, but I quickly realised I couldn't do this, as it didn't belong to me. It belonged to everyone who had contributed and to that point in space and in time. So with the help of a couple of the others I pinned it up on the wall.

 

Networking

One of the really enjoyable things about the day was the number of international participants. Over lunch I chatted with an Albanian and two German participants, one of whom is a professor in Tokyo.  There were also participants from Universities in Greece, Canada, Hungary and Poland. This international flavour made for very broad view and was quite a contrast with the "Grim up North" paper, which was more localised by the nature of its subject matter. This in turn made me realise how flexible and malleable my practice is, and how the visual arts cover such a wide range of source materials in every piece they produce. This breadth of practice is such a key strength of the visual arts.

 

With Bob at the drinks reception

The day ended with a drinks reception. It was a lovely Summer afternoon and we drank prosecco in a nearby bar. I chatted at some length with Bob, who was a very interesting and equally knowledgeable conversationalist. It rounded off one of the most interesting days I've had during the MA.

 

The next day

The conference itself was actually two days, but I'd only booked for one. I wished I'd booked both. However, it would have been too much of a rush to get back to Manchester for 9am the next morning, plus I needed to get back into the print room to prepare for the art market as I mentioned in last week’s blogpost. I'd connected with a few of my fellow participants on Twitter and one of the first tweets of the day was an image of our collaborative work welcoming the participants to day 2. The excellent conference organisers, Mao Hui Deng and Sophie Stringfellow, also tweeted a picture of themselves in front of the work as a wrap-up to the conference at its close that evening. It seemed the work had become a kind of talisman for the conference, some kind of visual representation of the narrative of the two days. I felt humbled and gratified.

I was very tired that next day but I was aware that the previous day's discussions had left me with a different view of time. So rather than rushing, I decided to relax and enjoy the printing. This was one of those serendipitous moments when theory and practice combine in increased creativity. I'd inked this plate umpteen times before, but the inking suddenly went quite futurist and dynamic, with no input from me at all. I'm not sure how this happened but it was intuitively connected with the previous day's activity.

 

The conference will stay with me for a long time. A real highpoint of the MA.