This afternoon-long
symposium was a response to Garry Barker’s exhibition “When the past overhauls
the present, you will forget that you can’t remember”. The symposium explored
the relationship between a story told in words and one held in an image. This
represented an excellent research opportunity for me and I approached it with
great interest as I struggle with this distinction, as I’ve described on more
than one occasion.
There were three
sessions followed by a round table discussion.
Robert Powell and Judith Liddle (Edinburgh
printmakers)
Robert started by printed
works. My impression was of fantastical figures and of an almost overwhelming
amount of detail, tiny figures, lots and lots going on. In his complex and
detailed approach, I could see a parallel of kinds with Garry’s work. Robert
explained that his work is often based on folklore or Bible stories (so,
stories and histories), and that he is not afraid to subvert or repurpose them.
Mythology, ancient inhabited settlements, literature and what I took to be sci-fi
are also subject matter.
Judith gave some
powerful examples of visual responses to a story:
The “written image”
– work by Mark Doyle, a mixed media artist and member of Edinburgh Printmakers who
had created a visual outcome of the semantics of printmaking language. Vulnerable
Housing – Mark had also cast hot water bottles in hard materials as a statement
of vulnerability.
Indelible Traces –
an exhibition depicting the rise and fall of industry in Edinburgh (5 or 10
years before rest of UK). The Edinburgh Printmakers’ building used to be the HQ
of the North British Rubber Company. This included prints on old bicycle tyres
by the artist Paul Charlton.
Both Robert and
Judith therefore discussed the depiction of social and political narratives by
visual means.
Una Comics
Una is an
artist/writer who started out with zines. She loves the intimacy of the book
form and through these two avenues became interested in pursuing a graphic
narrative of women’s history.
Una explained that
she had been studying for an MA but that in parallel she was “doodling in the
shed to see what would come out” and was keeping this well away from her MA
tutors (oh to have time to do work that I could keep away from my tutors!). She
realised that these were her best drawings and that these were forming the main
body of her work. About a year ago, she published “Becoming/Unbecoming”, a
comic that’s not funny, as she put it. It is a graphic narrative exploring
violence against women in West Yorkshire in the 1970s/80s, with a particular
emphasis on the Yorkshire Ripper. Although she didn’t say as much, I gather
that some of it came from her own experience. She did, however, do her archival
research, reading through 6 years’ worth of the Yorkshire Evening Post to learn
more about Sutcliffe (the Ripper). She subsequently told the story of the day
her mother was sectioned (On Sanity : one day in two lives), through her eyes
and then through her mother’s eyes.
I’d previously
heard about Becoming/Unbecoming and I was a bit wary of what Una might say, but
she didn’t talk so much about violence and mental illness, rather about how she
expressed what she had to say about it. Her graphics are simple yet gorgeous.
Their simplicity makes them all the more stark and meaningful. They boil the
idea down to its basics, focussing in on what she is expressing. I admired the
way she had finally allowed her true expression to make itself known, the idea
of her own voice but in visual terms. Una’s narrative presents as more factual
than Robert’s. It is less imaginary, though no less well executed. She has also
worked with mental health patients to create comics and zines and to allow them
to express themselves visually. She said something particularly interesting:
“narrative drawing is not an image or text”. She perceives it as a genre in its
own right.
Garry Barker
Garry is always an
interesting and open speaker, and his talk was warm and inspiring. He began by
telling us about his childhood inspiration from comics and his realisation that
through drawing you could convey that the bizarre was happening in your own boring
neighbourhood. Later he was inspired by the cartoonist Giles, who again placed his
work within the familiar. Presently apprenticed to a local factory, he joined
the painting club and was told by his colleagues that he should pack the
factory in and go to Art College. So he did. Garry has now taught at Leeds
College of Art for over 40 years and keeps trying to retire, but failing. If it
were not for his efforts years back to establish a course for adult learners, I
wouldn’t be typing this, as there would have been no Access course to get me
here.
Garry draws prolifically.
He says you can draw anything! What’s happening round and about? Most days he
will draw as he walks through his neighbourhood, Chapeltown, on his way to
work. As he draws, he draws (in a different sense) people to him. They want to
tell him their story, and he can combine what he’s hearing with what he’s
seeing. He has a very identifiable pen and ink style, and he draws as he walks
so the perspective starts to distort. Then when it comes to making bigger
works, he draws the little scenes on cards and shuffles them round and draws
from them. So stories evolve and move and merge and develop, and he draws a
space that doesn’t really exist. With the passage of time, memory and reality
merge. This explains why pigs frequently figure in his work; when he was a
child, people kept pigs nearby. They are embedded in his memory.
Recently Garry’s
work has taken on a more urgent tone. Chapeltown is traditionally the immigrant
district of Leeds, home to whoever is arriving. Now the new arrivals are Syrian
refugees, drawn to the dreams of the West. Garry has started to depict them and
their awful stories, using high rise flats as metaphors for modernity which can
be propped up or tipped upside down. Colour has started to appear in his work;
blood red. The work has spilled over into other media – ceramics, textiles,
animations. The scale of the problem has become too big to limit to paper.
All his work goes
back, he says, to “things that inhabited my mind”.
I have been taught
by Garry on and off for four years now, and it was a real pleasure to hear him
tell his own story. I knew part of it from his teaching, but his elucidation of
how he came to this distinctive visual style was really informative. It
explained so much when he talked about his almost compulsive drawing and his
way of amalgamating seemingly disparate source material into a finished piece.
Intuitively, it somehow made perfect sense. He is deeply immersed in Chapeltown
in many ways and although his work is figurative, his working method means his
recording of his area is quite abstract.
Round table discussion
Question to the
artists: “What does the visual allow that the written doesn’t”?
Robert stated that
the visual doesn’t have to have a “beginning, middle and end”. It can suggest
different things and is a more open form. Una elaborated in this : written work
unfolds in a linear way. With the visual, you take in the whole and look in any
direction. It’s more like life, i.e. chaotic. Una is further of the belief that
drawing is a way of thinking: the making of work makes more work. She could
draw without writing, but couldn’t write without drawing.
Judith went back
to the function of words. She said everything is a signifier. Words come with a
pre-conception. An image or object can be a far more direct communication. This
ties in with Una’s idea that drawing is akin to thinking. Garry took up a
similar theme: a woman who viewed his work was convinced he was stalking her
because she could see her own life story in his work. As there’s no text, you
can put your own story onto it. Similarly, if you read a comic book in the
Japanese language, you can still follow the story. The artist discovers the
story (of their work) as it arises. The audience then discover the story (their
own version of it, or a version of their own story) when they view it. So the
artist and the viewer, and their respective stories, are deeply connected yet
unconnected.
Reflection
This was a really
thought provoking day for me. The artists articulated concepts around the
visual narrative that I probably understood intuitively, but which I’d not yet
been able to express in words – which in itself underpins the validity of the
visual as a tool for communicating a narrative.
All the artists
have distinctive visual styles. They have developed their own visual languages,
accessible to everyone, but different to each other. These visual languages sit
alongside our written language and offer another means of communication. The
two are not necessarily exclusive, but the visual can and does offer a
different way to “enter” a narrative. The understanding of a visual narrative
may or may not be able to be articulated in words. The visual route suggests a
less pre-defined offering to its audience. The audience need to put more work
into understanding a visual narrative, but at the same time they are much more
able to put their own story into a visual narrative than a word-based
narrative. A viewer’s intuitive reaction to a work will draw them towards it and
into it, or push them away.
When I was
studying on the Access course, Garry challenged me to develop a visual language.
I understood what he meant in English, and I understood that I didn’t yet have
a coherent visual language. But I didn’t really know how to get a visual
language. Now, finally, I am beginning to understand. It is something that is
emerging intuitively, driven by practice, understanding the marks I make, and
focussing on them and refining them. One of the key messages from Garry’s
teaching on the Access course was, “why are you making that mark in that place
with that material?”. I am now beginning to answer that question.
All the artists
tell stories; imagined, real, their own or that of others. They all include
human and/or part-human figures in their work, which gives them a basis in
reality. The everyday happenings and the neighbourhood appear in their work
alongside an element of fantasy or storytelling. In particular, the use of
place by Garry encourages me to continue my own wanderings and responses to
them. It validates this as a method for research for practice.
The idea of work
being non-linear is really interesting. I think I knew this, but not in the way
it was articulated during the afternoon. A piece of visual work is developed
according to some methodology. The artist may be able to trace its true origins
back to, say, childhood, and may never really know when it’s finished. Notwithstanding,
its production happens over time and has a beginning and an end, so in that
sense it is linear. However, by the
techniques that the artist uses, he or she can choose to give the viewer a
definite entry point to the work – or not. This gave me a different perspective
on my desire to produce work that contains layers. I put the layers in because
they signify all the things that are going on and/or that I want to say – “things
that are inhabiting my mind”, to quote Garry. I pack them into the work how I
want, but the viewer can unpack them as they wish. They may give the work a cursory
glance, or they can stop and probe and see new things. You get out what you put
in. I got a lot out of this day.
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