MA Week 50 - a fantastic drypoint demo and the end of the dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 6^th December 2016

Urban printing

Something visual at last, after what feels like years but really is “only” about six weeks of writing. I went to a “Printmaker’s Toolkit” one-hour session by Cath Brookes at the West Yorkshire Print workshop, entitled “Printmaking in the Urban Landscape” – so obviously right up my street.

Cath is inspired by the industrial and has done a lot of work around Redcar, around the chemical plants and the now-closed steelworks (see Cath’s website). She sketches outdoors and then works from the sketches. She brought one of her sketchbooks and there were some lovely thick black lines in there (possibly conte sticks?). She demonstrated the printing of a thin acetate plate which she’d etched previously, first inking it in black then selectively wiping it, rolling ink back onto it, and re-wiping it. This gave a very industrial feel to the outcome.

Cath with the first print

 

She then inked and selectively wiped a second plate with a blend of orange and blue inks and printed this on top of the first print. The technique was fairly simple (though obviously Cath has finessed it over time) but gave such an impressive outcome, with a toxic orange in the sky and pools of water in the foreground. Finally, she demonstrated a chine collé, using some Chinese Paper onto which she had previously printed textures. This transparent paper blended into the overall image and gave fantastic texture.

 

The first print overprinted with a selectively coloured plate - super industrial!

Cath managed to gallop through all of this in an hour, but I took nearly all of it in as I have spent the past year working with the same techniques and subject matter. There were two really interesting points. Firstly, the use of thin, transparent plates. These allow you to trace an image using a Sharpie marker prior to etching it, and they also assist with the selective inking of the monoprint stage. Secondly, Cath is working the opposite way round to the way I did it, as I’d done the monoprint layer first. I’ve bought some of the transparent acetate with a view to having a go with Cath’s technique as soon as possible.

The dissertation is done

The dissertation is now finished, printed and in for binding. I’ve also finally managed to publish a few notes about Ann-Marie Bathmaker’s seminal book chapter on Life Histories. The dissertation took some beating into submission over the past weekend. Thursday went well; I took Sharon’s advice of last week (see my week 49 blogpost) and restructured the discussion about the chosen artists along the lines she’d suggested. This seemed to open up the essay and somehow remove other blockages. It was a long but successful day. On Friday I went into College and sorted out all the images, which took about 5 hours, then came home for an evening shift tidying up the bibliography and various other loose ends. So far so good. Saturday and Sunday were not so good. I knew I had to cut it off and tidy it up, but I was tired and I’ve read and written the damned thing so many times that I could recite it off by heart so I’ve no idea if what I’m reading is on the screen or in some previous version. The conclusion, in particular, proved much more difficult to write than I expected. I can only go back to the fact that this is my first piece of writing of this style.

Anyway, what’s done is done, all 130 hours of it. It has been a steep learning curve, frustrating at times, but for the most part enjoyable. I feel I have risen to the academic challenge and could have written more with more words and more time. I’m going to keep some of the psychogeography books out of the Library over Christmas in the hope of being able to read a bit of them. However my desire to do something visual has been absolutely fuelled by this morning’s demo. Although I haven’t given much thought to what I’ll do for the Final Project, I know it will have industrial-style black lines in it. Watch this space.

MA Week 49 - meeting up with Mandy Payne, and the endless dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 30^th November 2016

 

Meeting the artist Mandy Payne

On Monday I had the real pleasure of spending the afternoon with the Sheffield-based artist, Mandy Payne. I came across Mandy’s work via Twitter and it really struck a chord. For the past four years she has been investigating the brutalist Park Hill flats complex in Sheffield, recording the abandoned urban spaces, the gradual boarding up of the complex, and the gentrification of part of it (see Mandy’s website). My interest in her work is fuelled by the fact that I was an undergraduate student in Sheffield many years ago and I remember the complex well, towering as it did (and presumably still does) over Pond Street Bus Station.  

Mandy was talked to me about her career, inspirations and working methods, which was really thought-provoking and insightful. She has had a previous career, as an NHS dentist, and her art career has taken off quite quickly. Whilst acknowledging that Mandy kept her creative work going alongside her previous career, which I certainly didn’t, this does give me encouragement that I can make something out of my artwork now if I persevere. A unique point of a lot of Mandy’s work is that it is on concrete, and she had to do trials to get repeatable results for the unusual substrate. This again was encouraging as I realised that my own testing and trialling is a part of the normal process of producing artwork and is not completely through my lack of technique! 

Mandy was interested in seeing the brutalist architecture of the University of Leeds so we went for a good wander around the campus. I often wander there on my own but it was different to walk and talk with someone else. Just as I pointed out my usual paths and interesting buildings and shapes, so Mandy pointed out things I’d never considered, and in some cases never even seen, and other shapes that I’d overlooked. I enjoyed the fresh set of eyes and I hope Mandy enjoyed my “guided tour”. We talked about how stimulating it can be to walk with someone who knows the area, but how we are all bounded by our own little rituals of whereabouts we walk and what we look at. We also agreed that you can go out looking for visual source material and find some really good inspiration, but quite often the most fruitful source material finds you when you’re not expecting it. Mandy had gone for a wander with someone in Sheffield and he had directed the walk to Park Hill flats. She had never been before but was immediately inspired. It’s the same with the Armley walk – it’s driven my practice either directly or indirectly since I did it 10 months ago.  

Although we both use the urban as source material in different ways, it was great to spend time with another artist with similar interests and the conversation never dried up! Mandy has kindly invited me to go down to Sheffield in the New Year to have a look at Park Hill flats and I will definitely be taking up the invitation.

The endless dissertation

The walk and talk with Mandy was a really refreshing break from the endless writing. Today I had an even more intense tutorial than last time. I have been having real trouble regarding how to discuss my chosen artists within the dissertation. There are three artists; Mandy, Rebecca Appleby and Stuart Whipps. I was considering whether I needed to include Whipps as he doesn’t have such a strong place attachment as the other two artists. Sharon has suggested that I should continue to include him and use his practice as a “link” to the other two as they are more relevant to me at the moment. I was also thinking of removing a summary of the similarities and differences between the artists’ practices, but Sharon again challenged me on this. I will try this and see how it works. I also had a tutorial with the specialist writing tutor, Karen, last week and she has suggested weaving the artists through the essay. It just seems like artist’s block of a different kind! 

Anyway I have made a breakthrough with the first part of it. I had written small sections on each of heritage, identity and place, and I was struggling to pull them all together. I woke up the other morning (they are all rolling into one now!) and realised that the point of the section was to argue how intermeshed they all are – so why was I separating them out? I’ve now re-written it as one section, starting with Ann-Marie Bathmaker’s “life histories”, rambling through identity, heritage and place, and coming back to Bathmaker. It feels a lot more comfortable now and hangs together quite well. 

One of the strangest things about that was that I fathomed out the exact way of rewriting it during a lunchtime walk on Woodhouse Moor. I usually walk there for half an hour most lunchtimes, but I haven’t been for ages, due to tutorials and meeting friends and being buried in the library. Woodhouse features strongly in the dissertation, as does walking, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t seen my lunchtime walk there as a powerful analytical tool rather than a nice-to-have while I am in this intense reading and writing phase. The same walk also revealed to me a bit of a hole in another section – something that hadn’t even got on my radar up to that point. 

All of this structuring and re-structuring means that I am now about a week behind where I wanted to be, so I will have to use my contingency time of the coming weekend, which is not ideal, but that’s what contingency is for.

 

 

MA Week 47 - Place seminar, more psychogeographical thoughts…and more dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 15^th November 2016

 

 

 

An interesting seminar on Tuesday lunchtime to start with. I’ve put a copy of my notes here. It was given by Dr Helen Graham and entitled “Restaging the Political Dynamics of Commons and Publics”. Some of it was a little bit beyond my sphere of knowledge but there were some very relevant and interesting points, summarised below.

Helen’s research area is heritage and she pointed out that it is concerned with the past and the future as well as the present. Looking back, we can see what pasts have contributed to our current present. Extrapolating forwards, we can try to predict what sort of future our current present might make. She considers heritage as a social process and as a means of generating ideas. This takes the ideas I’ve been working with, of heritage as having a cultural basis, and takes it further. It definitely moves it on considerably from the days of object-based concepts.

 Helen also alluded to histories pluralised beyond the “best rehearsed”, i.e. the official, which again ties in very closely with what I’ve been working on in my dissertation – the need to disrupt the “official”, over-arching narrative by telling your own version of events.  Different “pasts” can also give rise to different “futures”. She is currently involved in a project to use this technique to try to envisage the city in 2026. The intention is that the city will become more dynamic.

An interesting ethical point arose regarding the group she is working with. The group has a pre-existing Facebook group where photos and memories are shared. Full ethical clearance has been obtained for the project. However, there are probably people in the “yesteryear” photos who haven’t given their permission for the images to be used as they are passing by in the background or otherwise unaware that pictures are being taken. It did raise the disconnect between the “official” (institution-level) and “unofficial” (Facebook) archives. There is no control over social media and there is not yet enough history to judge its use. It made me slightly wary of what I’m blogging, and to be more mindful of exactly what photos are showing.

Anyway, I was heartened to see that my reading on heritage had yielded some fruit as the ideas I’d gleaned were reflected back to me via Helen’s talk. It was interesting too that the idea of “official” and “unofficial” came up again. The talk provided confirmation that my thinking about heritage is along the right lines.

 

 

Millennium Square 1

 

I had a day of dissertation on Thursday then an excellent weekend away, but it was back to it with a vengeance on Monday preparing for the upcoming Being Human event on Saturday 19^th. I went out at lunchtime to take some photos of the area we’ll be investigating, around Millennium Square, and promised myself it would just be a quick rush round the buildings, no more. Of course that soon failed and I moved on to taking photos of all the text and signage. There is so much text, telling you what you can and can’t do, how much stuff costs, trying to entice you in for a drink… it put me in mind of a future project that abstracts text as well as shapes. I also did a couple of line sketches for use in the planned cityscape and which kids can use to colour in if needed. Those and the images have gone off to the event organiser, Dr Henry Irving at Leeds Beckett.

 

Millennium Square 2

On Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting up with Dr Zoë Tew-Thompson again. I had managed to squeeze in reading one of the chapters of her book, “Urban Constellations : Spaces of Cultural Regeneration in Post-Industrial Britain” and there was much to discuss. The chapter is a psychogeographical reflection on the Sage building on Gateshead’s riverside. Old areas of the city have been destroyed to allow it to be built, thereby erasing the past. But the past is never fully erased. Oral histories, life stories, emerge to disrupt the shiny new present. The stories may not be officially, factually correct – a street name may be wrongly remembered, for example – but this does not serve to lessen their worth. It simply reflects the everydayness of life, of remembering and re-remembering.

 

The new Sage building also provided something that wasn’t previously there; a view over Gateshead’s riverside. So elements are revealed in the same way that elements are hidden. By walking we can become aware of these different viewpoints and vantage points, and this can tell us something about our attitudes and identity.

One striking thing about the chapter was the way it is written. Zoë had effectively used her theoretical underpinning as just that – a layer onto which she placed her own experience and her own argument, pulling up her theorists into her own explanations and conceptualisations as needed.  This was informative to me regarding my dissertation as I’d been trying to get lots of different theorists for fear of relying too heavily on one. This helped me see a different viewpoint – rather, that the main theorists can be called upon throughout the essay and this can help the continuity.

 

Under (re)-construction, much like my dissertation

My dissertation is starting to make more use of sense of place, much like Zoë’s book chapter, and I have compared two articles about this here. The more I read, the more I realise so many of these theories are intertwined and they become more (rather than less) difficult to separate. In a way I consider this to be inevitable as everyday life doesn’t break down into silos, does it?

MA Week 46 - Mini Mabgate psychogeography, the End of Year show, and more reading

Reflection on the past week, 8^th November 2016

 

Still nothing visual to share, but I have been doing something a bit more interesting this week.

A mini wander

On Friday afternoon I finally got to visit the End of Year show of the graduating cohort. I had an unexpected mini-urban-wandering around the area too. The first thing was that I managed to get some images of the semi-demolished British Gas offices off Regent Street. Some definite fodder for visual work there –nice rectangular shapes coupled with the bleakness and strangeness of the still-standing skeleton. I couldn’t get near the building (and wasn’t for leaping over the 10 foot fences) but I could get the camera lens through a gap. I’m thinking of possibly some charcoal sketches but no doubt it will end up in a print at some point.

 

Dereliction. No doubt to be followed by gentrification.

Wandering up then towards the studio on Mabgate, I was a bit circumspect as it’s not the most salubrious part of Leeds. My eye was taken by an unexpected iron bridge over a beck. The most unusual thing was that there was a building over it, and the beck flows in a culvert underneath. I felt into conversation with an interested and interesting man who works out of that building. He told me it was in constant danger of collapse into the beck! He also told me that the area wasn’t very good, with drug addicts around on a night, but that it is being gentrified. “The town is coming this way”, he said, referring to the new Victoria Gate over the other side of the urban motorway flyover. He pointed out a building that will soon be converted to apartments. Whether or not this is true, I’ve not checked, but there seems no reason to disbelieve him. So gentrification makes its way out West. It was interesting, therefore, to find this Guardian article a couple of days later. If what the bloke said is true, there is at least something correct in what is otherwise an error-laden article.

 

Building, beck and bridge shadow

 

I also found a disused foundry, Hope Foundry, which now evidently houses a music charity. Such a fascinating building, but I didn’t have time to loiter. The City of Mabgate pub, with its sage green faience tiles, is now closed, but later a colleague told me she used to go to lock-ins there. The tiles reminded me of the ones on the Albion pub in Armley. I guess they are from the same time. So many stories, so little time… and yet all brought to the surface by the same psychogeographical approach of connecting with the environment and its people.

 

The City of Mabgate, as was

The End of Year show

I had to press on to the exhibition itself as I was already running behind for the day. I was disappointed that I couldn’t make the opening night, but in a way it was probably better for me to be able to see the artwork without dozens of people around. I thought it had been curated really well, with a kind of band of colour running left to right across the middle of the room. My erstwhile fellow students, John and Lorna, were invigilating that day and we talked about how a lot of their work was monochrome, as was ours in the work in progress exhibition in June.

MA Creative Practice Show 2016, Studio 24, Mabgate

 

It was fascinating to see how their work had developed. I remembered Lorna talking about pieces of paper discarded from archives, and she had worked up a piece based on stitch, discarded paper clips, wood and metal. It formed an installation in its own right and spoke clearly of the past, memory, the unwanted, the discarded – all repurposed and given shape, form and importance again as an art piece.  John’s work involved a lot of layering and printing into acrylic medium, which is much closer to my own practice than Lorna, but which also refers to memory and representation. I was particularly interested in some transfer prints of very abstract, mainly black photographs onto found paper, board and plaster. There was a lovely layering, a sense of decay and temporality. It has started to form ideas in my head of not only testing out paper when I get printing again, but other substrates.

 

The exhibition showed the work of 11 artists and it seemed to hang together harmoniously despite very different styles and subject matter. Some of the pieces were colourful and based around graphics; others more muted and based around memory and experience. The venue suited the pieces better than I’d expected. It’s one of the old buildings in Mabgate that has been partly boarded out to form an exhibition and event space. So there are plenty of areas of bare, peeling wall, and part-hidden floor tiles, alongside the white gallery space and the tiny, homely café bar in the corner. It was a real palimpsest of a place, wearing both its history and its current use concurrently and very well indeed.  I don’t know what will happen with our end of year show – there are rumours that it will be in the college – but this place was different, something away from the endlessly white walls. It did open a new perspective on the idea of the exhibition space contributing to the exhibition (which it did in this case – I suppose the wrong choice would subtract from the exhibition).

Quite bizarrely, one of my Access tutors then turned up, and it turns out he runs the place with two other people! It was great to catch up with him and to hear how they are making a success of the place. He reassured me that the area wasn’t too bad and that you had to hang out there to catch its… rhythm? Atmosphere? I’m not sure which word I’m looking for. Again there was that idea of the connection with place, becoming part of place, which keeps cropping up again and again as I read about psychogeography.

I was reluctant to leave as I’d really enjoyed this little window into another world, seeing friends’ final pieces, and meeting up with old acquaintances again. But the dissertation waits for no man (or woman), and I discuss this week’s progress (or otherwise) below.

Dissertation progress

I had a really useful and insightful tutorial on Thursday, in which Sharon pointed out some holes I knew were there and some I didn’t! It was really useful to get another viewpoint on it and she kindly took the time to comment in some detail. Basically it is going along the right lines, but there are some places where I have edited too much out of it, particularly about nostalgia, identity and Northernness. Sharon also gave me a couple of references, one of which I’ve looked at, and which should be useful.

To get back into the idea of nostalgia, I read a paper called “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography” by Alastair Bonnett (2009). It seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). I’ve discussed this in more detail here. There is some useful information, and some useful quotes, in here. There is more reading to do, especially around Northernness and around the everyday. I feel that I need to read selectively – I know now where the gaps are, and I need to fill them – but I find it difficult as everything is so interesting and new.

I think a large part of the problem I’m finding is that I am pulling elements of theory from so many different places. Heritage theory and identity theory are only the start points, and psychogeography is so big and so interesting. On top of this is this idea of everyday theory, then there’s the use of and attachment to place, and memory/re-memory. Within 8000 words I can barely scratch the surface.

One other thing that came out of the tutorial was a discussion about influential and relevant artists for me whom I had discovered via Twitter rather than the white walls of the gallery. Sharon suggested that this may be another manifestation of needing to tell a narrative in a different way, with social media almost acting as another means of distributing information vs the “official” of the gallery. It is probably too early to judge whether social media will ever be mainstream enough to be able to cite in an academic paper, but there is no doubt that it is an important source of information and inspiration for me. I do have a concern, though, that it is experience at arms’ length; seeing images on a smartphone can never get near to seeing the complexity of a piece of work in real life. It was really good to be able to get out and visit the End of Year show as it seems an age since I’ve visited a real life gallery, so perhaps that is a strand of research I will be able to pick up on once the dissertation is finished.

MA Week 45 - an emerging structure for the dissertation

Reflection on the past two weeks, 1^st November 2016

Nothing visual to share from these past two weeks, unfortunately. A combination of a couple of days away then picking up one of these bugs that’s going round meant I didn’t get into the print room. I did, however, join the new Leeds Print Workshop and had my induction and that made me want to get printing again. There are also lots of interesting buildings around there so I have earmarked that area for a bit of a wander as soon as I have time, whenever that might be. 

Most of my “spare” time has been spent on structuring and editing my dissertation. As I mentioned in my week 43 blogpost, I’d realised that the structure wasn’t correct. I’d written it as a kind of series of analyses of different theories and techniques – heritage theory, identity theory, psychogeography – then I was struggling with relating this to my own practice. I’ve now moved things around such that the theories form a backdrop to the Armley urban wandering I undertook back in February, and that wandering and its outcomes are the body of the essay. I then move on to describe that the theoretical perspectives and the wanderings form a methodology. Possibly methodology is a bit too grand a term, but it’s a working method that works for me. 

I’ve been quite surprised at exactly how much work it’s taken me to do this restructuring. I’m used to writing business reports and to putting together an argument. However, having to reference and evidence everything in an academic essay is much more time consuming than I’m used to. Writing the dissertation as an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion is odd too. The chapters are only two or three pages long so they are not really called “chapters” in my head. Siloing the information is proving problematic too. I can only think that it’s one of these things that would be easier the next time you did it. 

Anyway, I now have the first draft that actually has some proper flesh on the bones, so to speak, and though it’s woolly in places, it does have the basic flow of what I want to say. It’s about 5000 words and the target is 6000-8000 so it is well on its way. I’ve got to the point where I’m so close to it that I need a couple of days away from it as I can’t tell whether a paragraph is rubbish and needs deleting or whether it is crucial to the argument. I have a tutorial with Sharon on Thursday 3^rd November so hopefully that will give me a bit of clarity.

 

I am aware that I am still relying heavily on a small number of books and I discussed this with Karen, the academic writing tutor. She advised me that you don’t necessarily need to “compare and contrast” but you do need more than one author’s supporting ideas within the essay. She told me to envisage it like being in the room with your “favourite” authors for a day. After that you would want to hear some other voices and ideas. I liked this viewpoint. Whilst I was doing the restructuring, I deliberately didn’t read any further texts as I wanted to concentrate solely on the structure. The next tasks will be to start reading again, and possibly to think of other forms of research, although time remains of the essence.

 

 

MA Week 42 - Dissertation underway

Nothing visual to show this week. I didn’t get into the Print Room as I was away Friday/Saturday. However, I have made a start proper on my dissertation. I had a really good tutorial with my very patient tutor, Sharon, on Wednesday, which confirmed I’m on the right tracks with the structure. Since then I’ve spent time putting some flesh on the bones, so to speak. I’ve read a bit about psychogeography but there’s still more to do. I’ve been reading The Situationist International : A User Guide by Simon Ford (2005) , in which he describes Guy Debord – who is the founder of the Situationists International Group and the father of psychogeography – as seeing the psychogeographical walk as a drift, called the dérive.  See this Week 42 blog post for a summary of this. This contrasts with Tina Richardson’s viewpoint which she expresses in one of the chapters of the eminently readable book she’s edited, Walking inside out : Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015), in which she sees the psychogeographical walk as being more purposeful than just a stroll. So more reading and thinking to do. However it does seem Debord’s original idea allows for random and chance encounters, so this does help with my ideas of walking along and being open to whatever you might come across.

 

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with some members of staff from Leeds Beckett University on the same day, to talk about taking part in their “Being Human” event. There were four of us in total, from different backgrounds: English, History, Cultural Studies, and me! The plan for the day is to take groups of attendees on a short walk in the city centre, then invite them to reflect on what they’ve seen and experienced through creative writing and some sort of visual response (which is where I come in – it will probably be through collaging pre-cut shapes). We walked the short route and we all saw different things and could give different comments and insights from our various backgrounds. It was a very short burst of interdisciplinary collaboration and it was quite fascinating. I’m really hoping that I can get to the day and that it will be equally interesting.

This week, I’ve met one of my Twitter friends, Jane, in the flesh. That was great, to sit and natter away over lunch about our respective art practices. For the rest of the week it’s dissertation and hopefully the Print Room on Thursday.

 

 

MA Year 2 - restarting

 

Unbelievable that the first year is already over (and that I passed it!). I haven’t had much of a break, to be honest, as I’ve been reading, writing, powerpointing and rehearsing ahead of the “Grim up North?” symposium on September 16^th. I haven’t read nearly as much as I would like, but I have read a bit around sense of place, psychogeography and constructs of Northnness. I’ll write up some critical reflections on these in due course.

 

I’m also thinking about my dissertation. I think its subject matter is going to be similar to that of the Symposium presentation, but with a wider focus. I need to think more about the idea of chance encounters within the built environment and what theory (-ies) can underpin that. I can see the dissertation taking up most of my “art” time up until Christmas but I need to think about fitting in an hour or two of visual practice each week.