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.