MA Week 33 - Holbeck urban wandering : End of Days

Holbeck Urban Wandering – 23^rd June 2016

An urban wandering to find some more Northern shapes, inspired by the view from the train leaving Leeds.

 

Transcript: 

23.06.2016, en plein air, Granary Wharf 

I didn’t do the wander I’d anticipated. In the end the bus I got only went to the Bus Station, not City Square, so I got off there & wandered via Call Lane. I returned to my old haunt of the path by the canal near Brasserie Blanc. It was great to be doing an art project while the skirts and suits were in their offices. Then I walked down Water Lane to Tower Works. Very gentrified now; offices and open spaces, but a very peaceful and welcoming space. I ate my sandwich and sketched the shape of the towers, nearby offices and Bridgewater Place. You can get out onto the canal there, too, which I never knew. Lots of railway signal gantries as that’s where the main line to London leaves the city. I’d intended to go look at Temple Works but I walked by the canal a little way instead, and photographed the reflections. I was thinking about this idea of how much of an actor you are in an artwork? How much of an actor are you in a generative wandering? If you let yourself deviate from your intended path, have you lost control or gained the point of wandering? You can always go somewhere else another day. Wandering heightens your sense of place and your perception of shape. I thought it would be difficult to wander somewhere I didn’t know, but you just have to open yourself to the experience.

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Tower Works

I’d taken a rubbing of a door at Tower Works and wrote the above transcribed text onto that, although it was really a bit dark to write into. It was written at the end of my wander, sitting on a bit of grass, surrounded by bars with office workers eating and drinking al fresco. By chance I had wandered into the world of others at their lunchtime. I felt a bit like I was moving amongst them as an interloper, a ghost. I hadn’t realised how many offices there were nearby, and there were many workers taking the chance to walk in the warm sunshine – it was about 22 degrees – and to have a cheeky drink with their colleagues. I began to wonder about their stories. There was a group of six women who strode out as I sat sketching, chatting twenty to the dozen. They were on the way back when I strolled further up the towpath, and I guessed they did this most days, come rain or shine.  What did all these office dwellers do? Who was in with the in crowd and who was out? Did they even notice me sitting sketching and writing? Were they all as cheesed off with their jobs and daily grind as I was when I worked in Finance in the city centre?

 

Leeds Minster, 23.06.2016

It was a gorgeous sunny day, a day when it’s really good to be alive. Oh how different life felt the next morning. I took over a hundred photos, including Leeds Minster in use as a Polling Station. Without intending to, I had recorded the quotidian in image, sketch and text on the day of the EU Referendum.

In some ways I can hardly bear to look back on the photos as they seem to represent the last day that things were (vaguely) sane, but at the same time they present compelling evidence to support my ever-growing belief that each day is gently laying down the heritage of the future. That day certainly did.