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 48 - Psychogeography and Being Human, plus the dissertation takes more shape

Reflection on the past week, 23rd November 2016  

The dissertation

I had a very intense tutorial last Wednesday, focusing on the second half of my dissertation, which deals with the Armley walk and its outcomes. As I mentioned last week, sense of place is coming higher up in the mix and Sharon provided a Guardian interview with John Berger this great quote (though about the Haute Savoie in his case, not Yorkshire): “This landscape was part of my energy, my body, my satisfaction and discomfort. I loved it … because I participated in it” (Kellaway, 2016, n.p.). I loved this and I am going to cram it into the dissertation somewhere as it really speaks to me about belonging to your place. 

From this I have been reading then writing and writing and writing. I had three days off – Friday, Monday and yesterday – and I’ve got the second half in better shape, but it has been a long slog. By the end of Monday I knew it wasn’t right but I couldn’t understand why. Then when I slept on it, I realised it was because the whole essay is about looking for Northernness, but I don’t overtly say I’ve found it (or not). So I’ve pulled a lot of the existing stuff together in a different way and now it mirrors the part about Northernness in the first half of the essay and hangs together much better. 

I’ve also been skimming Laurajane Smith’s excellent book, Uses of Heritage. There is so much food for thought in there and I think it might even have overtaken Harrison as my favourite heritage book. It is ten years old now, though. There’s a critical analysis of what I read in this blogpost. The most interesting concept is the “Authorized Heritage Discourse” (AHD), which is basically heritage based on the views of “experts”. She rails against this and argues, more or less, that heritage should be open to all. This resonates for me with this idea of “official” and “unofficial” discourses too. There is also interesting stuff about identity, memory and place, so lots of material to give voice to what I’ve been grappling with and to help me link it all together. She also talks about the sanitising of heritage. There’s an interesting-looking chapter that I’ve not read, about the heritage of Castleford, which I am hoping to get onto as I had a quick glance and there was some anti-Thatcher stuff in there – the individual speaking truth to power again as Bathmaker would put it.

 

Being Human: Urban Dreams (and Nightmares)

First Group Walk - discussing the renovation of Merrion House

The “Being Human” with Leeds Beckett took place on Saturday (19^th November) and was an interesting and fulfilling day. Unfortunately it was rainy so not many participants turned up. There were four short group walks around the City Museum, each around 40 minutes, with plenty of time to talk about the surroundings and share opinions. I was fortunate to go out on the first group with Dr Shane Ewen, an urban historian from Leeds Beckett. Shane knew a lot about the history of the area (the Wetherspoons used to be a Methodist Chapel) and this was supplemented by some of the participants. One participant works at the council and she was talking about the sale of the nearby council buildings, and explaining the shrinkage of the council to some international participants. She also explained that the somewhat killjoy bye-laws for Millennium Square are there to stop people from injuring themselves then suing the council. Another participant, Helen Clarke, used to be a tutor at the Art College and is now doing a PhD with psychogeographical elements so we are now following each other on Twitter. I helped out by pointing out the colours and shapes of the buildings and also the amount of text about, which people found interesting. 

 

 

Participants reading about the city and colouring some of the outline drawings

I then helped out inside, and there were people colouring in my drawings, though sadly not any children! We did make a kind of cityscape but I would have liked to take this further, with participants able to cut out different coloured shapes to describe dreams and nightmares. There was some lovely shading on the colouring though and an interesting subversion of Merrion House to NYC which talks of transgressing boundaries again. 

 

The "cityscape". The line drawing in the middle is mine!

 

By the time my next walk came around, the last walk of the day, there were only two or three participants but Zoë and I braved the rain with them. Zoë discussed the way the area is intended to be used and a little of the history of the buildings. We talked about the Merrion Centre and the fact it houses a disused cinema, and I contributed the tale of the research of one of our PhD students, who is visually depicting the currently-disused Merrion Hotel. Again people seemed to find something of interest and this was gratifying.

I was really pleased I’d had this chance to work with counterparts from Leeds Beckett and to position myself as an artist within the context of the day. It helped my confidence and I learned a lot. It was the first time I’d done any public engagement and it was a really good introduction to it as I wasn’t responsible for organising the event and could just get on with enjoying it. The event was being filmed for Leeds Beckett, and I was interviewed about my participation and my art for the film. The event generated some good feedback, with people citing increased curiosity about the city, increased attention to and appreciation of the surroundings, and a general appreciation of the time to walk and chat. I would agree with all of that.

 

And there’s more…

I’d emailed Sarah Taylor at College to ask about joining the “Crossing Borders” research cluster, and she kindly invited me to the opening of their exhibition, Pink Slip. I will admit I went more to meet Sarah than to view the exhibition, but meet her I did and am hoping to attend at least some of the cluster’s meetings once the dates are announced.

So, a busy week, and more to come!

MA Week 48 - Heritage Readings (2) - Laurajane Smith

Heritage readings (2): Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage.

 

Authorised Heritage Discourse (AHD)

Laurajane Smith posits the idea of the ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (AHD) (p28),which arises from the aesthetics of its policy makers and practitioners, and its institutionalisation within various national and international codes. This AHD is largely concerned with monuments that have a perceived universal significance and which are tangible. Smith identifies two challenges to this: the desire of local communities (geographically- and/or socially-cohesive groups) to demand recognition; and the backlash against ‘Disneyfication’ of mass heritage tourism.

AHD uses the rhetorical device of ‘the past’, which is vague in definition, and therefore needs experts to understand it for us. Such a term disengages from the “very real emotional and cultural work that the past does as heritage for individuals and communities. The past is not abstract; it has material reality as heritage , which in turn has material consequences for community identity and belonging”(p29). AHD reflects the grand narratives of nation and aesthetics and privileges the view and stewardship of the expert (p.42).

“Material or tangible heritage provides a physical representation of those things from ‘the past’ that speak to a sense of place, a sense of self, of belonging and community’” (p30). However, the primary form of identity associated with AHD is often national, but this is under challenge as it ignores sub-national identities. AHD also promotes elite social classes - “non-traditional” concepts of heritage are excluded. Smith quotes Barthel (1996, pp 68/9) talking about the industrial site, and the masculinity and general unpleasantness of the dirty, grimy workplace; these are not presented to the public in the sanitised reconstruction. In fact, the public are seen as empty vessels or passive consumers (p32) as heritage has simply become a form of consumption via mass tourism (p33). Alongside sanitisation, authenticity can also become an issue with reconstructions and dramatizations and we are in danger of the ‘heritage theme park’ (p40).

 

Heritage and identity

Smith states that “material culture as heritage is assumed to provide a physical representation and reality to the ephemeral and slippery concept of ‘identity’”. It “fosters the feelings of belonging and continuity” (p48). Often, however, this identity is assumed in the literature to be national identity, as mentioned above. She posits the idea of the use of “symbolic elements” (e.g. flags) at national level, but these can then be used at a sub-national level as reminders and constructors of identity (p49).As modernization erodes customs and expectations, individuals and communities are forced to re-articulate and recover a sense of the past. This sense of the past can be used to confirm or reject identity.  

Smith introduces the idea of intangible heritage as part of the heritage discourse: “while there may be a physical reality or aspect to heritage, any knowledge of it can only ever be understood within the discourses we construct about it”(p54). I conclude that the idea of heritage covering the non-material must have been quite new when the book was written; she describes intangible heritage, including memory, music and oral history, as quite distinct from tangible heritage (p56).

 

Memory and remembering

Smith identifies an increasing interest in commemoration, arising from War anniversaries and the Millennium. At the point of writing of the book, she had identified only a passing mention of memory in the heritage literature. She argues this may be because “memory may be seen as subjective and not always reliable whereas history is about the accumulation of fact within an authorized narrative” (p58). A group can constructs an identity for itself though shared memories, i.e. the collective or social memory. These memorise are socially constructed in the present and make meaningful common interests and perceptions of collective identity. The collective memory is passed on and shaped in the present and is reshaped daily by interaction between members of the collective (p59). Smith further argues that “memory is an important constitutive element of identity formation” (p60). Unlike professional historical narrative it is personal and powerful.

 

Place

“Heritage is about a sense of place” (p75, Smith’s original emphasis). Heritage provides not only a “geographical sense of belonging” but also a “cultural place or sense of belonging”. “Heritage…[can be used] to express, facilitate and construct a send of identity, self and belonging” (p75). Smith is clear that place is not only physical, but also socially constructed and posits that the national is actually constructed from many sub-national places, rather than the opposite. She also acknowledges the vital role that place plays in everyday life :. “place is part of lived experience …an embodiment… of feelings, images and thoughts”(p 76). Futhermore, “heritage as place… creat[es] an affect on current experiences and perceptions of the world”. Thus, a heritage place may represent … a sense of identity and belonging for particular individuals or groups” (p77).

 

Reflection

From Smith’s work I understand AHD is a restrictive construct, concerning itself with a sanitised version of the past, politically constructed to suit the “experts” in history. Its exclusion of non-tangible heritage necessarily removes the individual as all our experience and memories are different – even within the same communities and families. Its driver is often the establishment of a national identity, with regional identities being marginalised. Members of the public are expected to use the heritage site in the way it has been prepared for them. Smith paves the way for subsequent researchers to break the restrictions of AHD. 

She argues that the past does play a part in the construction of our identity. The use of symbolic elements as constructors of identity at sub-national level could bring into play the Yorkshire Rose, a unifying symbol of Yorkshire. But any emotional affect that the Yorkshire Rose, or any other aspect of heritage has, is outside AHD as it is not factual. Yet as Smith acknowledges, it is powerful, and it is more likely to shape our identity.  

Memory also plays its part as a conduit between heritage and identity. We constantly reform and repurpose our memories. They become a discourse rather than a fact. But how can we say history is factual? If researchers are using archival research, they are potentially interpreting someone else’s interpretation of a particular event. Surely history is also a discourse – as Smith eloquently argues throughout the book, it is deliberately excluding and including to serve its own ends. Heritage is also associated with a place. This can be a physical place but could also be one’s cultural place in the scheme of things. Place is inextricably linked to lived experience and causes affects in the past and present. 

Place construct is also complicated and at this point it serves us to reflect on how the past and the present, our physical and cultural places, and our individual and group identities, are commingled. As I read more of the literature on these topics, rather than clarifying boundaries between them, I find they are more intertwined than ever and that any given book or paper privileges one approach simply because of the background of its author(s). This is not problematic in itself, though, as it simply underpins the autobiographical nature of my practice and the complexity of trying to compartmentalise its various components. The more I read, the more I think the visual can portray these topics as well as, if not better than, the text-based discourse as the visual serves to unify rather than dissect them.

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 47 - Sense of Place and Place Attachement

Sense of Place and Place Attachment : an analysis of two journal articles

 

Scannell, L., & Gifford, R., (2010) Defining Place Attachment : A tripartite organising framework in Journal of Environmental Psychology, vol 30, Issue 1, March 2012, pp1-10

Summary

Place attachment is defined as a bonding between the individual and a meaningful environment. It is multifaceted, with many definitions, and Scannell and Gifford attempt to cram it all into a framework based on Person/ Psychological Process / Place. The person is “who”; the process is the “psychological drivers” the place is the “object of attachment” .I don’t propose to summarise the whole framework, but rather here I pick out the points most salient to my own research.

A place, and one’s experience in that place, make it meaningful to you, and the personal connection helps engender a stable sense of self. The authors posit attachment to a place as a fundamental human need; the “attached” place (my term for it) gives security and comfort. The attachment comes about via memories, beliefs and meanings, implying that one’s past and heritage are of significance when attaching to a place. Each individual has a “schema” of knowledge and beliefs about that place, which make it their ”own”. The place can contain the essence of important events. Elements of place can also come to represent elements of who you are.

Place includes social and physical aspects : connection via community, bondedness to neighbourhood, aspects that are not-place specific e.g. religion. Ties created by the broader social system give rise to homogeneous communities. Civic place attachment may occur by a group as symbolic, e.g. attachment to a city, pride in the county. To summarise, drivers of place attachment can include : amenities, personal friends/family, memories, good experiences, security, fit between yourself and place.

Analysis

On reading this rather difficult paper, I could immediately see a great overlap between the person and the psychological process. I am unsure that these can be separated, although this is in a psychology-based journal, so I have to assume that psychology classifies your “person” as different from the way you interact with any given thing.

Overall a lot of the points made seem like, well, good old-fashioned common sense. You connect with a place because it’s familiar, your family lived there, you’ve always had a good time with your mates there. However, I have to acknowledge that I’ve lived in the same place for most of my life, so I wear my place attachment very lightly.

Looking deeper into the points that the authors make, they argue that attachment comes about via memories, beliefs and meanings. Therefore I can conclude that heritage and history contribute to place attachment, and place attachment contributes to identity. Thus the construct of place is important in heritage – the heritage occurred in a place, and that place then becomes a site of attachment. This then contributes to the idea of the contingent heritage of individuals and groups who may or may not know each other but who have a shared attachment to a place, and again the shared attachment may or may not be known to each other. So we have elements of heritage and identity that are shared with strangers and vice versa. The authors’ idea of symbolic civic place attachment is a nice one, particularly speaking as a Yorkshirewoman, but I think it is an over-simplification and easily glosses over the multi-cultural make-up of many cities today, with all the benefits and problems that may bring.

 Therefore I think a note of caution has to be sounded here, though. Bathmaker argues that the former trajectories for life (class, gender, race) no longer hold true, although the big narratives still impinge on an individual’s daily life. Bundling our “heritages” and “identities” and “civic pride” together with those of strangers could be an over-simplification and an indicator of nostalgia creeping in.

The over-riding message I took from this was “Self as place and place as self?”. If you have spent a long time in a place, it becomes inseparable from your identity.  It gives a whole new meaning to the football chant “We are Leeds”.

 

Beidler, K., & Morrison, J., (2016) ‘Sense of place: inquiry and application’ Journal of Urbanism : International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 9, (3), pp205-215

Summary

Beidler and Morrison’s article is a literature review-based paper which also proposes a framework for investigating and defining sense of place.  Their model is four dimensional, bsed on the self, the environment, the social interaction and an all-important fourth dimension, time.

They acknowledge that “at the center of all experience is the individual who is engaged in that experience”. The self converts a ”space” to a “place”. They quote Cross (2001, p10):’To some degree we create our own places, they do not exist independent of us’. The environment is the physical setting of the place, but enlarged to include such constructs as the town’s character. Within this element they also allude to the power constructs with which city planners try to make us use the city in a certain way. The social interaction brings into play the shared experiences of those people who use a place, and the relationships they build with other people as well as the place. Regarding the time dimension, the authors acknowledge the concept of “rootedness”, living in a place for a long time, and this giving you an intuitive understanding of your surroundings. They quote Relph: ‘An authentic sense of place is above all that of being inside and belonging to your place [original emphasis] both as an individual and as a member of a community and to know this without reflecting upon it’ (Relph, 1976, p65). However, they point out that different groups may be using the same space in different ways.

Analysis

Beidler and Morrison effectively argue the idea of sense of place as a discourse between the four elements of their framework. This inherent sense of fluidity in their argument makes a good deal of sense to me. Their centring of the framework on the self, narcissistic as that may seem, also appears completely logical. In a lot of the reading I’ve done, it has appeared that the authors frame their arguments based around an amorphous mass of people who just happen to share some characteristic (e.g. they live in the same place) without acknowledging that this mass is composed of individuals who are trying to make something of their lives.

The elements of the town’s character and the social interaction inevitably overlap, but it is the social interaction element that is most pertinent to my research. They state that ‘Phenomenological research stemming from cultural geography [in the 1980s] argued that ‘lived experience’ was central to place interpretation’. This fits exactly with my own argument of understanding a place because you’ve lived there for a long time, and can also be extrapolated to liking a place you’ve only visited once because you really enjoyed your day there. They stress the significance of memory, experience and social relations in the construction of the meaning of the place to the individual.

Regarding the time dimension, this appears to me as a kind of ”vessel” which contains or underpins all the other points. I couldn’t agree more with the Relph quote – I know this to be true intuitively. Their descriptions of the different groups using the same place give rise to the idea of any one person’s different identity and role within a place; different individuals, roles and communities within one place will have different degrees of and different experiences of place attachment.

Comparison

Beidler and Morrison’s article is much more accessible to me as a non-psychologist/geographer than Scannell and Gifford’s, but there are some common themes between the two. They both agree that place attachment and sense of place has some construction by the individual and by groups. In Beidler and Morrison’s case they attribute this to groups who physically interact, whereas Scannell and Gifford’s argument can be extrapolated to refer to strangers with contingent histories.

Both papers agree that memory is important to place construct. However, neither of them touch on the idea of nostalgia, despite both papers skirting around this. It seems reasonable to infer that place attachment via, say, the memory of a nice day at the seaside can turn into nostalgia with the passage of time. Scannell and Gifford’s paper says much less about this physical environment, but both papers agree that social constructs and human relationships are important in the construction of place. Buried within both articles are implications of heritage, history and identity and their complex entanglements with place.

Beidler and Morrison’s overt use of time as a “fourth dimension” in their paper seems to crystallise some of Scannell and Gifford’s arguments about memories and the essence of important events. Their acknowledgement that time spent in a place contributes to the construction of place attachment and sense of place seems self-evident to me, yet it lacks in Scannell and Gifford’s paper. Again this appears to me to flag up my individual experience and to underline once more the general academic treatment of the individual as an amoeba in an amorphous mass. Overall I found Beidler and Morrison’s article the much more helpful of the two.

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 46 - Psychogeography readings (3)

 “The Dilemmas of Radical Nostalgia in British Psychogeography”

by Alastair Bonnett (2009).

 
This paper seeks to compare and contrast “the use of the past to critique industrial modernity”  and the “suppression of nostalgia” (p45). He explains that radical politics of either side doesn’t like nostalgia as it stands in the way of progress, and he links psychogeography with trying to understand the past; radicalism moves on, but psychogeography is of itself avant garde so it seizes on what’s not in fashion, i.e. nostalgia.

This is all interesting but not directly related to what I’m doing. Of more interest is that it gave quite a lot of useful information about Iain Sinclair and his influence causing British psychogeography to become nostalgic, which Richardson had mentioned; in the mid-1990s psychogeography had a “quixotic, love-hate relationship with the past” (p47). I think we all probably do, to be honest.  Bonnett also pinpoints the feelings of loss for place as society moves on and the everyday space changes: “within avant-garde praxis, it was at the level of everyday space, especially of the changing urban scene, that we find nostalgia most forcefully asserted”(p52). This is much more pertinent for me as I try to find traces of my heritage and identity within various places around Leeds. There is a definite sense of nostalgia, and possibly psychogeography has (is?) more concerned with nostalgia and the past than I had thought; I had found it to be more about connecting with the environment and allowing open-ness to new experience. But perhaps the fact that you are walking in a place that many people have walked before you means you are just part of an ongoing palimpsest of passersby.

Tellingly, Bonnett states that “Contemporary British psychogeography may be viewed as a creative space in which feelings of loss and redemption are explored and negotiated”. This can be extrapolated to mean a physical space or a mental space (“headspace”), and possibly other types of space I haven’t thought of yet. But it is very much a creative space, a thinking space, a linking/connecting space. The visual outcomes that I’ve been producing for the past 9 months all depend on psychogeography of some kind, whether through an actual wandering or an item of interest seen on a car journey.

Bonnett also touches upon the idea of the power structures which bind us and whose disruption fuelled the original derive. These are easily forgotten as the walker takes the urban wandering with their own viewpoints, but if we stand back they too can reveal something of the hidden. One thing I never commented on during the seminal Armley walk was the fact that some workmen (they all seemed to be men) were building the new Bradford – Leeds cycle superhighway on Armley Road. Quite why we need to spend so much money and disruption on this (bus stops removed, 10 passengers waiting in the rain, whilst one cyclist goes past once in a while) is not for me to answer, but the answer must lie in some political power construct somewhere.

Possibly the most pertinent statement comes in Bonnett’s conclusion; “attachments to the past and feelings of loss becomes sites of repression and potent resources for resistance and technique”(p63). I believe he speaks here to (at least part of) what I am trying to do; to critique and resist the loss caused by the deindustrialisation of Yorkshire.

 

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.