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.