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 43 - Printing, partying, networking and writing

Reflection on the week - 18th October 2016

 

Printing

I finally got into the Print Room on Thursday 13^th October and finished the pylon drypoint. It lacks symmetry, or better said mirror imagery, but I don’t think that is too much of a problem because it is hand cut. I did have some trouble printing it, though. I couldn’t get a good black line out of it. I think the grooves I’ve etched may not be deep enough. It will hardly take any wiping at all. I need to talk to Mike or Mick about it but I didn’t get that far.  

I did do a bit of experimentation with paper for the first time. Mick had kindly given me some offcuts of Canaletto paper which is about 300gsm, so really it’s like thin card. I soaked it for about 20 minutes but I think perhaps I should have soaked it longer. It did seem to take the print a bit better than the cartridge paper, though. Certainly more experimentation to do but that would be no hardship!

 

View inside pylon - 1

I also printed it onto a couple of monoprints, one of which had tissue paper on. As I suspected, some of the tissue soaked off when I gave the paper a quick soak. I think I could probably glue it back on so I will have to see to that in due course. I also printed onto a two-tone scratched monoprint and I liked this one. I haven’t had time to reflect fully on these and where next but I don’t see that as a problem; the dissertation has to take priority this term and the printing will kick back in as the priority from January. Any printing I can do this term is a bonus.

View inside Pylon - 2 - drypoint over monoprint

 

Leeds Print Workshop opening

 

On Friday I went to the opening party of the Leeds Print Workshop and it was grand. It was kind of like hanging out in a printerly environment with beer. What more could a body want?

I also had lots of good conversations, including with my classmates Carol and Sue. Then I met two of the first year MA students, Will and Russell. Russell’s work seems to have some overlaps with mine so we have agreed we will get together to discuss in more detail and see if there are any avenues for collaboration. It was interesting trying to answer Will and Russell’s questions about the course; they are very similar to the ones I was grappling this time last year and they reflected back to me that fact that I have learnt something.I caught up with College printroom staff past and present which was good, especially to see Lyndon, and was also delighted to see my friend Filippa up and about after a bit of a low time.

Alongside the Print Workshop opening was an exhibition called “Out of Bounds”, which carried on from residencies that various East Street Arts artists and associates had undertaken in the Summer of 2015. I visited East Street Arts’ Patrick Studios to see some of the outcomes of the residencies in September 2015, and was particularly inspired by the urban mark-making of the ceramicist Rebecca Appleby. Rebecca was exhibiting two pieces from her Urban Palimpsest series and I had the good fortune to be able to chat with her again. She has had a fantastic year, including winning “Best Newcomer” at the prestigious Ceramic Art London. She gave me a bit more of an insight into how she is drawn to the urban as her source material, and also advised me to keep working and striving so that I could be ready for things to start happening when the time is right. It was a real boost to be able to talk to her a year on.

Thinking ahead

 

Another thing I’ve been doing over the past few weeks is working with my classmates Sue, Carol and Paula, to try to find a venue for our end-of-year show this time next year. To be honest I have done the least work of the four of us. However, it has opened up a conversation with East Street Arts about using temporary space. I would love to exhibit in the space that Out of Bounds is currently occupying. Carol told me the same thing as Rebecca – get making!

Thinking

I’ve had plenty of thinking to do as I press on with my dissertation. I’ve written a couple of short critical analyses. One concerns Tina Richardson’s chapter A Wander through the scene of British Urban Walking in the book she edited, Walking Inside Out : Contemporary British Psychogeography.  Her chapter throws up some interesting links with nostalgia and therefore heritage.

I’ve also written something about Constructing ‘The North’ : space and a sense of place, a book chapter by Stuart Rawnsley. in Northern Identities : historical interpretations of ‘The North’ and ‘Northernness’. Rawnsley offers a potted history of the construction of Northernness. His approach is quite aggressive in terms of exposing agencies that he considers to control constructions of “the North”. I agree with some of it, but I found it went much further than my own viewpoint.

Finally I have been browsing Discourse and Identity by Bethan Benwell and Elizabeth Stokoe. This has given me a really useful overview of factors at play in the construction of identity. These authors argue that identity is fluid and will change depending on the individual’s situation. The negative point for me with this book was that it seems to stray into the idea of the individual being part of a kind of mass of people who can’t think for themselves – I’ve found this in a number of what I would call “Social Sciences” texts. However it did throw up links to identity being linked to relationships and with place. So a kind of web of heritage – identity – walking is beginning to emerge.

A quick psychogeography and culture lesson

I was really pleased to be able to meet up with Dr Zoë Tew-Thompson of Leeds Beckett University on Tuesday. Zoë is taking part in the “Being Human” event that I mentioned last week. She is a lecturer in Media, Communication and Cultures and has a particular interest in place and space. Her research has included telling the “small stories” behind the “big shiny” official stories (my words) – much like I am trying to do. Also similar to me, she had to pull theories from many different disciplines to be able to understand her research and it was great to know that I’m not going mad trying to find the academic underpinnings of my visual work. She gave me a few more psychogeography references to follow up and we talked in some depth about the importance of viewing the city in a different way to that which the city planners have defined. The shapes, smells, colours are all there to be observed if you simply open yourself to them. Zoë is interested in the idea of disrupting the “official history” to tell the narratives of the individual stories underneath, because really these are not only the story of one person – they are the stories of many contingent people.  In this she articulated at least some facet of why I’m doing what I’m doing. It was quite exhilarating to be able to talk to someone who knew what I was on about and could offer insights that unlocked some of the academic blockages I’ve been wrestling with. As a result of our meeting, though not of any particular thing that Zoë mentioned or suggested, I’ve realised I can improve the structure of my dissertation so that it will flow significantly better.

MA Week 41 - Heritage readings (1)

A couple of useful chapters from a book called Heritage Studies : Methods and Approaches edited by John Carman and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen.

In the first chapter, “Heritage Studies : An outline”, the editors give a history of Heritage Studies. They quote a definition from UNESCO : “Heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations”. However, they argue that there is no real definitive definition, so to speak, as Heritage Studies exists in an “interdisciplinary space”.

They trace the roots of heritage studies back to the late 18^th/early 19^th century, emerging with civil rights and citizenship, and argue that the industrial revolution and land destruction gave rise to the need to “safeguard” heritage. This brought heritage legislation into play. However, such legislation brought with it conflict with the state and the traditional guardians of heritage.

Heritage studies as a discipline was first clearly identified in 1980s as the “field of practice that investigates the role of the past in the present”. Part of driver was post-colonialism and new voices and contested ownership. Arose from “developments in several otherwise largely unrelated disciplines.” There was an initial school of thought that “today’s presentations of the past can be coloured by ideologies”, but the authors rebut this as they believe it to be grounded in perspective rather than substantive research. Here I would have to quote back to them the idea of life history or microhistory. The current authors are not living through the 1980s!

Subsequent work in the 1990s “identified different communities who valued different types of past – a monumental, national or global history; or a more personalised, family and genealogical past”. The authors acknowledge the “expressly political nature of interpreting the past”. For me this idea is not so different to identity. One’s own views (self) magnified through research. Here there is also the idea of metanarrative dominating. The authors then go on to state that heritage is  “recognised as simultaneously defenceless and open to abuse… and also as a potentially empowering aspect of social life in terms of, for example, the formation of identity and creating a sense of rootedness” (so they probably agree with agree with me!)

They summarise current (2009) concerns : “We have officially as well as cognitively moved from an object/monument-focused understanding of heritage to being able to recognise the many kinds of cultural products that are part of our construction of heritage and the roles it plays in our lives”.

Apart from where my lived experience gives me different opinions, I’ve taken this chapter at face value as a potted history of Heritage Studies. Although I don’t think there is a lot that is directly related to what I’m doing, it’s useful to have the background. It also supports some of Harrison’s views, particularly regarding the many different strands of heritage and culture it brings together.

Of more interest was Grete Lillehammer’s “Making them Draw : The use of drawings when researching public attitudes towards the past” Lillehammer was investigating “public attitudes towards cultural heritage in a rural district of south-western Norway”, looking at the opposing views of farmers and environmental bureaucrats. There was an ongoing conflict between the cultural heritage of the land and its use for farming, particularly concerning the so-called “fairy rings”.

Lillehammer interviewed people from both groups, and at the end of the interview, asked them to draw a map of the farm. These she termed “cognitive maps”, describing these as “products of the mind’s ordering of information”. She had come across this method by chance during the literature search for her research, and approached its use “ …as freely and openly as possible to see what happened”. She then realised that “…the most representative record … was actually the drawings made by the two groups”. She recognised some similarities in the maps but could not fully describe these. By using them to assist her systematic analysis of the interviews, she gained fuller understanding of the drawn maps. Farmers draw their farm from near – others drew them from managers from afar. Basically the drawings serve to depict what could be expected in terms of the differences between the two groups.

She acknowledges that trying something new can bring interesting results: “The potentiality of applying methods generated from the theory of different disciplines stresses the importance for Heritage Studies and archaeology continuing to explore and even further extend its means of investigation”.  

Lillehammer’s work really resonated with me, and at least part of this resonance was intuitive. Firstly I liked the way she presented her book chapter chronologically, as a description of her journey of the discovery of the cognitive mapping method and her growing understanding of how she could apply it and use it as another method alongside her original method of interviewing. This made me think that perhaps my presentation at “Grim Up North?” wasn’t overly personal after all, which was reassuring. 

I liked the fact that she had used the cognitive mapping method “freely and openly” and had been open to the possibilities it could bring. This put me in mind of my openness to my surroundings when undertaking a wandering. I often think that research employs rather prescriptive, rigid methods (and academic research often demands similar outcomes) and yet by the nature of the freedom and unpredictability of drawing, she had employed it freely and gained rich outcomes. Of course, given my history of tension between the written and the visual, I was personally pleased that the drawn outcomes had given rise to greater insights than those afforded by interview alone. That was probably the most resonant point.  

Her conclusion about applying methods from different disciplines is very similar to the path my research is taking at the moment. Using heritage, identity and psychogeographical perspectives is enabling me to discover and depict new areas and depths in my practice.