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 36 - Discussion of "Migration and Sense of Place" - Annemarie Murland

Migration and Sense of Place : re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice.

Annemarie Murland

Summary

 

The premise of this paper is that personal experience is a legitimate source and subject matter for visual art practice.

Murland is a native of Glasgow who moved to Australia with her Australian husband. She has a deep connection to Glasgow and the tension between this and her migration to a distant country informs her work. She argues that her “felt experience” of being a stranger in the country where she now lives constitutes legitimate subject matter and source material for her visual art practice. She states she has “never truly left” Glasgow, and “after twenty years [in Australia, her] attachment to [Glasgow] is probably stronger”. And expressed in very strong words. She effectively retreats to Glasgow when engaged in creative practice.

Heritage, identity and felt experience commingle to drive her practice. The deep connection with Glasgow is pulled through to her present situation. The identity and characteristics produced in her work reflect her past and present; “in temporal space Memory and Reality embrace” (Murland, 2009, n.p.). She draws on place as a “conduit for creativity, that when examined from an embodied point of view translates into works of art” via a “visual grammar of felt experience”. Her migration affected her practice and she shifted towards abstraction: “the vehicle of abstraction illustrates my visual concerns”.

Murland acknowledges the role of process in her work; the choice of picture plane, the support, the camera lens. She argues that “chance fuses with the material characteristics of the medium” to reveal “new visual conversations”. She describes her work as layered, “weaving paint” including “soft bands of colour” and undergoing a process of marking and erasure. This means her work covers and reveals, and she describes it as “capturing tactility” – “felt” experience of a different kind,

She also articulates the relationship between life history and visual outcomes: “re-telling one’s story within the context of personal experience has developed a methodological art practice that recognises the role of the artist as individual”. She uses “the line as language” and the investigation of materials to transfer felt experience to canvas via mark making so that her experience is expressed.

Discussion

 

There is much in Murland’s article that I understand, some of it intuitively rather than analytically, and little wonder: .“Born in 1962, my cultural heritage is Irish Catholic”. Yep, me too. Her family migrating from Ireland shaped her family history and personal identity in the same way as my family’s Yorkshire lineage and work in Engineering shaped mine. Her sense of dislocation and longing for Glasgow is profound and almost saddening. Yorkshire is deeply ingrained in me. We are intertwined. However, this gives rise to the question -what is place? Yorkshire was fragmented and its boundaries were redefined in 1974 via the Local Government Act (Local Government Act, 1972), yet Yorkshire still exists – for example, the success of “le Grand Départ” of the 2014 Tour de France attests to this.  From this I imply that “place” is a physical phenomenon, but also a felt/personal/emotional one. So the “sense of place” to which Murland refers in the title might be:

• inspiration
• memory
• site where art is made
• site where art is installed
• effect upon emotions/body

and I’m sure others that I have yet to add to this list which is an immediate response to Murland’s paper.

A further thought on using place as a driver for a visual practice: production of work happens in a (or many) places – how does this affect the end result? An outdoor sketch might of necessity be free-er and less detailed than a final piece – but is it different in other ways, because of where it is made? How does the experience of being in a place (seeing the subject directly rather than via a sketch or photo, being in Yorkshire rather than Lancashire or wherever) – rather than the physical conditions (light, weather, indoors/outdoors) – affect the outcome? I’m not entirely sure here. Another project for me to work on at some point.

Murland’s use of the term “felt experience” is very interesting. It implies a deep, personal sensory experience as opposed to “embodied experience”, which has a less personal implication.  “Felt” could imply the sense of touch only, which would imply less of a holistic experience than “embodied”, but it also encompasses emotional feelings. I prefer the term “lived experience” as implying the sense of being alive in all senses during a particular series of moments.

Murland’s description of process and methodology particularly resonate with me. Her idea of “chance” playing a part in the production of a visual work has repeatedly appeared both creatively and theoretically over the course of my studies so far. Playful action research and “happy accidents” often move the work onto an unexpected pathway and the outcomes arrived at are often the most creative. Other agents which immediately spring to mind and which affect any particular work are my choice of medium, my experience with that medium, my mood and my level of energy.  The layering which she states characterises her work is also another concern of mine. The need to mask and to reveal, ever-changing, is a reflection of our interactions with one another, and another way of depicting one’s identity and story.

Her recognition that telling her story – her felt/lived/embodied experience - via visual means has helped her develop a visual language was also a point of recognition for me. Around the time I read this article, I also had a conversation with a colleague which helped me to understand that which I knew intuitively but was struggling to express verbally, namely the articulation of my holistic experience of a moment of time in visual form. The term “embodied experience” suddenly meant something to me, as did its ability to be articulated in a language other than the spoken – i.e. a visual language.  This has been key to me starting to develop my visual language, or “visual grammar” as Murland terms it. She uses “the line as language” – harking back to the question in one of my tutorials “are the marks saying what you want to say?”. Now, at last, they are, and Murland’s article has helped me to articulate in text some of the sources, methodology and outcomes of my work.

MA Week 28 - Pylon Abstracts and Salford Symposium

Reflection on the past week – 23rd May 2016

 

Some interesting experiences and work this week. I haven’t been back into the print room, unfortunately, because I was ill on my afternoon off. Shame as I had written a list of things to try out. However, I have been making some progress with some little acrylic pieces. 

I pursued the idea of working up the repurposed pylon monoprint from my Week 26 post into four pieces. As time is of the essence, I decided to work straight into acrylics rather than work with pastels or cut paper as I might normally do when planning and developing  a piece. I wanted to see how the colours and paint would work.

 

Pylon 1 : spot the constructivist influence

This is one of the results at the first sketch stage. There are two or three layers of paint and I’ve used some masking tape too. It’s fairly faithful to the original monoprint but it’s clear that there is too much going on at the top left and not so much at the bottom right. I’m therefore working on a second sketch which is looking much more balanced and which I hope will be OK to reproduce on board for the End of Year show.  

It’s interesting how the marks translate, or not. The “grubby” marks of the monoprint, which give a nice industrial feel, don’t work so well in the acrylic. The inclusion of marks of different thicknesses in the acrylic version gives the work energy and movement. Not that they lack in the original; I have just had to think differently about how to represent them and how to rework the lines of the original to get the piece more balanced.

 

Crit in transit

The original four sketches were the subject of a three-phase crit at the end of last week! I put a couple of them onto whatsapp and there were suggestions they would work up as linocuts – I’m not overly experienced in linocutting but I might give that a go later on in the year. Then I had a crit with two classmates on our way to Salford (of which more later), now known as the “crit in transit”. This revealed some ideas of day and night, of lights beaming out of the darkness, and a very challenging question of whether this represents what’s going on in my head (who knows?). Later, when I finally got to Salford, another two classmates kindly had a look. There were further suggestions of taking the pieces back into print, perhaps by monoprinting from or into them, of further layering, and also the question of trying to get them up off the page more. They do look 2D, but perhaps that’s how they’re supposed to look. I’m not going to be able to try all these things before the end of year show, but I am definitely up for trying a bit more layering and I’ll do that when I go back to working on them tomorrow. 

The Salford jaunt was interesting. We met with MA students from Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Salford in a place called Atelier Artworks, an old light bulb factory. It was a strange space; industrial, dirty, under-used, disused almost, yet alive with the studios of a number of artists. Because of being ill I hadn’t really had much chance to prepare, so my responses were very much that – immediate.

 

Salford Piece 1

 

 

I concentrated on shapes and colour and produced two compressed charcoal and pastel pieces. On both the bottom layer was a rubbing of the metal stairs. There was a lot of improvement that I could immediately see; if I’d thought a bit more about it beforehand, I would have positioned my various images on piece 1 differently. As it was they overlapped too much. A lesson to learn. Don’t get overwhelmed by the situation and jump straight in. On piece 2 I think the red is a bit too intense. I liked the colour of the two doors, bright red and bright emerald green (these were their colours in real life), but I wish I’d left it as a black pencil drawing on the red rubbing.

Salford Piece 2

On the other hand, producing these as immediate responses means there is a lot to develop – there are no filtered or refined ideas in there. The shapes and colours can be used in different ways in future pieces. I really wish I’d taken more photographs and made more rubbings of the stairs to use now I’ve got back. Another lesson to learn. Part of the immediate response also means that these pieces bear the imprint of the site; not only the stair-rubbings, but the fact that I sat on the uneven, cracked concrete floor to do them. This means the lines are not straight because the floor was so uneven; something that I couldn’t filter out as I actually did the work.  I am beginning to understand, and to like, a little bit more about responding to place through these experiences (the Armley walk, the pylon photos, the Salford Symposium). 

We had a crit in groups of three and one of the comments on piece 2 was that it was like looking through a window when there was a dangerous chemical incident going on. It made me see the piece in a different way and I liked it a bit more then. I think the first stage in developing something from this would be to take the stair pattern from piece 1 and work with it; this was the first thing that captured my attention as walked up to the space where we’d be working. 

There wasn’t nearly as much time as I would have liked to interact with the students from other institutions. I think most of the others probably felt the same as I did – slightly nervous, happier to stick with our own classmates. It would have been nice to have had an ice-breaker to get to know people and perhaps more time to view each other’s work. Having had the experience, I wish I could go back and do it again and get more out of it.