MA Week 35 - Etching and a different kind of abstract (2)

Reflection on the past two weeks – 11^th July 2016:

Etching and a different kind of abstract (2) 

The other thing I’ve been working on this past fortnight is my first ever conference abstract. I’d heard about a symposium called “Grim up North” via social media. Its topic is Northern heritage and identity, which I have of course been researching. It’s aimed at MA and PhD students and postdocs, so it was a foregone conclusion that I should have a go at submitting an abstract. 

Preparing the abstract was quite challenging but interesting. I followed my usual approach of reading the question (i.e. the call for papers (CFP)) and working up a response. I had enough confidence in my writing ability to know that if I kept drafting, something would eventually appear. It took a lot of grouping my thoughts, though, and to get out those 250 words I had two or three lots of initial scribbles plus six or seven drafts.

 

How to write an abstract - the long way

One of the initial hurdles was trying to focus in on what I wanted to say. It took a while for me to realise that I didn’t need to submit an account of everything I’ve been doing, but rather focus on just those bits that overlapped with the CFP. To help strengthen my submission, I read back over this blog, in particular the posts on heritage as a critical perspective from Harrison’s book . I’ve also got some part-formed notes about identity from Bathmaker’s book, Exploring Learning, Identity & Power through Life History & Narrative Research, that helped.  

I’ve also recently read a really relevant paper by Annemarie Murland, Migration and Sense of Place: re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice. (Edit: now discussed in this Week 36 post).The gist of this paper is about translating the embodied experience of a place into visual form. Murland talks about the feeling translating itself into the marks she is making. This was something I think I would have eventually arrived at, with my deep, black, scratchy marks, but Murland articulated this hitherto half-formed thought.  This unlocked the final piece of the jigsaw, namely the fact that you can depict a lived (felt/embodied) experience in a non-figurative way and the marks can say more than a figurative depiction could do. 

The next bit of editing was the style. I’d written in the first person, but thought that wasn’t right. I read Murland’s abstract of her own paper plus the abstracts of a couple of others I had previously printed off, and suddenly the style came to me, and this strengthened the text a good deal. 

Finally I sought the opinion of three people whose views I respect; my colleague Jenny, who teaches skills including academic writing to PhD students and postdocs; my colleague Liz, who is also a lecturer in Fine Art; and my long-suffering tutor, Sharon. Each of them gave me some useful insights. Jenny pointed out that I had a disconnect in one paragraph – easy to do when you’ve done so much editing. Liz gave me some deeper insights into my comments about use of colour and also some useful references about that topic. Sharon pointed out some repetitions and advised me to read the abstract out loud to myself. I edited it then read it in my head, and thought it sounded OK. When I did finally read it out loud, I was amazed to find repetitions I’d missed. I’d never heard of this technique before and it is so simple and useful. 

The abstract is reproduced below, and was submitted yesterday. I don’t know if it will be accepted or not. Whatever the outcome, I think it has been a really useful exercise for me. It’s helped me to hone in a little further on what I’m doing and how, and I’ve learnt some good lessons about abstract writing along the way.

 

Using wandering and visual response to investigate Northernness: How did I get here?

“The North” exists not only as a physical entity, but also as a lived experience for the Northerner. How can this embodied experience be investigated and depicted using visual methods? 

Within the various stages of deindustrialisation - the decay and rebuilding of urban Yorkshire - lie the roots of the heritage and identity of many Northerners, myself included. The search for our roots can be depicted visually; the transformation of the urban landscape forms a rich source of visual material. Heritage and life history perspectives can be used to articulate stories of the places, people and objects of the North. By combining these theoretical perspectives with urban wandering, it becomes possible to visually describe the embodied experience of living here.  

This combined approach opens up an immersive, visual research method which gives rise to visual responses. Looking, observing and connecting with the built environment and its peoples, past and present, brings a sense of place, of being and of belonging. As today becomes tomorrow’s heritage, so this visual research adds to the pool of collective memories.  

The creative outcomes generate a personal visual language of Northernness, deepening understanding of identity, self and heritage. The urban landscape reveals new shapes and colours, repurposed through the choice of marks and materials. Abstract, non-figurative artworks invite the viewer to share the embodied experience without the pre-conception that might be suggested by a figurative image. Colours come into play: black and white suggests the grim industrial past. Vibrant colours depict the embodied experience of the present and hope for the future.

 

 

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.