MA Week 42 - Dissertation underway

Nothing visual to show this week. I didn’t get into the Print Room as I was away Friday/Saturday. However, I have made a start proper on my dissertation. I had a really good tutorial with my very patient tutor, Sharon, on Wednesday, which confirmed I’m on the right tracks with the structure. Since then I’ve spent time putting some flesh on the bones, so to speak. I’ve read a bit about psychogeography but there’s still more to do. I’ve been reading The Situationist International : A User Guide by Simon Ford (2005) , in which he describes Guy Debord – who is the founder of the Situationists International Group and the father of psychogeography – as seeing the psychogeographical walk as a drift, called the dérive.  See this Week 42 blog post for a summary of this. This contrasts with Tina Richardson’s viewpoint which she expresses in one of the chapters of the eminently readable book she’s edited, Walking inside out : Contemporary British Psychogeography (2015), in which she sees the psychogeographical walk as being more purposeful than just a stroll. So more reading and thinking to do. However it does seem Debord’s original idea allows for random and chance encounters, so this does help with my ideas of walking along and being open to whatever you might come across.

 

I also had the pleasure of meeting up with some members of staff from Leeds Beckett University on the same day, to talk about taking part in their “Being Human” event. There were four of us in total, from different backgrounds: English, History, Cultural Studies, and me! The plan for the day is to take groups of attendees on a short walk in the city centre, then invite them to reflect on what they’ve seen and experienced through creative writing and some sort of visual response (which is where I come in – it will probably be through collaging pre-cut shapes). We walked the short route and we all saw different things and could give different comments and insights from our various backgrounds. It was a very short burst of interdisciplinary collaboration and it was quite fascinating. I’m really hoping that I can get to the day and that it will be equally interesting.

This week, I’ve met one of my Twitter friends, Jane, in the flesh. That was great, to sit and natter away over lunch about our respective art practices. For the rest of the week it’s dissertation and hopefully the Print Room on Thursday.

 

 

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.

MA Week 41 - Printing and Perusing

Reflection on restarting – 4^th October 2016

 

So, back in the thick of things. Since I gave the paper a couple of weeks ago I’ve made a start on my dissertation and done a bit of printing.

 

I’ve spent quite a bit of time poring over books and perusing papers. My dissertation will have the same theme as my paper but obviously will need more academic rigour, so there’s quite a bit of referencing to do. There was a lot of food for thought about identity and heritage in the symposium itself and some of this has been borne out in the reading I’ve done.

 

I’ve also gone back into the print room. It was strange, restarting, and I made some of the same stupid mistakes I made last term – doh! On Thursday I did some monoprinting. I decided to use grey and black as a change from red and black, but the grey didn’t work brilliantly well. I mixed some white into Payne’s grey and it went really thick. When I scratched into it with the comb, it gathered at the edges of the paper.

 

Some of the Vernon Street staff are now in the Blenheim Walk print room and this means I am getting some additional views and information as obviously everyone has different experiences. This is even better than before! Mick Welbourn advised the use of cobalt drying drops. I completely forgot to put them in the grey but put them in the red. The red ink definitely dried quicker – by the afternoon it was difficult to roll whereas the grey was still going strong. It also dried better on the paper.

 

Rack of monoprints. Happy days!

 

I tried two different types of paper: a coated paper and my usual cartridge paper. The red didn’t work very well on the cartridge at all. On the other hand, it worked really well on the coated paper. Susie (a technician) told me that this paper is used for commercial printing as it’s glossy and takes up the ink really well. You need to do at least one pull on cartridge paper first or the ink overwhelms the (coated) paper. So this is all fodder for my desire to experiment with paper this academic year.

 

On Friday I started to etch a photo I’d taken looking up a pylon. It’s gone a bit astray in places but so far so good. Mick showed me how to ink it using oil paint. You apply the paint onto the plate with a cardboard square then scrape it away and polish it – no scrim. It’s a lot cleaner but I missed the scrimming. And there was no black, just bl**dy Payne’s grey. So I’ll ink it properly when it’s finished.

 

Pylon drypoint - WIP

 

“Grim Up North? : Symposium on Northern Identity, History and Heritage (2)

“Grim up North?” presentation

16^th September 2016

This was my first academic presentation and it was gratifying to be a part of a well-organised and well-attended symposium. The symposium itself was supported by the Heritage Consortium of Universities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). It was ably organised by two PhD researchers, Michael Reeve and Andrew McTominey. I've posted about the day itself here.

I presented on my research by practice to date, with the title “Using Urban Wandering and Visual Outcomes to investigate Northernness : How did I get here?”. Within my powerpoint presentation, I used photos from my urban wandering as backdrops to the slides, with the intention of adding context and interest to the paper.

I started by describing how my practice is fuelled by my own lived experience and is an investigation into what’s happened, and what is happening, to me – hence my subtitle, “how did I get here?” (which also links back to my 3-minute presentation at the“Heritage Show & Tell” back in March – this presentation built on that one). I then mentioned my emerging methodology of wandering and response to investigate Northernness and positioned this as a synthesis of academic research, wandering and visual outcome.

I went on to talk a little about my own lived experience – my own personal narrative – as context for my research, mentioning my family as Engineers and the trauma of redundancy when the industry closed down. I explained that when I restarted my art practice, it quickly became apparent that I was expressing “what’s inside me”. I showed an example of my work (on the slide below), and that when I came to write my MA proposal, I needed to express this in a more elegant written format – hence the research question on the slide below. And that was how I “got here”, i.e. presenting my work to a room full of historians!

 

 

Next, I talked a little about my theoretical perspectives, admitting I had no background in heritage, but quoting Harrison on heritage: the ideas of heritage concerning people, places, objects and practices, and heritage only happening if something is at risk – and obviously our industry was at so much risk that it disappeared. I also quoted Bathmaker on life history as the life story in its social context, which resonated with Jack Southern’s comments on microhistory earlier in the day. I used these two points to illustrate my argument that the two work together – heritage and identity, past and present.

After this came the main point of the presentation – the urban wandering, and beyond. I showed some images of my wandering from Woodhouse to Armley and talked about my purpose of seeking Northernness, and how it then became clear to me that I was also moving into the area of psychogeography, showing a definition of pyschogeogrpahy from Tina Richardson. I talked about crossing the boundary into Armley, findng the canal, the repurpsoed mill, factories derelict an in use, and how I took the splashes of colour – e.g. the yellow of some skips – to be a sign of life amidst the soot-ingrained bricks of the buildings. I told the story of me being in my Dad’s space, but not our space together, and yet it was no longer his space as the industy had moved on – an example of the quotidian of yesterday forming the heritage of today. I explained that this had been a really direct and immersive experience of the theoretical perspectives of heritage and identity and I re-quoted Richardson’s quote of Abdelhafid Khatib, one of the founders of psychogeography: “at the same time as being a form of action, it is a means of knowledge”.

 

Explaining one of the Armley abstracts (photo: Mel Dewey)

 

I therefore had found Northernness, conflated with industry and memory, and my next action was to depict it. I showed a couple of my visual outcomes from the wandering, and offered some insights into how I’d used what I’d experienced. I explained how I had repurposed the shapes and colours I’d seen, using the colours as a palette. I’d used collaged black and white images to represent the past amongst the colours of the present. By using an abstract approach, I had tried to offer a universal way into the work, to invite viewers to join me in my experience; not just what I’d seen, but what I’d experienced. I also showed some close-up details and drew attention to the layering and scratching, depicting memories, the hidden and the revealed, leading to the painting becoming an industrial palimpsest.

Further explanations about developing a visual language to depict embodied experience (photo : Mel Dewey)

Explaining that this was the start of a personal visual language of Northernness, I went on to talk about how it had taken on a life beyond the wandering, giving a new sense of direction and purpose. It carried on in car journeys, with me taking pictures of anything and everything I found interesting and industrial and Northern, and I cited the example of the pylon abstracts, produced using the same methodology as the Armley abstracts from the picture in the slide below. I concluded this section with images of some outcomes from the Holbeck wandering, explaining that I had introduced printing using the shapes I’d seen.

My talk finished with a brief mention of my next steps: more visual and academic research, the possibility of collaboration, and the definite undertaking of further wanderings.

 

Reflection

I’d rehearsed the talk a few times, and had tested it out on a couple of people to ensure there was a logical flow, so I was quite confident about getting up and presenting. That said, I was still nervous when I stood up. However, it went well, I said what I wanted to say, only one slide got stuck, and I was more or less within my 15-minute slot.

It was clear that my research was at a much earlier stage than most of the other presenters, who were all PhD candidates or Early Career Researchers. However, I didn’t see this as a problem, simply a fact. There was a difference in presentation style and that’s something for me to consider  if/when I do another presentation. My presentation was much more personal than the others, although that is in part because my research by art practice is very personal. The others’ talks were clearly part of their ongoing research – a window into their research at this time, so to speak – whereas my presentation was a business-style affair with a definite beginning, middle and end and slides that had been prepared specifically for the occasion (some others had obviously done this, some not). I prefer the business-style presentation but I do wonder if perhaps mine was a little too personal on this occasion; however, there is no escaping that my life history is the basis of my research. I also made a point of including lots of visuals in my presentation rather than just loads of text. I do think this helped maintain interest.

After my panel, some people came up to talk to me. I hadn’t anticipated this and it was a shock, and a pleasant surprise, to find that people were interested in my work. The psychogeography element definitely captured people’s imagination. I think most people in the audience were from some kind of history background and I think the psychogeography angle gave them a way into my art practice. This was an interesting and potentially useful revelation. One participant told me he had done something similar as part of his undergraduate studies and that he had actually walked to some of the same places as myself. He did say he would share his writings with me but that hasn’t happened yet, which is a shame. He was also complimentary about my art work which was really gratifying. 

Cate Benincasa, who was formerly a lecturer at Leeds College of Art and is now a Senior Lecturer at the University of Huddersfield was really encouraging and complementary about my talk and told me I had pitched it at the right level. That was really useful and encouraging feedback. She also complemented me on the red pylon abstract which I was very pleased about. 

I realised afterwards that this is the first time I’ve shown my recent work to anyone publicly. I’m glad I didn’t realise it beforehand or I would have been very nervous. To have the work complemented was fantastic.  

Dr Henry Irving of Leeds Beckett University also approached me regarding a possible participation in Leeds Beckett’s “Being Human” festival event, when he and colleagues will lead participants on short walks around Leeds City Centre and help them produce written response. He was interested in possibly producing visual responses. This is really interesting and I hope it will come off. 

The whole experience was a really good one and I hope I can give another paper at some point. Although the preparation took a long time, the research I did will form the basis of my dissertation, which I will write on the same topic.

“Grim Up North? : Symposium on Northern Identity, History and Heritage (1)

Grim Up North?" : Northern Identity, History and Heritage

The Leeds Library, 16^th September 2016

An extremely interesting day spent in the fine surroundings of the Leeds Library. There were three panels, summarised below, including my first academic paper. 

 

With other Symposium participants during a break (photo : Mel Dewey)

 

Panel 1 : Identity 

First up was William Marshall (independent), who discussed negative Yorkshire stereotypes and how they have been appropriated positively by Yorkshire folk constructing their own identity. One example he gave was that of horse dealers who allegedly swindled unsuspecting non-Yorkshire folk of their horses. This gave rise to the positive ideas of humour, thriftiness and cunning as part of the county’s identity, and gained particular currency with the advent of print. William argued that the adoption of negative stereotypes as positive constructs could be both a form of defence and defiance. 

The second speaker on the panel was Jack Southern (University of Central Lancashire), who spoke about the Lancashire cotton industry up to 1915. He argued that previous investigations have often focused on the economic situations of the time, rather than the effects of those economic terms. This he termed microhistory. Neighbouring villages competed, taking pride in their industrial outputs. They built their identity based on industrial reputation and local principles, propagating these until they became the stuff of myth.The local identity ignored civic boundary changes. Women also had some financial independence, and although this point was not pursued, there were comments asking is history gendered? 

The last speaker of the morning was Anna Feintuck (University of Edinburgh) whose research investigates the amalgamation of Leith into Edinburgh. . Although Leith had and has its own identity, it also had and has connections to Edinburgh e.g. by public transport and tracks. Anna made a strong point of how arbitrary boundaries can be, citing the anecdote of the Hull – East Yorkshire boundary running through her own back garden when she was a child. She raised ideas of the boundary being at once definite, permeable and arbitrary, depending on whose viewpoint was under consideration.  

All three talks had a strong theme of the self-determination of identity by residents, drawing on myths, microhistory and reputation. Boundaries imposed by civic authorities were not necessarily accepted by local residents. However there is a boundary fluidity. Boundaries are invisible. How do we know they are there?

 

Panel 2 : T’other

The first speaker in this panel was Adelle Stripe (Manchester Metropolitan University) who spoke about the Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar, who wrote “Rita Sue and Bob too” amongt other works. Dunbar wrote the stories she saw on the Buttershaw Estate in Bradford, for example in her local pub, the un-aptly named “The Beacon”. When her work was performed in London, audiences laughed, leaving Dunbar nonplussed. Opening up her lived experience of Buttershaw to the whole country caused disuputes with neighbours because of the way she portrayed the estate. The media played a part in this, constructing their own versions of Dunbar’s and Bradford’s identities, ultimately contributing to Dunbar’s early death.

Next up was Rhiannon Pickin (Leeds Beckett University) who spoke about constructs of Yorkshire identity in Yorkshire Crime and Punishment Museums, in particular contrasting these museums in Ripon and York. Both museums offer experiences for children to understand their heritage (and by implication, add to the construction of their identity). However, as one might expect, York’s Museum has more of an international outlook, whereas Ripon draws on local volunteers who have actually worked in the judiciary and are therefore passing on direct experience. So the experience for the children is quite different. She also explained that there was little research about historical judicial systems outside London.

Closing the panel was Tosh Warwick (Leeds Beckett University) who spoke about the World Cup 1966 in Sheffield and Middlesbrough, which were both host towns (used as a generic term as Sheffield is a city). His research reveals that people (FA officials, foreign journalists and FIFA officals) didn’t want to go there. The two venues set about selling manufacturing towns as tourist destinations, with differing ideas of Northernness. Sheffield showcased its steel industry but Middlesbrough wanted to create a sculpture-based art trail (much to the dismay of some locals). Tosh associated this with Middlesbrough’s gradual move out of Yorkshire proper and towards Teesside.

 

Within all three papers there was the concept of the “other” being London; it wasn’t overtly stated, but it was implied. There were though also other others e.g. the media (Stripe), foreign FIFA officials (Warwick). Again the paradigm of identity construction emerged strongly, although this time not as self-determined, but as determined by others (e.g. museum staff, media).

Panel 3: Heritage

This was my panel, and unfortunately the two other speakers had to drop out. However, a replacement speaker was found for one of them. I presented on “Using wandering and visual response to investigate Northernness: How did I get here”?. More on this here.

 The other speaker, Catherine Flinn Goldie (independent) gave a paper on the politics of postwar rebuilding in Hull. She discussed arguments at local level regarding how to proceed, causing stumbling blocks. An interesting point was that rebuilding plans made no mention of heritage and there was the concept of the past being swept away as modernism prevailed. Oddly, some of the temporary structures put up are still in existence. This was a glimpse of the urban palimpsest in the city.

 

With Catherine Flinn Goldie taking questions after the papers (photo: Paula Hickey)

 

The keynote address, by Barry Doyle (University of Huddersfield) looked at health indicators in the inter-war years in Leeds and Sheffield. He discussed that this can be politicised and that there is evidence that it wasn’t so “grim up North”. He also, again, touched on the idea of London as “other”.

Discussion

The Symposium had a number of recurring themes:

Boundaries – boundaries featured strongly and it was clear there were definitions other than those used by the authorities. Boundaries could be fluid and could be invoked by local people when necessary and equally, ignored when necessary. There was a playful jibe at Jack Southern from the panel chair that he was from the wrong side of the Pennines (i.e. Lancashire) and Jack gave as good as he got – the county rivalry lives on! This gives rise to areas for investigation, e.g. what boundaries do we have that we acknowledge (myself and my classmates gave the example of the boundaries of where you could play out as a child). Conversely, what boundaries do we have that we don’t consciously know about or refuse to acknowledge?

Construction of identity – this massive topic was touched on in various ways. To at least some extent, we self-determine our identity, and our community does the same. However, there are many external agencies at play, particularly the media. Alongside this, .I felt there was the question of whose voice constructs our history, and therefore our heritage, thereby feeding our identities? Certainly all the speakers were giving some voice to their own view of history.

London – London was identified as the “other” several times. This poses the question – what about that part of the country (England? UK?) which isn’t the North and isn’t London? Just as some papers argued that previous research had only investigated London, and by implication there is a conflation of “London” with the “UK”, so I felt we as Northerners were conflating London with the South.

Moving around the urban space – this was another strong theme, which my own paper relied on, and which also arose in discussion of boundaries and in persons or groups moving to another place. Reactions to the urban space and to moves help create identity.

Microhistory – I hadn’t heard of this term before, but I identified it with Bathmaker’s idea of “life history” (one’s life story in its social and historical context) which I used in my own paper. Again, I think this is something that my work is exploring. The very brief mention of the gendering of history was, alongside this, also an indicator of the question of whose voice shapes our history.

Heritage feeding identity – this is a key tenet for me and it came out very strongly from many different viewpoints. This confirmation was very satisfying.

Above all, there was a joy of Northernness and a real affirmation of the value and importance of researching regional and local identity. It was a fascinating day and a great experience for me to be a part of it.

 

MA Year 2 - restarting

 

Unbelievable that the first year is already over (and that I passed it!). I haven’t had much of a break, to be honest, as I’ve been reading, writing, powerpointing and rehearsing ahead of the “Grim up North?” symposium on September 16^th. I haven’t read nearly as much as I would like, but I have read a bit around sense of place, psychogeography and constructs of Northnness. I’ll write up some critical reflections on these in due course.

 

I’m also thinking about my dissertation. I think its subject matter is going to be similar to that of the Symposium presentation, but with a wider focus. I need to think more about the idea of chance encounters within the built environment and what theory (-ies) can underpin that. I can see the dissertation taking up most of my “art” time up until Christmas but I need to think about fitting in an hour or two of visual practice each week.

MA Week 40 - Practice 1 : summary of the module

Practice 1: Progress and Reflection

This was a very practical module which had the potential to drift as it was double the length of the previous module in terms of time. It was typified by times of little activity due to personal issues (with the health of both myself and my partner’s elderly mother, both taking a lot of time and energy) and times of intense and enjoyable activity.

It was hard to restart in April but taking a number of photographs of pylons provided some good source material and I was back on track after some drawn monoprints of these. I’d made a conscious decision to try drawn monoprinting as I thought it would loosen up my cramped practice. I was right, and also the pylons have been constants in my source material since then.

As always, pivotal moments come when you least expect them. In early May I did a piece of free writing, about writing, over a monoprint of a pylon. It seemed to settle that the writing and visual were in fact two sides of the same coin. After that I felt like I’d wrestled the writing into its place, and this was confirmed by the points made and discussed at the “Tall Tales and Crooked Yarns” research forum on 15^th June, when artists discussed the use of the visual (as opposed to written) narrative. Also in early May, in a lecture by Adam Stone, he commented to the effect that you are only one actor in the creative process. This statement has kept coming back to me, and was particularly noticeable when I was monoprinting, which I’ll talk about later in this summary.

Etching a drypoint of the pylon around the same time was another key point in this module. This plate built upon the experience of the two plates I’d produced previously within the MA, and I really liked the blackness of the marks I’d made. To no small extent, I think I am learning to draw via drypoint.

For the end of year show, I decided to fall back on that with which I am more familiar, acrylic painting, and produced four abstracts. It was a risk averse strategy as I didn’t know what I could manage in terms of printing. I asked my classmates for a crit which eventually took place via Whatsapp, on the train to the drawing symposium in Salford in May, and in the symposium itself. This plus further prototyping and going back to my trusty “Encyclopedia of Acrylic Painting” meant I was well able to produce the pieces. I used two definite, limited palettes, one based on my usual Socialist black/red and the other a combination of blue/yellow/silver based on pylons under a stormy sky. This set my palette for the rest of the term, which was concerned with printing.

The opening night of the End of Year show was fantastic. Although I was very aware that my work was a definite work in progress, it was such a buzz and so much fun. This was followed by my submission of the postcards to the 1000 secret postcards exhibition in Frome, Somerset. I followed this on Twitter and it was also uplifting, positive and resulted in a few new Twitter connections in the South West. These two events represented steps forward with my professional development.

After the show, I undertook some further planning and an analysis of the time still available to me, and realised I couldn’t do both the acrylic painting and the printing that I would have liked to. I therefore took a conscious decision to concentrate on printing. I started to monoprint using the geometric shapes of the pylons and this is where Adam’s statement about being merely one actor became very apparent. I was led by the loose, visually driven process that is monoprinting. This was exciting and opened up a realisation that creativity can come when you loosen the control, as well as when you exert as much control as possible.

I used the black/red and blue/yellow/silver palettes for the printing work. This followed on from a nascent methodology from the last module, of using a palette which derives from what you’ve seen, and I like this idea. It also tied in with another couple of pivotal moments. Reading Annemarie Murland’s paper, Migration and Sense of Place: re-contextualising felt experience through creative practice, made me realise that you can allow a place to channel itself through your creative practice by your choice (or its choice??) of the colours and marks. I also had a really interesting conversation with my colleague, Dr Liz Watkins, whose research interests include colour. Liz was doing some work on some old photographic images and looking for signs of the embodied experience in which those photographs had been taken. In a Eureka moment, I realised that this is what I’d tried to do with the pylon abstracts. I felt the beginning of a kind of visual language or visual encoding – not necessarily the only visual language in which I might articulate myself – but something which had been brewing since the start of the calendar year in terms of my colour and mark use. This was a very gratifying and exciting moment!

I undertook another urban wandering, to Holbeck, to generate some new source material. Along with monoprinting, I made a new drypoint based on some of the shapes from this wandering and I combined this and the pylon drypoint with some of the monoprinting. I also used some cardboard shapes from the buildings I’d photographed on the wandering as resists and let the whole lot come together. I learnt so much during this time simply from practising the printing. I had the confidence to think what I was going to do rather than just jumping in. The results were much better. One thing I need to learn more about is the paper. One of next year’s objectives will be to learn about paper! Can’t wait! I have become addicted to printing, particularly intaglio.

I have also managed to get an abstract accepted for a symposium called “Grim up North?” on September 16^th this year. I’m really pleased about this as the theme of the conference is right up my street, to use the vernacular, and it is something I’d wanted to do since the outset of the MA but didn’t think I’d be able to. I intend to talk about trying to develop a visual language which describes the embodied experience of being a Northerner, building on the points I made earlier in this summary.

In my MA proposal, my definitive statement of my research topic was ‘to understand in more depth how I can use creative practice to depict experience that is part and parcel of the condition of “being human”’. There were many times along the way this year that I felt I was hopping around, not able to settle on any one thing, miles away from my topic. But really I’ve just been on a few exploratory pathways and I’ve now returned to it in terms of developing a visual language which attempts to describe lived experience (embodied/felt experience).

If I look back through my creative journal for this module, the source and subject material is entirely the urban landscape, and particularly the industrial, landscape (with the exception of a Yorkshire Rose from the Holbeck wandering). I’d not even noticed this - there is actually an unexpected strength of theme. Something noticeable by its absence in this module is my own image, which has hitherto been present in my practice since the Access course days. Whether I have moved on permanently from this, only time will tell, but I think the development of my use of colour and mark is possibly taking over from the need to put myself literally in the picture.

What next?

A week off after hand in to go to York Races! Then back to it. The first task will be to research and produce the paper that I will give at the Symposium on 16^th September. This is equally exciting and terrifying. I hope that that research will form the basis for the research for my dissertation. I haven’t yet finalised a title for the latter but I expect it will encompass some or all of the themes of Northernness, mark making, developing a visual language and urban wandering.

I expect that the dissertation will take up most of the time next term, but if at all possible I want to keep going into the Print Room to try to keep developing my technique. In particular, I want to learn more about etching into a ground on metal and to think about how this could work into the Practice 2 module next year.