Week 1, Beginnings
"Something is beginning to happen here at Radio Public, so exciting! Week 2 at @colabdudley #social #art #Dudley" @goodlifecic
This April, following an exciting exchange of ideas and backgrounds on zoom, I signed up for a new project based in CoLab, Dudley High Street. To be part of an emerging community of practice in Dudley, facilitated by social artists Helen Garbett and Bill Laybourne of Workshop24 culminating in a festival of art in the High Street on July 9th.
Focusing on ways to change Dudley High St for the better, Radio is the project's means of transmission and reception, with a wide and flexible intention of making the inaudible audible; explicitly opening up space.
I'm attracted by opportunities to explore somewhere strange to me in ways that are not fixed, with the idea that I might create some kind of art that is site-specific - and I welcome a public deadline as this often helps art to actually happen. It also feeds my will to experiment. There are seven of us in the group including Bill and Helen, with a wide range of practice; including playwriting, sound art, visual art and animation, which holds all kinds of possibilities for future collaborations.
I'm still recovering from Covid, which has pretty much wiped me out, therefore as I couldn't attend the first week's meeting at CoLab, I sat at the end of a zoom call and felt a bit out of things. About halfway through, subjects of dialogue, evesdropping and documentation came up in conversation, and I felt in the right place on the edge of things with this half-view in that I had, to play around with documenting our start as a group. So I ended up tearing up my notes and started making a tower of torn paper written with half-sentences and comments I could hear. Some funny, some portentious, some hopeful, some exciting, some surreal - 'Are we the deer or the little old lady?' It was a fun way to be involved. Next day I machine-sewed them together into the washing line that we are holding in the pic. This began my route into the project.
Week 2, Percolation over flow
By the time week 2 arrived I was well enough again to drive up from Leamington and meet everyone for real. This week was slated for a psychogeographic Derive (aka 'a pookle,' aka 'a pootle,' aka ' a wander about') of the High Street, which is just outside the door to CoLab. Helen primed us to look for water and the skies handily provided!
We split up into small groups and Helen and I wandered off down an alley by the side of the Wetherspoon's Full Moon Pub. This is a smooth cobbled alleyway, a typical transitional space, meant to be always passed through and never dwelt in, however I find these spaces often reveal the character of places better than the polished up frontages, and typically, given Dudley's abundant past it did display a magnificent wealth in architectural textures and objects from life being lived.
As usual my Derives tend to be short and full of intense examination so we didn't get much further than the alley in the time we had, and I could easily have spent twice as long there.
Now I have to admit that I totally forgot that our aim was supposed to be sound-based and captured instead a host of visual images and relatively few sounds - and those I have are mainly trickling, dripping water - attractive in itself. It makes me wonder if perhaps my input into our collaboration can be around visually conveying sound - how is listening signposted otherwise?
At the end of the alley at the back of the pub sat a small collection of shiny kegs and on the other side a piece of fenced verdant wasteground, full of plastic litter, cans, brightly coloured broken signs, several species of plant life, and snails; as we discovered back at CoLab when a tiny and perfect snail rode across my notebook. I'd unknowingly brought it in on a fragment of concrete I'd collected and brought back to show the others. It was duly returned to its High St home.
So there is another week to explore before we need to discuss ideas. So in the meantime, and to help me think through my ideas from this position of stranger/visitor, I've decided to continue with my route of documenting. I don't know where this will lead me, but it is a way of generating work and research can sometimes just continue in doing until it becomes something bigger - or it comes to a natural end and makes space for something else.
If you were to explore like a tiny snail
If you were to listen to the rhythms of the street
If you were to follow the flow of water
If you allowed splashes of pink paint
If you let keg tops become ponds
If abandoned corners became forests
If you straightened up like drainpipes
If your art deco bricks became museums
If you let drain covers became your television
If you used puddles to look up
…
If you were to listen like the High Street.
If you explored like a tiny snail
and followed the flow of water
If you allowed splashes of pink paint
let keg tops be ponds
and abandoned corners be forests
If you straightened up like drainpipes
Let your art deco bricks became museums
and drain covers became your television
If you let trickles of rainwater become necklaces
and used puddles to look up.
If your skin was brick and your feet sprayed with piss
and your eyes glowed yellow at night.
If you let in the ancient creature above your brow
and combed the moss between your teeth.
