Radio Public - playing and planning

I think it might be the eleventh week of this project already. Time has run on without me in terms of blogging about the Radio Public project in Dudley High Street because of various other projects and work, so this blog is an attempt to catch up.

Weeks 5 & 6 saw ideas being shared and tentative steps made between group members to try for a collaborative piece of work. Space was made within those ideas for others and they evolved. 

[oOo]!  WINDOW DRAWING  [oOo]! 

7 May saw a leap forward in communicating between us as a group and us and the High Street as we worked together on a sunny Saturday to create a drawing on the window of CoLab, which is a retail unit and therefore has a very large window. This drew passersby into conversation - some of whom ended up being drawn into the montage. Amongst the many enjoyable creative moments within this project this has been a highlight for me.

 

Me drawing my reflection

 

Helen & Rick

Helen drawing 

 

Dan drawing 

 

Rachel drawing 

Small Things and Elena's flowers

Bill curating The Observation Radio Station

We got to test a number of methods and materials for making marks on glass and everything we did will feed into later work because we plan to create another montage on the window for the Radio Public Art Festival, July 9th.

Weeks 7, 8, and some of week 9, saw Helen and Bill helping us to test and commit to our plans, working with us to grow our confidence where that was needed.

During weeks 9, 10 and 11 ideas were still evolving. Things always change between the place where they are in your head to the place where you can poke them. 

We had to dismantle our lovely window drawings and clear up to make room for another event, so what once looked like quite a large store cupboard when we started filled up with work and materials. And so has a display space at the back of CoLab, which has become a sort of test-ground for the final exhibition.

[oOo]!  RADIOS  [oOo]!

Bill and Helen have been playing with radios and making radios for a while. Building them in ways to express their multifaceted idea of radio in its widest sense. They made a point of inviting the rest of us to join them to make more, and now there are many more radios! These are two of mine. 

This one makes a sound. This one is aromatic!

Our group has begun to expand. Now we all knew more about the project and how it would work, Bill and Helen challenged us to think of and invite other artists to join us. We also experienced a few delightful enquiries from passersby who dropped in.

[oOo]!  HIGH STREET TEXTURES  [oOo]!

It might have been Week 6 when Rachel and I decided that we would bite the workshop-bullet and collaborate on a three-hour workshop around textures on the High Street. Doing this ahead of the actual festival would hopefully kick start some creativity and generate some public interest. 

Rachel has been making exquisite little hand-drawn illustrated artist books for some time and it was clear these would be very effective. On the other hand, I had a stock of heat stamps that I'd never used but was sure they be fun to experiment with, would be fairly accessable to most people and would create images that could feed into later projects. However, we had to make sure they worked and that heating them up was safe enough to do with a group. 

So we set a date to try them out a Tuesday meeting and the results were pretty good. Easy to use, they never got too hot to burn skin (even the one that partially melted) and the prints on unbleached cotton fabric produced a pleasing mid-20th Century aesthetic. They provided a base for some lovely artist books by Rachel and Rick.

 

One of the best things about the stamps is that they can be reheated and reused - even the melted one.

The resulting workshop went fantastically with our participants and we plan to run it again at the festival on the 9 July when our plan for the patterned fabric we have created will also become apparent.

[oOo]!  RADIO IN THE WIDEST SENSE  [oOo]!

While we were messing around with paint and ink several other members of our group continued with their own projects. Amongst these are a piece of street theatre and a radio play, a choral work and sound piece made in the church at the top of the High Street, as well as other dialogic works in various formats. I hope to include more about them in subsequent posts and will provide links to works where I can.

Can we land on earth?

I have recently read ‘Can we land on earth’ an interview with Bruno Latour by Line Marie Thorson, which is resonating hugely with me, worth saying ahead because so I’m communicating with you through that lens in this post. It's been one of those affirmative reads for me. 

As an artist my ‘material’ is ‘matter.’ I also work with with a portion of our planet that Latour calls ‘Critical Zone ~ the membrane that goes a few kilometres up and a few kilometres down.’ 

 

Matter expands infinitely into nature; which is everything. This immediately causes in me a feeling of stretching dismemberment quickly followed by anxiety about reconnecting so that I may become re-entangled with other earth matter. I feel I must somehow learn to engage with this reentangling urge.

 

So I work with materials I find in the pre compost layer. This is the becoming-critical upper zone, the layer visible underfoot and overlooked. Searching for understanding of what it is to be entangled. Deliberately trying to move observation downwards to reveal human affectivity in the soil. 

 

Like Latour, I “take a field site and try to understand as much as I can.” My first project was the mass housing estates being built on top of greenfield secondary terracotta deposits near home. Then there was suburban to urban Coventry which was also subject to re-modelling. These projects remain ongoing. 

 

I’m a fan of focus over distance.  I think you can learn so much from close looking at what is quite near.  Latour speaks of the amazing differences between specific places: ‘When you are on the earth-system, every single kilometre, metre and centimetre is different, and they confront and enhance the heterogeneity of the critical zone.’ My material/matter is specific and local. I revisit and note how things change next to other things changing. 

 

Actually, the scale at which my observations operate are getting smaller and smaller. So you could say my material is shrinking, but at the same time I experience a personal stretching and expanding as my knowledge grows, and then a further shrinking as I realise my enmeshment as a living being in the earth system followed by expansion with conjecture at the ramifications of my choices working on that system.

 

It’s important for us to know where life is and how it is affected. 

Mainly working at ground level means I work with waste; plant, creature and human. Working through a project about urban litter, notwithstanding my anger and disgust, I formed a conclusion that every living thing drops things. 

 

Parts of bodies fall to the ground constantly within our ecosystem. 

What falls matters. 

 

What is dropped becomes indelibly connected to others – after all, the ground is our grand and ultimate point of contact with each other. Gravity brings us together. However, we must conclude that human beings have lost the knack of dropping. Where trees are experts, we fail.

 

Working with ground level means I frequently grapple with the aesthetic problem of the small and mundane in art, in a culture that like the big and shiny rather too much. And this is where I feel kin with Latour, who calls it the ‘representational crisis representing Gaia.’ I feel my work is part of a cultural movement towards ‘rediscovering earth – reinventing what it is to have soil – and learning to find our ground.’ Landing on earth and still looking down carefully.

Two Printing Workshops

I’m rather breaking the mold this week in running two workshops!

On Friday there is Print Sculpture in Coventry, and on Saturday there is High Street Textures in Dudley, which I am co-running with artist Rachel Massey.

I'm posting this here more for a point of documenting my practice development, but if you happen along to this page in time and want to come along, contacts are:

Print Sculpture, Coventry: Coventry Artspace

High Street Textures: Helen or Bill at workshop24