Mapping Sloughing

I'm studying MA Contemporary Art & Archaeology part-time and therefore my attention has been taken up with lots of writing in a journal and not so much on the blog. It has been very absorbing and helpful. Leading me to think about the found object collections I make and subsequent assemblage works as a kind of conceptual mapping. Not in any way topographical or geographical representations of space, but how feelings about being in certain spaces and how this related to how I thought the objects I found gathered together.

For this recent open studio I constructed a hanging hoizontal grid and played around with a couple of older collections I'd made quite near the studio. Mapping, now realigned, enabled things in the map to relate to each other as well as to my memory of how I found them. Different species of maple leaves were kept apart, pine needles formed a row like the row of pine trees alongside the trainline from whence they came, plastic headphone casing cradled smashed headlight plastic because I thought of how that might sound that whenever I saw them. But there were visual groupings that related only to each other - circles and colour related maps that were woven into the whole - where I was thinking about those collecting walks, archaeologists call them 'walkover surveys', where the first thing I'd picked up became set a key for all the other things I was drawn to subsequently.

Adding an Arduino powered servo which hit the grid repeatedly made all the things move and shimmer and I amused myself during the day with adding more things and changing the tempo of the servo. It didn't take much might to make everything in the grid move just a little bit - some pushed a little each time until they fell off. 

I seemed to have re-attuned myself over the day. That night I didn't sleep well, constantly visualising little bits of stuff vibrating. Kept catching sight of things possibly moving out of the corner of my eye. Fortunately it only lasted one night!

Since this, I've been thinking more about mapping and specific experience of place. I've been limiting my collections to one walkover and then seeing what I can make. This has co-incided with the seasonal dropping of tree and shrub twigs - they dropped their leaves in January - which is fine material to make grids with. I have dogwood, birch and mistletoe. And I've gone back to using scanners as a way to document and create further grids to accentuate the action of watching and recording.

Radio Public: 'At Home On The High Street'

Here are a few images of Radio Public Art Festival held on Dudley High Street July 9 2022. This is all from the beginning of the day. I wish we had more photos but we got too busy to take them.

Radio Public happened as art festival in a variety of ways, including a found-sound MixCloud radio programme, street theatre, visual art and workshops. We called the sound-scape exhibition 'At Home On The High Street' because it describes how we wanted Dudley High Street to be felt as a space not as it currently is - but warm, cuddly and a bit silly - completely different to a normal day!

 Rachel setting up the Textures Printing Workshop

 The Observation 'Radio' Station displaying a collection of old radios.

 Some results from explorative Textures Workshops

The Observation 'Radio' Station again.

Textures workshop 'gallery' showing works made by passersby who dropped in and had a play at printing with us.

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.

Artist on My Street Audio Guide in Coventry

One of my recent projects is programming the audio guide for Coventry ArtSpace's Artist on My Street. We are now midway through the project to spread the work of local artists and brighten up the windows of community projects and centres throughout Coventry's suburbs and Warwickshire. and there are Artists on Your Street as far afield as Stratford's Ken Kennett Centre and Bedworth Leisure Centre.

It was a joy to make my print sculpture for Crow Recycling in Hillfields and equally interesting to listen in to the voices of the other artists in the project talk about their work, their inspiration and their relationships to the communities where their work is shown.

This is the link to the audio guide in Echoes that can be listened to on-location on your phone while viewing the artworks - just select the relevant one from the list.

https://explore.echoes.xyz/collections/L3m0WzACqu0RdzSQ

You can read more about the works here and apply for the next round of commissions: Coventry Artspace Artist on My Street 3rd Round Open Call - Deadline Monday 31 Jan 2022.

Crow Papers

Listen on Soundcloud: SOUNDCLOUD

 

This is Crow Papers, which I installed last week at Crow Recycling Scapstore. It's part of a programme of commissions by visual artists based in Coventry designed to bring visual art out of Coventry City of Culture into the suburbs of Coventry and towns of Warwickshire. It's affliated with Coventry City of Culture and run by Coventry Artspace - who've been brilliant. I'm really grateful to have had the chance to make this work and to get to know Crow Recycling, who are lovely and are a great resource of artist materials.

So I have to deeply apologise for creating yet another artwork that is difficult (read - impossible) to photograph as one whole thing without getting all manner of things in the background of the shot, but nevermind, the sun was shining intermittantly on the day of install, so I managed to get some photos of detail.

I've been involved in the Artist on My Street project from the beginning of all the commissions as producer of the audio guide that features each of the artist windows. So, for a change I'm not going to go into great detail here about the work as I have created both an onsite audio guide via Echoes LINK (It's a free app and you can be there or listen offline) and also a longer personal podcast on Soundcloud - which is my first podcast, so we will have to see how that goes.

However, here are some of my research photos from October this year, of inside Crow and around about Hillfields.

Hillfields is an area with a number of economic and social challenges to its fabric, but that in itself presents an interesting subject, especially since the places where other species interact are usually where humans are not, or where we have left untidy spaces, therefore I consider Hillfields to be quite rich in diversity because of its unkemptness, and I really enjoyed my hours spent exploring there. 

A few photos of the work in production. The silvery stuff is an insulation board left from my Silverhouses project. It's been really useful to use as a guide for layout and I really miss not using them in the actual installation. Sadly, it's about 2.5 inches thick and there is no room at the bottom of the stairs at Crow.