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.

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.