Stalemate

I saw the remains of this hawthorn which has become impaled upon a galvanised steel fence between industrial road and rail track. The tree with its limbs pinned in the fence, scalped by the rail workers who were eating lunch by their vans down the way having just finished tidying up when I passed by, seemed to me an allegory of the embeddness of human structures in an organic world rather than the other way around. 

As an organic intervention in the metal grid requiring branches to become involved in the fence I was reminded of the failed freedom of Steve McQueen’s character in The Great Escape; caught up in razor-wire with the motorbike engine still pointlessly throbbing. I’m Generation X and this to me is an iconic image of failure of the individual despite determined action against a larger, organised and well-equipped foe. Yet we know the outcome of that war and therefore know that combined action can create freedom from tyranny. In this instance, the tree still lives and will regrow. There are small shoots of regrowth showing even as it stands chained to litter and decay. Its roots are wedded in concrete through which the railworkers will not cut. So the system that impoverishes it also saves its life. It is embedded in this landscape. It can't escape but neither will it die. It remains in an obstinate stalemate which is what I chose for its name. 

I think this is a poor framework for a future relationship with our environment. I dislike framing that as a battle as much as I am repulsed by actual violence. It is an inherited battle for survival that no side can win without sustaining loss and I think we are better to reorganise our culture around acceptance and making space for all. 

I recently read Nick Hayes' book 'Trespass' in which he recounts his own travels across several constructed barriers and the history of enclosure of land in this country. He reveals the private/public ownership of land as a vastly unfair monopoly of shared resources by the rich and a dichotomy that is visible sculpted into our landscape as field boundaries, hedges, walls and ditches. So I'm showing the (current) final print as part of a fence-like assemblage.

Because it's installed in a window it can only be viewed from two dissimilar points so I chose to put Stalemate on the inside because it is more hemmed in. 

On the side that can only be seen from outside (which you can see here) I put prints made from marks that try to transcribe birdsong above a hard-ground and aquatint print of a group of digger buckets that were being used in the same plot of land where the birds live. I suppose it is a flight of fancy, but if it is possible for me to try and write in human ways the conversation between birds, and I obviously did, then perhaps it is also possible to imagine a conversation between inanimate objects and the living. And it might be easier to do that if we comprehend that we cannot understand either of the languages of the speakers. Hense, the name of my installation is 'Other Conversations'.

I've been working on Stalemate for a while and it's taken several forms so far. Firstly, I painted it on polythene but the result was too light and flighty for such an obstinate tree.

At first drypoint versions of it were constrained by the size of my A4 press which led to a fragmented version. This has its own character and might be something I look at doing again. 

I'm planning to make a hardground and aquatint zinc-plate of it which will allow me to explore the detail and stand up to more experimentation than the plastic CadFoil version I've been using.

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.