Surveilling Place - Transcription

Since I didn't press record properly on one of my visits to the piece of land I’m currently studying I decided to visually map a recording of my prior visit. This is it below. 

I spoke a lot in the recording and it was impossible to resist transcribing directly. The closest I got to my original mark-making intention appears in the bottom right hand quadrant which is from when I was sitting on the bank of the brook watching midges in an air current above the water and listening to a pair of chiffchaffs sing their repeating song to each other - 'Chiff-Chaff' - as in their onomatapoetic name. The abstract dots turned out to look a little like the midges which were using updraft from the stream to circle back into their throng. I thought it might work as a drypoint.

Here are some of the first proofs.

The paper was a bit too damp at the bottom which is why the marks are fluffly and smudged. Although I liked this reference to water, overall they lack a balance between boldness and accuracy of mark making. 

Shortly after this I started a course in intaglio printing at Leicester Print Workshop and picked up some tips; I needed to scratch the plate on top of a harder surface rather than leaning the plate on cutting mat and when I re-cut it the results were much improved.

Next steps:

I'm really taken with this idea for exploring sensorial space to produce an abstract image as it is accessable and there is no really wrong way of doing it. I like drawing without a sense of impending failure! So I'm developing an experimental workshop to share it. 

City Arcadia in Coventry is going to be redeveloped at the end of this year which is felt keenly amongst artists in the city because it currently contains precious exhibition space alongside various other small business, charities and community ventures who are going to lose their units. So, although the buildings have already been widely captured photographically, I think capturing a personal visual response to audible sensations of a space would be of value. I will publish that Eventbrite via Coventry Artspace and put the link in here when it is ready. 

Surveilling Place 2

On April 29th I decided to explore the part of Tachbrook Country Park I didn’t last time and try to find the footpath from Bishops Tachbrook shown on this OS six-inch 1888-1913 map to compare where the path starts now. 

It was sunny, warm and slightly muggy so as the air quality felt poor I walked there away from the main road through the three year old housing development at Tachbrook Mallory.  I've decided to audio record all of my visits so I started recording as soon as I hit the boundary at the alley joining Landor Road and finished it an hour later by Tach Brook.  I don't quite know what I'm going to do with all this sound - but at least I shall have it!

I did find a footpath eventually but I think the route might have altered quite a bit which explains the DC comment on Facebook over whether to make a decision to reinstate it. Later on it joined with the country park path across a dyke where there was this dilapidated single iron girder 'bridge'. I dithered a bit before crossing it because it had rusted quite badly but it was strong enough to hold my weight.

On the other side I sat by the brook for a time and watched the midges and the sunlight glinting off the water for long enough then walked around and up the meadow I missed out last time. To one side this is still occupied by development from the road right down to the dyke, separated off by a fence that splits in half a mysterious circle of blue posts, one of which had been decorated with a flowerpot.

By the fence I took a few photos of sculptural construction paraphernalia inside the development compound, including a group of digger buckets.

As soon as I left the border of the park I came across this bin overloaded with poo bags. It's obvious to me that dog owners are making an attempt to be tidy but the council has not kept up with them. It would be nicer if they could take the poo home with them!

Damage to land and habitat would be much harder to repair than prevent. Transfer of property deeds between the developers and the District Council needs to happen soon so that better waste facilities can be installed, otherwise this disgusting mess will spread, and ruin what is currently a fairly clean space.  

surveilling place

Tachbrook Country Park

I'm starting a new project connected to my Silverhouses project from 2018-19 which grew from exploring housing development near my home in Whitnash, on the Southern edge of Leamington Spa. It's 2022 now, the 4,000 new houses promised have now mostly been built and, at last, a strip of low-lying land around the periphery will be handed over to the District Council and made into a country park called Tachbrook Country Park. Pretty plans for community gardens, paths, playgrounds and scattered orchards have been published and signs warning 'Private Land Do Not Enter Until Land Is Transferred' have been erected next to already worn footpaths.  

I'm interested in human impact on land, on changing land use, on sharing / not sharing land with non-human lives, territory, boundaries, entangled lives, waste, litter, traces of human inhabitation. Silverhouses was inspired by anger and incredulity over imposition of human global capitalism on green belt land, and of litter and construction waste infiltrating it, and in that light this new activity seems conciliatory and hopeful. I wonder what I will find over the next few years. 

I spent 2 hours wandering around. Orienting myself and getting a view of a space. The terrain currently varies between grass-land and bog by the spinny and stream. There are three soak-aways providing clay-banked ponds - one of which is large. As yet these seem to be the only areas that have experienced much intervention and planting. There are a couple of mainly hawthorne, elder and blackthorne copses that look ignored - I can tell this by the lack of litter. Overall, except from by the hedge between the houses and stream that catches litter in the wind and is on the main dog-walking stretch, there is little litter. By the copses the land is squashy, almost like a moor in parts, which shows it hasn't been trampled much. I hope pathways can help keep it this way as these parts are rich in diverse life.

The stream also is clean, and clear with collapsed mature willow trees that are creating pools I suspect these were originally planted for whithy growing. There are rodent holes in the muddy bank. I suspect these are rat holes but need to do more research to confirm that.

This is one of the first properly warm days of spring and therefore there are lots of newly hatched butterflies - I spotted brimstone, tortoiseshell and peacocks - and lots of bees.

I didn't come prepared to make a collection on this visit, instead I recorded all of my two hour walk - there is an excerpt on my Soundcloud - but I did rescue a 2m square bundle of HDPE caught in the hedge which may come in handy for a future work.

On my next visit I plan to carry out a square metre survey over a couple of different kinds of terrain.