Though the PlaceMaking work has taken something of a back seat to the The Serenity Series of recent months, I have also been invited back to Hulme History Society to re run the I Remember workshop I first delivered to them in 2011. As they have many new members who were not involved in the original session, they have asked me back to work with them again in sharing some new perspectives on the local area. This will take place in a couple of weeks, on August 14th and I shall look forward to sharing the resulting photos soon!

Just a quick one; a couple of little updates!

It’s been refreshing to get back into painting, especially as I have come up against a couple of rather frustrating dead ends in pursuing other areas of my recent practice, so while this may be the first painting I have made for a while, I have a feeling it probably won’t be the last!

Summer has certainly not disappointed in meeting expectations, in terms of both content and apparent brevity! I arrived back in the UK this weekend following a reasonably lengthy bout of travel through New Zealand, Australia, Japan and China, slightly jet lagged but freshly armed with a few updates to share!

By far the most exciting of these are the outcomes of the PlaceMaking workshops I ran with the kind support of English First language school in Dalian, Peoples’ Republic of China. I ran three workshops with different age groups of summer intensive English language students, who used the opportunity to explore the area around the school, share their thoughts about the place and practice a bit of English, sometimes in conversation inspired by the workshop, sometimes in written form on the boards themselves. As well as being available in the online gallery, photographs from the workshops will be on display at the Chinese Arts Centre in September. As well as (I hope!) being an enjoyable and valuable experience for the participants, The workshops were an exciting new opportunity for me to extend the project work beyond the shores of the UK and start to question the role that cultural and geographical differences may play in our perceptions of public space. Along with my own observations of certain key differences, the responses have allowed further reflection which will in turn fuel the evolution of the project work.

To enrich this further with some other perspectives, I paid a visit to meet the director and residency artists working at the studio of the Institute for Provocation, on my way through Beijing. The IFP is an initiative which aims to provide a physical and conceptual opportunity for sharing ideas and questioning the boundaries between different art forms. Primarily a research project at this stage, the Institute hopes to set up a free local workspace and that through making opportunities for conversations between artists, creatives and local self-employed people it will be possible to find common ground from which to recognise differences in cultural backgrounds. These differences and exchanges can then, it is hoped, be utilised in order to ‘provoke’ personal creative changes, reflections and responses.

I shared my recent work with Director Max Gerthel as well as current residence artists Maja Bekan and Angela Serino and spoke about contemporary art in Beijing; there is currently a small but dynamic creative community but this does have a clear western influence due to visiting artists and local artists who have travelled or studied outside of China. Smaller artists’ communities in the suburbs have a more traditional Chinese leaning. As well as talking about public space, we discussed the differences between Chinese approaches to art as a craft, the concept of making copies in order to achieve perfection of trade, and Contemporary Western perspectives where unique outcomes tend to be more highly valued. The former is of course not a uniquely Chinese perspective and we come dangerously close to the ‘What is Art?’ question in this territory but it was interesting to have this discussion from a new specific perspective.

I will discuss these conversations further, alongside a more in depth analysis of the recent PlaceMaking work at a scheduled presentation as part of the CRITgroup autumn programme on the 25th of September, from 7pm at MadLab, Manchester.

It will be a busy September, with the show going up at Chinese Arts Centre, open from the 10th to the 14th with a late night viewing on Thursday 12th. I will also be returning for the third time to the Wythenshawe Garden City Festival on Saturday the 14th to run a ‘Greening the City’ workshop, which will utilise practical crafts techniques to incentivise young people to explore getting their fingers a bit greener (and pinker, yellower, bluer if my experience of kids and paint is anything to go by!)

So; it is with positivity that I bring the summer of 2013 to a timely close. I find the experience of travelling exhilarating and to be able to combine this with my arts practice and educational interests is like a career dream come true; however, I can be a bit of a home body at times and it is with a deep sense of contentment that I reacquaint myself with the familiar and settle back into a routine that will see the fruits of my international work flourishing in time for harvest in Manchester this Autumn!

The next CRITgroup meeting will be on August the 28th (that’s next Wednesday for anyone reading this in ‘real time’) and I will also have an few updates to add to the This Place Is project soon… Bet you can’t guess which places they will be!

For the last few years, especially while studying, the summers have ended up being an extended period of time to ‘get more done’ rather than anything much of a break, however, this year I have finally managed to schedule a bit of an adventure. Next week I shall be leaving the UK (whatever the weather!) and going on a mission that sees me spreading myself across a couple of continents until mid-August! I’m keeping an open mind about what I might come back with but I should certainly have some interesting new inspirations in relation to public spaces and how different countries and cultures manage them. With any luck, I may even have one or two new contributions to my current projects, depending on who I bump into while exploring!

A couple of quick points before it all goes quiet though; bad news first, the UK PlaceMaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre has had to be cut short and will now only be running until September 14th. The opening event will still be held on Thursday 12th but it will all be coming down a bit quicker as they have some exciting new building works that have been moved forward.

On a more positive note, if you happen to be in Manchester at any point between now and August 11th, you could pop in to Nexus Art Café on Dale Street (Northern Quarter) to see their Happiness exhibition, in which I have four paintings!

Have a great Summer… Now where’s that Passport…?

As this is my second post for June, I don’t feel too apologetic about it being a fairly short one!

The main update is the PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops that I ran this weekend at the Magpie Thunder Bureau Pop Up as part of the Barnaby Festival. In the morning, we took the PlaceMaking boards on to the streets of Macclesfield and gathered some thoughts on local perspectives, especially in light of the recent approval of some major town centre redevelopments. This took a slightly new approach to previous sessions and rather than working as part of an existing workshop group, we approached Saturday shoppers and arts trail visitors. We got some interesting conversations going too, once we had persuaded people that we weren't trying to sell them anything!

In the afternoon, I ran a This Place Is demo session back at the Pop Up Shop and rather than asking people to complete the booklets there and then, they have been made available to take away and return. You can still collect a booklet from the shop between now and June 30th (that's at 2 Church Mews, Churchill Way, Macclesfield, SK11 6AY) and can then either drop the completed work back into the shop or post them to me using the address on the project page.

I also now have four paintings on display at Nexus Art Café as part of their Happiness exhibition and they will be up until August 11th. If you drop in for a coffee you won’t be able to miss them; they are smack bang in front of you as you come down the stairs!

This is probably my last update for a while as I am off on a globetrotting jaunt this summer; I’ll be back in time for the UK PlaceMaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre in September though and who knows what additional inspirations I shall encounter over the summer months?! No doubt the time will fly and you’ll be reading all about it soon enough!

One of the features of May was the first showing of work by members of CRITgroup, which marked the end of the first of a series of collaborative projects seeking to investigate the perceived differences between ‘art’ and ‘craft’. As this has been a feature of our conversations in several meetings, we started the collaborative projects to question how the apparent need to ‘label’ oneself as a particular kind of practitioner (a ‘photographer’, a ‘craft worker’, etc.) affects individual practices and how those descriptions of discipline relate to differing methods of producing work. The May CRITshow event was the culmination of the Creative Whispers group project, in which each collaborator began by producing an item intended to represent their practice. These were brought along to each meeting (beginning December 2013) and passed on to a new artist. The task was to respond to each piece and bring it back the following month. This pattern repeated for 5 responses, with the intention being to discuss and review the outcomes in order to research the characteristics of practice, though we also knew we would have some interesting pieces in their own right.


It was a successful day with lots of discussion and plenty of time for further collaboration. We also discussed our next project; Crafting by Committee. You can see a full account of the day with photos and find details of the new project on the CRITblog post.

That’s the main update for now, though as ever there are a few bits and pieces in the pipeline! Next weekend I shall be running Placemaking workshops at the Magpie Thunder Bureau Pop Up in Macclesfield, running as part of the Barnaby Festival. In a slightly new approach, the morning will comprise of a walkabout with the Placemaking Boards before returning to the venue in the afternoon for a second session of completing This Place Is booklets. It is hoped that this will be an opportunity for local residents in the area to creatively voice their concerns relating to major changes to the high street and commercial areas in the vicinity. There will of course be an update soon after!

I have also now confirmed dates for the UK Placemaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre. Photographs from the recent workshops will be showing from the 13th to the 21st of September.

Finally, I should like to thank all the sponsors who supported me in running the Bupa Great Manchester Run on the 26th of May. I completed the 10 km course in 45:31 and raised a total of £360 for Venture Arts, whose participants I have worked with in the initial stages of the Placemaking workshops. They will be using the cash towards a new gallery space in their venue and it’s not too late to add a few extra pennies to that total on the fundraising page!

The next SketchCrawl I will be facilitating for Nexus will be on Sunday the 5th of May (Bank Holiday weekend) and will be a fresh chance to get stuck in using the PlaceMaking boards with hopefully better weather than the last one in October!

The PlaceMaking boards also had an outing to Bolton at the beginning of the week, where pupils of Pikes Lane Primary School took part in the workshops to kick off their Arts Week on the theme of ‘Environment’. The sessions were a great opportunity for them to get started thinking about their local area by using the boards to stimulate thought and discussion of their memories, current experiences and hopes for the future of their school and local environments. It never fails to amaze me just how quickly even very young people grasp the concept of how to use the boards and there is a real mix of both fantastical and genuinely practical ideas and observations. There are a lot of images (I worked with 120 children!) but they are  worth flicking through when you have a minute as many are guaranteed to raise a smile whether or not you know the area!

Whilst that was a most enjoyable (if somewhat exhausting!) day, the cherry on the cake that has been April just has to be the PlaceMaking Workshops that I ran last week with 2 members of staff and 7 students from Hangzhou Jiangbin Vocational School (The Chinese equivalent of UK Further Education colleges) in Zhejiang Province. The educational delegation were visiting Tameside College and York St John University as part of ongoing relationships between the institutions and as I was involved in delivering an arts brief to students in Hangzhou in 2011 I was very fortunate to be able to accompany the group on their trip round the UK. Using specially made PlaceMaking boards in Mandarin (as well as a few English versions) the group allowed me to record their perspectives on the UK cities we visited. You can see all the photos here for now (with translations!) but I am also very excited to announce that they will be exhibited at the Chinese Arts Centre in September! I will be going back to China myself before then so who knows, there may even be one or two additional photos by then!

A little closer to home and the CRITgroup Creative Whispers project is drawing to a close with our last swap taking place last night. My responses for April can be found here, while the whole series for response four are on the CRITgroup pages here. We now turn our attention to organising the CRITshow one day event at MadLab on the 25th of May, which will be a conclusion but also a further investigation into the questions raised by the project; those of ownership, boundaries between disciplines and the contrasts between the sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflicting perspectives of ‘artists’ and ‘crafts people’. The event will be open to the public so I will share more details of that soon!
On the very next day, the 26th of May, I shall be running in the Manchester 10k to raise funds for Venture Arts, who you may remember I have worked with a couple of times before to run PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops for. I have never participated in an event like this before so it is going to be an interesting experience! I have been training for a few months now and am confident with the distance… it’s just the speed I am working on now!

It’s just as well I think that I managed to submit the final assessment for my Astronomy studies this month as I would be hard pressed to find a spare minute to work on it at the moment! Results for that will be out at the end of June I believe but so far, so good with my individual assignment grades. Now all I need to do is sit down and think about my wider aim; finding a way to combine my new understanding into my arts practice… Hmmmmm…. That’ll give me something to ponder while I am pounding the streets of Manchester!

I realised today that I had quite a bit to be sharing about the various things coming up throughout the year and that it felt like ages since I’d last posted an update, but I now see that actually it’s only been a month, which is about usual of late!

So first things first; some dates for the diary! We now have a date for the CRITshow; a one day event which will showcase the Creative Whispers outcomes and much of the process (which is arguably more important anyway!). We are also hoping to host a series of investigative workshops which will continue in the theme of the entire collaborative project and encourage participants to reflect on the relationship between their own practices, the disciplines they subscribe to and the work of other practitioners. We’ll use the day to explore the outcomes of Creative Whispers but will also hope it can form something of a launchpad for the next part of the project; Crafting by Committee! This is all part of the artists’ networking group I manage in Manchester by the way; If you’re not sure what that is, check out CRITgroup, we always welcome new faces!

There also two new SketchCrawl dates with Nexus Art Café approaching ever closer. The first is on Saturday April 6th and will be a two hour opportunity to become involved in the This Place Is project. We will spend an hour walking around Manchester’s Northern Quarter and drawing ‘on the hoof’ before returning to the café for tea, cake and some more time to work on the booklets, either printing photos we may have taken or adding other materials to our drawings. The outcomes will all be displayed on the online gallery and will be collated too as I hope to exhibit all the contributions physically in the future, when I have gathered a good number. If you are interested in attending, drop me a message or contact the café directly!  The following Sketch Crawl will be on Sunday May 5th (that’s the bank holiday weekend) and will be another opportunity to participate in the PlaceMaking workshops. Hopefully the weather will be a bit more clement than last time!

The following months also involve even more PlaceMaking workshops! I am hoping to work with Pikes Lane Primary School in Bolton as part of their April Arts Week on the theme of ‘Environment’(it still needs confirmation to be fair but it is looking hopeful!). We hope to use the boards at the start of the week to physically explore the local area and make a record of the pupils’ memories, perceptions and aspirations for their local environment. In June, I hope to take the workshops to Macclesfield where Magpie Thunder will be hosting a temporary arts space as part of the Barnaby Festival. We hope the workshop will be of interest to residents who would like to explore, express and record their concerns regarding proposals for retail-based town centre redevelopment in the area.

And last, but very certainly by no means least, I am looking to September with great optimism as I have just entered into planning talks with the Chinese Arts Centre in Manchester to exhibit photos from a series of PlaceMaking workshops I will be running with a group of visitors from Hangzhou Jiangbin Vocational School in April. The group is visiting Tameside College as part of on going links between the two institutions and has agreed to participate in the workshops whilst in the UK. As well as enriching the experience for the delegates, I am hoping the contrast of perspectives on public spaces across our cultures will form an important development for the whole project.

Thankfully, my final submission for the Astronomy course is at the end of April so whilst I must crack on with that in the meantime, it does mean I will be significantly freer to keep pursuing all these opportunities by the time I get there!  
 
Whew, 2013 certainly means business! I shall be back in a couple of weeks probably with updates from SketchCrawl!