April was a busy month for a variety of reasons but one of the main things that seemed to take up most of my time and head-space since my last update in March was my first ever attempt at running a marathon.  I did this on the very clement April 6th at the Asics Greater Manchester Marathon and in so doing aimed to raise money to fund arts workshops to be delivered to users of mental health charity Imagine. This is a local charity, based in Liverpool but with ongoing work nearer to Manchester in Salford too. I was keen to support a small organisation as I believe this means donations go further and one of the additional benefits of doing so is that it is possible to work closely with staff to ensure the cash goes exactly where you want it to. Having raised over £400 for Venture Arts last year by running a 10k race (my first of those too!) I thought I’d push it a bit and set a target of £500. I was absolutely delighted that I managed to inspire such generosity from friends and colleagues alike who between them have smashed that target absolutely to pieces by more than doubling it. It was then lovely to receive a thank you card and letter from the charity director and arts group service users and even better because what I didn't realise is that the existing arts group for Imagine is actually based in Liverpool, not Salford. They are now however, in a position to use the money we raised to initiate a whole new programme for delivering arts workshops in Salford which is a massive deal in this age of budget cuts for the arts and for health and I feel confident that my supporters have really truly made a difference to individual lives without their donations getting sucked in to a huge charity with massive overheads and generic budgets. If you are interested in more details about race day, you can read the update I wrote for the charity on their own blog page.

Though we're almost one twelfth of the way through 2014 already, I've been easing gently into the new year with one of my first ventures in a contribution to project two thousand and fourteen. This is an artist led initiative in which each day of the year, a different visual practitioner submits a new 2D outcome based on a main news story for that date. The idea is to finish the year with a visual record of the main issues and events. Having agreed to submit a piece on January the 13th, I chose to respond to the funeral of Ariel Sharon because I felt his death was quite important globally and no one had yet recorded it in the project. It was quite a challenge as I know very little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and so don't feel informed enough to have a particular opinion on it. The thing that jumped out at me the most about this figure however, was just how divisive he was both in terms of opinion and physicality with the construction of the wall in Gaza, so I have tried to record that instead of leaning towards any political bias.

Seeing this as a good opportunity for some student involvement too, I worked with the project organisers to agree January the 22nd as a date to submit the outcome of a collaborative response from a one day intensive workshop run with second year National Diploma students at Tameside College. The group gelled well on the day and worked hard to generate this outcome based on the Syrian peace talks in Geneva.

One project that has been on a back burner for some time is the cryptically titled Cupcake Karma venture and January 2014 has also seen the first physical realisation of this. As it had been no more than ideas on paper for so long, it seemed the ideal candidate to trial as part of the second CRITgroup collaboration, Crafting by Committee. The collaboration is interested in identifying the contrasts between different artistic practices and so I was required to pursue the project with some specific instructions from my peers in response to an initial proposal. The Cupcake Karma project is especially concerned with the concept of trust and aims to harness the power of cake to facilitate positive interactions between strangers in the city, in this case, the residents of the other apartments on my floor, who I very rarely see, let alone speak to. The instructions I was given by the CRITgroup committee included the constraint that I was not allowed to make verbal contact with my selected recipients and that I had to include sound recording in my documentation of the results. As such, I approached the whole thing in a slightly different way than I might otherwise have done (which is exactly the point!) and produced a video diary to record the outcomes. It’s about fifteen minutes and you can watch it on the main project page. Though the work  has been live online for a couple of weeks now, I will present it at the concluding Crafting by Committee session on the 29th as part of my project summary presentation and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the group thinks of it!

Next up on the Glittermouse mission is the exhibition of prints from the Peaceful Places collection, which will be on display from February 17th at The Earth Café in the Manchester Buddhist Centre. These are now printed, mounted and ready to hang so I’m looking forward to getting them out to a new audience!




In other areas, having enjoyed the success of my first ever race raising money for Venture Arts last May in the Bupa Great Manchester Run , I am now in training to complete the ASICS Manchester Marathon in April. As much of my time will be taken up with training, there might not be any huge leaps forward on the arts front for a little while but I will still be raising cash for an arts related cause, asking for donations to Imagine Mental Health who work locally in Salford. One of the benefits of working with such a small charity, as well as being more locally focussed, is that I get to be involved in exactly what happens to the money raised and in this case it will be put towards delivering arts workshops to those using the service. So far, so good, and I managed to run 19 miles out to Ashton-Under-Lyne and back last weekend so I’m sure those last 7.2 will be just a doddle; Not! Better stop rambling out this blog post and get my trainers on! Whoosh..!

Blog posts must be like buses… There I was just a week ago thinking I hadn’t had much to share for a while and suddenly two updates seem justifiable in the space of less than a fortnight!

Last time I mentioned the Peaceful Places series of photographs, some highlights of which will be exhibited at The Earth Café in the Manchester Buddhist Centre. I now have a date confirmed for that and will be hanging the prints on the 17th of February. I am not yet sure of the details of any opening event but will of course publicise any details as soon as they are agreed! As well as being able to purchase the full set of 35 images in book format, it will also be possible to order 30x30cm photographic prints from the exhibition. These are also available now for postal order.

In addition to that good news, I was even more excited to receive a package from China through the post at the end of last week, contained within which were some new submissions to the This Place Is project! These are now all uploaded on their own gallery page which has pride of place at the top of the contributions!

It must just be a generally arty week; CRITgroup meets tomorrow evening and I am looking forward to hearing what everyone has been up to as well as seeing the progress people have made as part of our second collaboration; Crafting by Committee! I hope the group finds my own contributions appetising!

It feels like an age since my last update; two whole months already!? Whilst it would be fair to say I have been enjoying some kind of down time on the arts front I have also been in ‘facilitation’ phase for a couple of projects which means all background work and not yet much to show for it!

The most currently developed of these is a bit of a tangent from my ‘main’ practice; following my summer travels, I realised that many of the photographs I had taken, whilst not being directly involved in the PlaceMaking project work, still referenced my instinctive interest in place. As some of my travelling was work related anyway, much of the time I spent whilst not engaged in these activities was concerned with the pursuit of relaxation (not an unusual thing to say about the summer!) and this was equally reflected in the photographs I took.

I have since selected a series of these that are now available in self-published format under the title Peaceful Places. The highlights from this collection will also be on display in February at The Earth Café in the Manchester Buddhist Centre, where it will be possible to purchase individual prints. I will be posting more specific details on that in the near future.

CRITgroup has also picked up again after the summer and following the September talk I gave on my work in China, October saw the start of the second collaboration in our ongoing research project into the differences between ‘arts’ and ‘crafts’ practices. CRITlaboration 2; Crafting by Committee runs until the end of the year and involves individual practitioners responding to each other’s project proposals with the aim of identifying and challenging ‘personality traits’ in the practices of respective disciplines.

You can find out more and see details of my own (delicious) proposals in the CRITgroup pages of this site.

On a less creatively self-indulgent front, I have been taking the first steps in setting up a virtual exchange following reflections on and recommendations for the future of the PlaceMaking project work. I have been in conversation with HomeShop, an artists’ initiative in Beijing, and am now looking for participants to become involved. If you are interested, check out the full specifications and drop me a message!

That’s all for now; it just remains to enjoy the last few bites of 2013 whilst leaving plenty of room for all that the new year holds! Eat up!

A quick update for September, just to say that he latest phase of the PlaceMaking work is now all wrapped up since I collected the photographic prints from Chinese Arts Centre yesterday. The show ran throughout the week with an evening opening on Thursday the 12th, at which I enjoyed talking to visitors and receiving lots of positive feedback.

If you are interested in reading more about the background to and my analysis of the project outcomes, you can now find an evaluative write-up on the Critical Documentation pages of this site. Alternatively, if listening is more your style than reading and you happen to be close to Manchester, I shall be giving a presentation about the work at CRITgroup on September the 25th and will be covering many of the critical points! Always looking forward, I’ll also give detail of proposals for the next steps planned in developing the project!

In other news, on Saturday, I enjoyed participating in the Wythenshawe Garden City Festival for the third year running with a slightly different crafts workshop for 2013! This year, crafty visitors made their own recycled tin plant pot so they could play their part in keeping Wythenshawe a green Garden City.

I have also now published my own contribution to the This Place Is project; This Place Is Summer 2013. Having spent so much time exploring other parts of the world this year, it seemed pertinent to complete a few booklets to both record my experiences and add to the project gallery. Interestingly, I wouldn’t have expected to feel a need for the fifth and final booklet of the set before I left the UK. I learnt a lot about other parts of the world but I also learnt a lot about the concept of ‘home’!

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!

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!