I’ll dispense with the ‘Where the heck did January go!?’ comments and since we’re now half way through February get on with sharing some highlights of what has been happening in the weeks since my last update!

On the 26th of January, I was invited to participate in an artists’ networking event at Blank Space in Manchester. This was part of The Verb Project’s In-Between residency, and encouraged artists to engage in mini site-specific collaborations. This was a great opportunity to dust off the Placemaking Boards and I was genuinely pleased with the results of the day, which included some exciting developments (no pun intended!) in the temporary dark room that had been set up in the space. You can find out more about the day and see four sets of photographs here.

CRITgroup continues to go from strength to strength and having shared our first responses to the Creative Whispers project  at the January meeting, (these can be viewed here) we are just two weeks away from sharing our second. My own response takes inspiration from a series of sketches, painted samples and photographs inspired by the repetition and concealing qualities of brick as interpreted from one of the original starting points. When discussing these, the artist I ‘inherited’ the work from briefly mentioned the concept of ‘bricking up’ memories and so I have moved a bit outside of my comfort zone with this one and used it as an opportunity to try expressing (or bricking up!) my emotional responses to some current personal difficulties. This was something of a departure from my usual way of working which doesn’t tend to be very self-referential and whilst I did find the process somewhat cathartic, I am really not sure I am either happy with the outcome or comfortable with the idea of sharing it. Still, in the interests of the creative experimentation that the project aspires to, there it is, in all its slightly adolescent glory! I have used envelopes to form the ‘background’ in a brick pattern, each of which contain fragments of various documents that relate to the aforementioned challenges that I am currently experiencing. On to these has been sketched a portrait of a family member who is involved in some of these with me, but the envelopes and the portrait have been ‘bricked up’ using fragments of the samples I was given. There is also a photographic reference to a friend who recently died unexpectedly. Despite my misgivings about the personal nature of the piece, I am intensely curious to see if the person who takes it on after me will be brave (or nosey!) enough to ‘un-brick’ the contents of the envelopes or whether a sense of moral duty to allow me my privacy will prevent it! Something of a risk on my part but one guaranteed with a very interesting outcome nonetheless!

In addition, we have been pleased to contribute details of our work on Creative Whispers so far to the Patternotion book, a project by Alban Low which seeks to document the various systems for creativity and living that many artists and creative types impose upon themselves in order to facilitate progress. This seemed to be a pretty good description of the CRITgroup in general but of the Creative Whispers project especially, and so we were happy to send along a bit of ‘work in progress’. This can be viewed on the project Picasa album.


That’s about all for now; the days are getting longer, the weather’s getting warmer… (Well, It isn’t actually but we can dream) and the next SketchCrawlevents at Nexus draw a little nearer ever day!

So September did not disappoint in its characteristic tendency to be one of the busiest months of the year! To be perfectly honest, the last few weeks have been something of a difficult time with a strange mix of both personal and professional highs and lows. However, concentrating on the professional, the lows (a couple of rejected applications) do not negate the highs and so it is on those that I am pleased to focus.

On the 15th of September I returned to Wythenshawe for my second year at the Garden City Festival and the second incarnation of the developed crafts workshop The Best Thing About My City Is. I first ran this at the Wythenshawe Games Festival in July this year, however it is based on my contribution to Wythenshawe Garden City Festival 2011; My City Would Be Better With. I’m pleased to report that this year was just as popular as last (in fact it felt even busier!) and you can see the contributions from both the Best Thing… workshops here.

Hot on the heels of that event, I was glad to revisit some old friends at Venture Arts and took along some This Place Is booklets for one of the groups to have a look at. I visited for a total of four hours across a period of two weeks and really appreciated their thoughtful and careful input to the project which gives a completely different (and generally far less local) perspective on the project. You can see their contributions in the dedicated Venture Arts; This Place Is gallery.

Upcoming events include not just the on-going CRITgroup gatherings (last month we had an excellent speaker in Hannah Mosley and look forward to welcoming Jo Scorah in October) but a couple of other dates for the October diary.

On Sunday October 28th I will be running a new Placemaking workshop as part of Nexus Art Café’s SketchCrawl programme. The session will be an opportunity to use the Placemaking Boards as seen in the recent Hulme Workshops in Manchester’s Northern Quarter. The workshop will begin at 3pm and take a leisurely meander through the streets around Nexus before arriving back at 4.30 for refreshments and a discussion of the afternoon. The session costs £4, the price of which includes coffee and cake as well as PDF copies of your contributions and your work displayed online at www.glittermouse.co.uk. Sounds like a bargain for any aspiring urban artists to me!

If you fancy getting involved in the project but can’t make the 28th, there’s another opportunity to use the Placemaking Boards on the afternoon of the 31st (that’s a Wednesday) when MidConversation collective will be taking their recent contribution to the Free For Arts Festival out of the gallery space and into an as yet undisclosed location for a bit of urban intervention. The Placemaking boards will again make an appearance as a tool for facilitating conversation and photographically recording the event in the streets of the Northern Quarter. I’ll publicise more information about that as soon as I have it.

A couple of miscellaneous things to leave you on, firstly, this rather charming picture of a particularly chuffed Julian Birtwell, who informally commissioned me to brighten up some glass for displaying his wood turned bottle holders at various events around the Greater Manchester area. I’ve not done any glass painting myself for such a long time that it was rather refreshing to have a reason to dig the paints out outside of workshop times!

Secondly, returning to the aforementioned personal and far sadder note, I have dug out this silly digital illustration that I submitted to the Newschool Graphics competition at Sundown 2010. It was a hasty reworking of a Halloween party invite and aside from being something of an ‘insider joke’, features portraits of a couple of my very best friends including (second from the front) the irreplaceable Giles Constant.

I met Giles in 2002 whilst doing a boring office job less than a year after leaving Uni. I used to sit on the front desk, drawing whilst failing to hide my disinterest in office workers’ holiday allowances, however being an incredibly inclusive person, he soon invited me to the pub and quickly became one of my best friends. His social and intellectual enrichment of my life ever since through introductions to various concepts such as the demoscene and the idea that maths could in fact be beautiful, has made a real and meaningful impact on the person I am today.

He died suddenly last week and I don’t believe I have yet even begun to deal with it. I don’t normally include personal reflections on this site but this seems of sufficient gravity to justify it.

My world, and those of the many other lives he influenced, will simply never be quite the same again.

Rapidly approaching the end of yet another ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ summer, this really is the end of the road for the holidays as I return to work this week. Just as well really as there will be a new group of first year Level 3 Art and Design students demanding my full attention in less than a week and I have but three work days left to prepare for them!

Other little bits of news include the continued existence of CRITgroup which has kept itself up though out the summer. Attendance has been a little more sparse than I might have liked but with speakers lined up for September and October I’m hoping that it’ll pick up a bit when everyone is back from their summer breaks.

Last but not quite least, (and this doesn’t seem like entirely the right place to share my final update but it’s also quite fundamental to my long terms plans and philosophies on creativity generally) last year (after finishing the MA) I enrolled on an evening course to re sit my GCSE Maths. I had multiple reasons for doing that, not least of which was a growing desire to prove wrong anyone who had ever hinted, asserted, assumed or stated that if one is capable in areas of visual arts that one must be necessarily less able in areas perceived to be unrelated (or vice versa). I didn’t complete the full GCSE courses when I was at school because I experienced health problems during much of the last three years of Secondary education and despite gaining A-C grades in everything else, only managed a D in Maths. When I enrolled, I was placed onto the Foundation course (you can achieve grades F-C on the exam) but was moved onto the Higher paper after a few months (meaning it is possible to be awarded A-D) and was predicted to achieve a B. Despite wondering what the hell I was doing on more than one occasion, I managed to bend my brain around various totally new concepts and can only describe myself as being utterly shocked to discover last week that I had in fact managed to achieve an A grade. This should have prepared me well for my next educational project; I am hoping to enrol on an Astronomy course in the next few weeks. Some of my other reasoning for re sitting the Maths might now be a bit more self-explanatory and I hope to eventually tie in more instinctive visualisation skills with my learning in that area. That, however, is a little way off for now and must remain to be seen…

More updates soon; until then, I think it’s time to pack away the sun cream…

This has all been happening over and around a new job that I took on last month. I am now delivering arts workshops on Saturday afternoons at the brand new Blackburn Youth Zone. The centre was featured recently on North West Tonight and really is a stunning facility for young people. I’ve been really enjoying using the space, getting to know new colleagues and having an opportunity to share my love for visual arts in an alternative environment to formal educational contexts. There are always one or two people who, for various reasons, don’t get on with the structure or pace of Further Education Courses and it’s good to know that I might be part of a different solution for a wider range of people.

This is a very exciting development as it demonstrates an alternative application of the boards and it’s great to be able to get involved in something with such a clear aim. Photos from the session will be displayed as part of the upcoming Nexhibitionists show, which celebrates the different groups that have used the café. This opens on June 28th and coincides with the Private View of I Hope To See.

I have also confirmed guest speakers for the CRITgroup meetings in July, September and October. You can find more information about these on the home page as well as register your interest to come along to the June meeting if you are a creative practitioner within traveling distance of Manchester.