In my last update just over a month ago, I promised an update from the This Place is The Northern Quarter SketchCrawl event so I’ll start with that! Hosted by Nexus Art Café, the workshop was an opportunity to spend an afternoon exploring and recording personal responses to the Northern Quarter area of Manchester City Centre. We were blessed with good weather (finally!) and I was joined by seven participants who enjoyed a leisurely stroll, drawing, chatting and taking photos before heading back to Nexus to collate individual This Place Is books and tuck in to some free tea and cake! The booklet pages from the workshop can be found in the These Places Are public gallery.

Far from winding down for summer things have in fact been just as busy as ever on the arts front so far!

Though the I Hope To See exhibition came out of Nexus on July 4th,  the very next week all 6 photos (and 44 more!) were whisked off to the other side of Manchester where they are now on display at Rolls Crescent Primary School.

It’s much more appropriate that they end up there as they can now be enjoyed by the children who participated in the workshops and who were no doubt pleased to show off their work at the recent parents evening. I was also delighted to join an important prize giving assembly at the school on what turned out to be a very lucky Friday 13th for some pupils who not only received certificates to reward them for their ideas but also copies of a smart brochure containing all the photos for both classes.

The following week saw the first opportunity to get the This Place Is brochures out and working.  A collaborative event organised through CRITgroup, a few of us met in Manchester to take a reflective tour of the Mancunian Way. As well as a series of activities provided by Kevin Linnane designed for interacting with the environment, participants were asked to use This Place Is booklets for recording their responses to the space. The workshop ran for about 3 hours and the contributions are recorded in the This Place Is Public Gallery. It’s always interesting to discover the reality of a participative project (no matter how flawlessly it runs in your head!) and needless to say I have not been disappointed by the responses so far. So many interesting stories and visual records came out of such a seemingly limited space and time and it’s probably just as well that I am able to report that I also enjoyed completing my own booklet!  None of that of course, is to undermine the activities set by Kevin; I certainly didn’t expect to spend Sunday afternoon dowsing next to a motorway and I think I shall be eternally grateful for my reintroduction to the largely forgotten art of wax rubbing! All the contributions to This Place Is are now live for browsing so head on over if you fancy discovering just how inspirational a dual carriage way really can be!

Despite all the busyness I have still managed to find time to complete the third canvas of the outstanding series of four (a quadtych!?) that I began in 2009 before starting the MA. The (delightfully titled) Suck My Ballsack is 50x50 cm and is acrylic on canvas. The series is loosely related to many of the same themes as the installation series, and some of the initial sketched can be found a little way down on the Sketchbook page.

This evening we have a special guest at CRITgroup who will be taking about his recent work in Hong Kong and tomorrow I am off to deliver two workshops; painting on glass and then on metal  at the Wythenshawe Games 2012. I’ll expect to be posting updates on both of those events (Check CRITblog for details of CRITgroup meetings) and with further This Place Is workshops lined up through August and September I expect to have even more to share soon; hopefully before this latest snap of warm weather runs out!

The main update for May is the current exhibition I Hope To See which I have just finished hanging this morning. The show at the Nexus Art Café is of a selection of photos from recent workshops with Rolls Crescent Primary School; the final sessions in a series of interactions with various groups in Hulme. The work is up until July 5th and can be found downstairs in the café area of Nexus (Northern Quarter, Manchester city centre). The prints will then be moving to a display of the full series in the school itself, to coincide with Parents’ Afternoon. There will also be a presentation of souvenir brochures to the classes who participated.

Though this marks the end of the Hulme Workshops, it is really only the beginning for the Placemaking Boards and these will next be aired in the Nexus Art Café itself. In June I will be attending a meeting of the staff and community groups who use Nexus and we will be utilising the I Remember, This Place Is and I Hope To See boards as a creative alternative to paper based questionnaires in a feedback gathering exercise. It is hoped that the outcomes will help the café reflect on its successes as well as providing suggestions for improvements from those who use the space.

The CRITgroup project continues to bloom and though we had a small group last night it was still useful. Though you can read a full write up of the session on the CRITblog, I will share the most useful thing for me, which taking along a final draft of a new interactive project looking at place that I have been developing with the help of feedback from the group. This was the first session that the mock-up booklets weren’t met with an ‘I think this would be better if’ response, so I feel I am finally ready to get them properly printed up! You can see the group contributions in an earlier trial run on the Sketchbook page.

On a tangential note, I have completed a new canvas since my last update. I began this series in the summer of 2009 but it got put on a back burner when I started the MA because I really couldn’t take the time out of the 3D design practice to paint. It is loosely related to many of the same themes though and grew directly from the same research sketches as the installation series, which can be found further down the Sketchbook page.


Next update due in June or July… Here’s hoping the weather holds out!