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More on Places; Peaceful, Imagined and Revisited

4/8/2014

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Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus
Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus, Acrylic on Canvas Board, August 2014
The decorative detail on the right of the composition is an interpretation of designs that feature frequently in surface pattern on Persian textile and ceramic pieces. The particular design  I developed this from was in fact based upon Chinese decorative arts and is an interpretation of the lotus flower.
It seems hard to believe that it was a full year ago since I was actually at the temple, but this slightly sad realisation is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that I have continued to enjoy the experience through the production of these pieces.
Today I finally made time after returning from various summer travels (none as exotic as this time last year when I was still in China!), to complete  the latest in what is now a series of three acrylic paintings titled The Serenity Series. The series is based on photographs from the Peaceful Places collection, and I started to produce the paintings following positive feedback on the photographs. This piece, titled Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus is an impression of a large statue of the Buddah at the 'Big Bell' temple in Tamana, Japan, which I visited in July last year. The giant statue is situated at the top of a large flight of steps (see below) and cut a striking figure against the (almost) cloudless sky.
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Big Bell Temple, Tamana, July 2013
In other news, I have continued to be productive in alternative areas. Just occasionally, though I've always felt it is something to aim for, you get to combine passions. Sometimes, one can be lucky enough to actually get paid for this. In June I was fortunate to be commissioned by Up & Running to produce a design for the front cover of a promotional give away notebook that they plan to publish before the end of the year. As an avid runner, I didn't need asking twice and it was a genuine pleasure to spend time working on the brief in close discussion with one of the directors of the company. It was a smooth process as we understood each other well and this is the resulting piece. If you want to get your hands on a copy you'll need to head in to your local Up & Running store (there are branches across the UK) sometime from the beginning of the autumn season and see what the deal is! Even I'm not sure yet!
Hopefully I will be working with them again soon to produce artwork for further projects. Watch this space for that one, but in the mean time I must try and make the most of a few last days of holiday to get a bit more painting done! I have a couple of new ideas for The Serenity Series already on the simmer!

Up & Running
Illustration for Up and Running Promotional Material
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!
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An April Shower of Workshops!

25/4/2013

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SketchCrawling
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.

This Place Is The Northern Quarter
Pikes Lane
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!

Jiangbin PlaceMaking
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!


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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!

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Another New Year

3/1/2012

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Since completing the MA in October, the last couple of months of 2011 were spent in an enjoyable rediscovery of acrylic on canvas. As the MA was focusing on Three Dimensional Design, I couldn’t justify the time to work on 2D pieces for a couple of years but have completed two painted portraits since the end of the course. The first of these, titled ‘Lainee’ is from a photograph of the God Daughter of a colleague and was commissioned following a series of sketches and negotiations. The second (with a working title of ‘Hexagons’, which seems to have appropriately stuck) is a personal impression of someone with a background in colour chemistry and was generated as a low cost (but high labour) Christmas present! It’s been a refreshing change to get back to painting, and it’s reminded me how much value I place in having a broad skill set with regard to my practice. Though I’m not planning to focus exclusively on painting, I’m certainly pleased to have the time to pick it up again and will now continue working to complete a series of paintings I started 3 years ago. One of these, ‘Bear’, can be seen on the Older Work section of this site and is developed from a series of sketches and photographs of Graffiti as recorded at the bottom of the Sketchbook Page.

In addition to the paintings, I have now managed (thanks to a friend still studying at MMU!) to cut a third series of boards in relation to the I Remember and This Place Is workshops. The I Hope To See boards have been made with younger participants in mind and I hope soon to use them with young people in Hulme to finish off a project which will in essence have generated a multiple perspective portrait of the area from the points of view of those who regularly use it. The daughter of another friend kindly trialled them for me when I visited just before Christmas and her enthusiasm for the idea has given me a fresh boost of confidence with which to pursue the project, as well as a few images to use for illustrative purposes when submitting proposals.

Lainee - Dec 11
Lainee - December 2011
Hexagons - Dec 11
Hexagons - December 2011
I Hope To See
New 'I Hope To See' board in use
_I have learnt from experience that aside from access to facilities, the thing one misses most upon completion of a programme of study is the feedback and support of peers. With this in mind, I have been taking steps to set up a small group of people to regularly meet with the aim of facilitating a pooling of professional skills and knowledge which would provide motivation, support and social contact for those pursuing a creative practice in Manchester. There has been one meeting so far in November which went well enough for the second to have been organised for the end of January. The meeting will take place at MadLab, Manchester and details can be found on their website.

While I have at least been keeping practical work ‘ticking over’ since the end of the MA, the biggest cognitive challenge I have faced may come as something of a surprise, at least to those who know me. I have enrolled on an evening course to revisit and re sit GCSE Maths. Thankfully, it is with some relief that I have found myself actually quite enjoying the content and though it is not without apprehension that I look forward to the memory test of exams in the summer, it has certainly given me an opportunity to exercise a different part of my brain, albeit a rather underdeveloped part! Though the decision to sit the course is not completely random, the long term reasons for it are as yet not well enough confirmed to justify any further details at this stage and so for now I shall be content just to mention that I’m doing it!
I have been feeling somewhat apprehensive about 2012 as I have somehow developed the habit of assuming that each New Year must be better than the last. As the last few years have been very positive, it seems hard to imagine how 2012 could possibly live up to that and I have been assuming a degree of disappointment is inevitable. However, that’s clearly not a productive attitude and I have instead resolved to invest my efforts in ensuring that regardless of the as yet unknown content of 2012, I at least maintain, if not develop, those projects begun in earlier years which continue to display creative or social potential.
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PubliCity

2/9/2011

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In an attempt to cut myself a bit of slack, I wasn’t planning another update until after the completion of the MA, but I was so excited to hand in my final written document yesterday (titled PubliCity) that I couldn’t quite stop myself from sharing these photos of the final bound document ready for submission. You can find the document in PDF form here but I was so pleased with the quality of the printing and binding that I thought I’d post a couple of photos. Just one thing left now; a presentation on the 15th of September and that’s it!

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There are, as ever, a couple of other things going on in the next few weeks too. Firstly, I am returning to the Hulme History Society at the Zion Centre on the 8th of September as they have asked me back to revisit the use of I Remember boards in relation to members’ photographs of the Stretford Road area of Hulme. These will be old photos and will hopefully encourage a discussion of how the area has changed and how urban regeneration has affected it for the better (and sometimes the worse). Though I initially devised the boards for utilisation directly in the urban environment, I’m delighted that an alternative application has been suggested by users and I’m really looking forward to seeing how their use might be developed. I’m especially excited by the suggestion that they could be used with projected photographs as this feels like a very natural response to the initial intention of use of shadows in sunlight so I can’t wait to see how the evening goes. Additionally, I’m hopeful that more members will be able to participate as we had some difficulties last time due to reduced mobility. A method of using the boards inside would make the whole session much more accessible for some people.

On the 17th of September I will be running a crafts workshop for the Wythenshawe Regeneration Team at their Garden City Festival; the theme of the day is gardening so I plan to use the opportunity to ask participants to explore ideas of gardening as one of a series of devices for reclaiming city spaces. This will be primarily through the medium of glass painting as that’s what I’ve been brought on board to deliver, but I’ve also been asked to respond to the theme and that fits in quite nicely with some survey feedback I had many months ago that some residents felt community gardening led them to feel more positive about their area.

That’s all for now… Next updates will hopefully include photos from the upcoming workshops and a reflection on how the final presentation went. Who knows, I may even be able to report that I have passed!



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This Place Is

16/7/2011

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Following on from the I Remember workshop about 6 weeks ago, there are one or two updates to make in relation to those projects. The photos from the session with the Hulme History Society went on display at the Zion Arts Centre in Hulme for a month from the 13th of June. This gave the participants the opportunity to see the photographs of their contributions. The members of the society reported that they felt a sense of achievement in viewing the work, commenting that although it was a small portfolio of images, the content was expansive. The group also enjoyed a new conversation about the area stimulated by the photographs and were able to share the discussion further with those who had been unable to participate on the day. Keen to continue the project, Hulme History Society has invited me back in September 2011 to conduct a second I Remember workshop using members' photographs of the area through various decades.  This workshop will take a slightly different format and we plan to bring projection back into the session to view and interact with the photos. The main benefit of this new approach will not only be that we can visualise the past of the area but also that those with reduced mobility will be able to participate more directly and share their thoughts equally.

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On the 14th of July, a group of artists from Venture Arts (an organisation in Hulme which runs workshops for people with learning disabilities) participated in a similar session. Instead of focusing on memory however, the This Place Is workshop focused on a more current perspective of the same part of Hulme, which provided an interesting opportunity to compare the impressions of alternative community groups. The 7 members of the group agreed that they all had fun during the 2 hour session and that they enjoyed looking at the buildings and taking the pictures. Photographs from the session will soon be on display in the Holden Gallery Café at the Manchester School of Art.


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In other news, I recently added a couple of additional projects to the site; Fancy a Pint and Where’s Good For You? These smaller ventures have yet to be realised on a larger scale but are still related to my on-going investigations in to interaction between strangers in cities.
Aside from potential additions relating to the above, the next major update is unlikely to materialise until mid-September/early October as I now have until the first of September to write up the details of practice and concept that have occurred since my last assessment. Upon completion, I will then have reached the end of the MA and the very clear start of a new chapter!

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New Site!

6/6/2011

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First things first, the purpose of this post is mainly to show off the new look glittermouse.co.uk! Websites, especially those serving the purpose of an online portfolio, seem to have a tendency to get cluttered over time and can end up looking like a teenager’s bedroom wall; random snippets and posts that seemed important 6 months ago but really don’t have much relevance anymore. As such, I noticed it was time for a virtual spring clean, so you’ll hopefully find this site brighter, fresher and easier to navigate. It’s also now easier to find me on Facebook and Twitter (groan) and you can see an archive of previous blog posts on the Facebook page too…

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There have of course been other developments in recent weeks and progress has been made on a variety of on-going projects. Not least of these was the I Remember workshop with the Hulme History Society on Saturday (June 4th) in which 7 members of the society joined me for a wander around the Stretford Road area in Hulme, where we all enjoyed sharing tales of Hulme’s past, from long forgotten local indiscretions to activities of a less lascivious nature such as the Beatles recording at the Hippodrome! We were fortunate to be blessed with good weather and the participants agreed that the I Remember boards helped them to both recall and share happy memories that made them feel positive about the area. It was also recognised that the discussion helped to identify where change had come about for the better, as well as looking back with some nostalgia on other aspects of the place. It is planned for the photographs from the afternoon to go on display at the Zion Centre, in Hulme in the coming weeks so watch this space for updates!


I have also just received confirmation that a second workshop will be going ahead in July, however this one will be with the photography group at Venture Arts (Also in Hulme). As most members of the group are not from the local area, it is planned for new boards to be made which will carry a different phrase to encourage a more forward thinking feel to the day. As it is likely that we will visit similar places, the combined output of these workshops should provide an interesting portrait of an area which contrasts memories of its past with hopes for its future.

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In other areas, the Talk To Me project concluded at the end of May and I have received a small amount of feedback which should enable me to assess whether or not it met objectives of encouraging public interactions. At a first glance, it does appear to have had some beneficial effects, I’ll properly analyse that in weeks to come. In addition, Public Warming a new strand to the current suite of investigations, looks at subverting the visual language of the public warning sign to suggest possibilities for a friendlier, freer shared ownership of city spaces. Public input has been an incredibly important part of developing this recent work and I’m currently gathering feedback on these signs so please do visit the brief survey page and share your thoughts.


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    Glittermouse has a background in  visual arts and education. You can read more on the 'home' page of this site. 

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