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Winter Spice; a Variety of Projects for December 

2/12/2014

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Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus
Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus, Acrylic on Board, 2014
A few little ‘nuggets’ in what will probably be a final update for 2014! The Serenity Series continues to trickle out like a little brook bubbling up from its source; slow but steady.  I’m currently about a third of the way through a new piece in this body of work which combines elements from the 'Big Bell' temple in Tamana, Japan, (also featured in the piece ‘Tamana Buddha with Rainbow Lotus’) and an interpretation of Persian textile designs, themselves inspired by Chinese stylised depictions of the lotus blossom. I’m hoping to find time over the Christmas break to complete that, which would give me 5 paintings to the series and would seem like an appropriate point to pause and consider the direction that it could move in next. I’m slowly coming round to the idea that these are not, as I have previously described them, a self-indulgent tangent, but are going to form a fairly important part of my practice, if not an especially prolific one. I’m finally allowing myself to relax into it and not be overly concerned right now with the ‘whys’ and ‘wherefores’.
I’m not even pressuring myself to necessarily get lots of them produced or work at a specific scale, or worry about consistency. I’m really just letting it come out as it feels like and I’m sure the confidence to do this has come from recent discussions at CRITgroup. Voicing doubts and finding that others are perplexed at the cause of them is very liberating and I feel I’ve given myself permission a bit more as a result to just let it flow.
As well as this I was delighted to agree to help out a running friend with a design for the logo and branding of a charity event in the planning for January. This is really only just happening over the last 24 hours and certainly not in any state to be shared, but it’s good to be working on a variety of areas, with distinctly different styles. It’s an overused cliché that ‘variety’ is the ‘spice’ and all that but it’s certainly the best way I have found of staying interested in life! The work I do for this project will be far more illustrative and will be more in the vein of the design work I did earlier in the year for Up & Running.
U&R Design Work
Ladies T Shirt Design for Up & Running

The most exciting update however; and a really enjoyable end to my creative year came in the form of a weekend of PlaceMaking workshops with students of the International School of Creative Arts in Wexham, near Slough. 
We actually started off with a day out in Central London, where as well as gathering a range of research drawings and photographs, the group used This Place Is PlaceMaking boards to respond to two specific locations; The British Museum and the North side of the Thames near Embankment. These were recorded and used along with their other materials on day two (back in the studio), where they generated small scale sculptures designed to reflect their perceptions of and relationship with London. I was genuinely impressed with how sensitively they engaged with the concepts presented to them and they appeared to turn out idea after idea quite effortlessly. Their self-motivated approach to generating outcomes was also notable and their intelligent discussion of the outcomes did not undermine the successful visual communication that they had all been asked to carefully consider.
It’s impossible to pick favourites so this is a fairly random selection just as a flavour. Please do check out the project pages to see all the work and read a little about the ideas behind each of the sculptures.

That's all for now. December is upon us and shaping up to be as busy as ever. It seems like only a month or so ago that I was reflecting upon the conclusion of 2013 and wondering what was in store for 2014. It hardly bears thinking about that a whole new twelve months will soon be upon us! Nevertheless, I'm optimistic. Finding out is half the fun!

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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.
Picture
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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Quick March!

11/3/2014

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Just a quick one; a couple of little updates!
Regular readers of my updates will recall my last exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre in September, in which I displayed photos from PlaceMaking  workshops in the UK and China. Part of the agreement in this collaboration with Tameside College was that the work would also be exhibited in the Art Department’s gallery space on the Ashton campus. That work has now also gone up, so the prints are currently enjoying a brief resurrection through the month of March. If you’re local, you can pop in to the gallery which is situated in the Waterloo building at the site on Beaufort Road, otherwise you can still find all the images and further information about the workshops on the project pages of this site.
UK PlaceMaking Tameside
UK PlaceMaking at Tameside College
UK PlaceMaking Tameside
With thanks to Dave Bennett for photography and editing
Tamana Lotus
Tamana Lotus; March 2014; Acrylic on Canvas Board
I also mentioned a new series of photographs recently that came out of my travels last summer. Titled Peaceful Places, they can be purchased as individual prints or as a photobook. These are currently on display at The Earth Café underneath the Manchester Buddhist Centre. Although these images have been something of a tangent from my recent practice, I have enjoyed working with them so much that I was already considering making some paintings from them and having received some very positive feedback from the show at the café I was motivated to produce this new piece. It is a reasonably direct representation of a lotus growing at a Buddhist temple in Japan and I have explored the concept of ‘peace’ further through the application of paint by employing calm, soft, almost meditative brush strokes and trying to stick to a light palette.
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!
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A Peaceful Place at the Earth Café

18/2/2014

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Earth Café
Despite having to fight a rather unsympathetic brick wall, it was largely a pleasurable experience hanging the Peaceful Places prints at the Earth Café yesterday. As much of my work recently has been focussed on participatory events, the documentation of which is displayed mostly online, I had almost forgotten just how enjoyable it can be to get work out physically into a public display. In the short time I was in the café hanging the work, I received very enthusiastic and positive feedback on the photographs from four separate customers and it is always very gratifying to see people derive genuine pleasure from your work.

Earth Café 2
Though the Peaceful Places series has been something of a tangent from my recent practice, I have enjoyed working with the images so much I had already begun to consider developing some painting work from them and having experienced this response at the café, my intentions in that area have been somewhat galvanised! I think it is important to keep things fresh and dynamic anyway, and we’re still just about near enough the front end of the year to be thinking about changes in direction for 2014! Who knows, perhaps this tangent can end up being a new and as yet undiscovered path! 

Peaceful Places
A selection of ten prints from the Peaceful Places collection, are now on display at The Earth Café underneath the Manchester Buddhist Centre in the Northern Quarter, and you can view these as well as placing orders for copies, which can be collected or delivered.

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New Year; New Work

27/1/2014

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Division (Project 2014)
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.

Freedom (Tameside College)
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.


Cupcake Karma
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!

Peaceful Places
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..!

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November; The Sequel!

26/11/2013

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Peaceful Places
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.

This Place is China
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!

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A Winter Wind-Down...

18/11/2013

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Peaceful Places
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.

Cupcake Karma
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.

Virtual exchange Callout
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!

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A Last Word Before the Summer Hiatus

5/7/2013

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UK PlaceMaking Flyer
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.


Nexus Happiness
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…?

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May through to June

6/6/2013

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Picture
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.

Picture
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!


In other news, I have finally conceded to remove the canvases I finished last year from the walls of my flat and temporarily donate them to Nexus Art Café for their exhibition exploring ‘Happiness’. The paintings grew from earlier stages in the development of my recent work, which began by looking directly to the urban environment for inspiration. An initial visual starting point was the contrast between interventions which exist either inside or outside institutional control. For example, No Parking signs and graffiti. They loosely link to the theme of happiness in that I am interested in the concept of graffiti being used as a tool to assert control over city spaces in a subconscious attempt to affect feelings of ownership and a counteraction of urban alienation and unhappiness. The 4 canvases will be on display from the 13th of June until the 11th of August.
Picture

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!


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A September of highs and lows

9/10/2012

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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.
The Best Thing About My City Is
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.


This Place Is Monserrat
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.

This Place Is - SketchCrawl
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.

Julian
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.

Terror After Sundown 2012
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.

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