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!

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!

As this is my second post for June, I don’t feel too apologetic about it being a fairly short one!

The main update is the PlaceMaking and This Place Is workshops that I ran this weekend at the Magpie Thunder Bureau Pop Up as part of the Barnaby Festival. In the morning, we took the PlaceMaking boards on to the streets of Macclesfield and gathered some thoughts on local perspectives, especially in light of the recent approval of some major town centre redevelopments. This took a slightly new approach to previous sessions and rather than working as part of an existing workshop group, we approached Saturday shoppers and arts trail visitors. We got some interesting conversations going too, once we had persuaded people that we weren't trying to sell them anything!

In the afternoon, I ran a This Place Is demo session back at the Pop Up Shop and rather than asking people to complete the booklets there and then, they have been made available to take away and return. You can still collect a booklet from the shop between now and June 30th (that's at 2 Church Mews, Churchill Way, Macclesfield, SK11 6AY) and can then either drop the completed work back into the shop or post them to me using the address on the project page.

I also now have four paintings on display at Nexus Art Café as part of their Happiness exhibition and they will be up until August 11th. If you drop in for a coffee you won’t be able to miss them; they are smack bang in front of you as you come down the stairs!

This is probably my last update for a while as I am off on a globetrotting jaunt this summer; I’ll be back in time for the UK PlaceMaking exhibition at the Chinese Arts Centre in September though and who knows what additional inspirations I shall encounter over the summer months?! No doubt the time will fly and you’ll be reading all about it soon enough!

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!

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…