 Heart Sutra, Acrylic on Canvas Board, 2015 It is then with a quiet simplicity that my first post for 2015 shares just one piece; the newly completed Heart Sutra; Go Beyond. This painting is a development from a Peaceful Places photograph of the entrance arch at the 'Big Bell' Buddhist temple in Tamana, Japan, in the summer of 2013. The text on the arch refers (I am reliably told) to the Heart Sutra, one of the most important Buddhist mantras. It is translated by the 14th Dali Lama as “go, go, go beyond, go thoroughly beyond, and establish yourself in enlightenment.” The painting also includes visual references to designs that feature frequently in surface pattern on Persian textile and ceramic pieces, themselves inspired by Chinese representations of lotus blossoms. | The winter months are, for just about every species of life on planet Earth except humans, months of rest, recovery and rejuvenation; an important opportunity to build strength and resources in order to make the most of the more naturally bountiful seasons. I have been trying to learn from this observation and have attempted to keep my usual expectation to be continuously and both-feet-first into multiple projects in check. This is certainly in keeping with the essence of the Serenity Series, which has become, from apparently nowhere, the main thread of my recent creative practice.  Entrance Arch, Big Bell Temple, Tamana, July 2013 |
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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.
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.
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! It was with mild embarrassment yesterday that I noted my last post was in August. The cause of this embarrassment was mostly due to the fact that at the time I was using my own blog as a quick example to a student, upon whom I was pressing the importance of regular updates to engage with an audience. Whoops. Physician Heal Thyself. Fortuitously, I was also but a few brush strokes away from completing the fourth painting in the unexpected tangent that has been The Serenity Series and so today I felt I actually have something to post about. In my defence, September is always a very busy month (Yes, I know, we’re a third of the way through October) and so it’s been a genuine challenge to squeeze the painting in at all, let alone find time to write about it!
Whilst I was pleased to know that others could identify with having experienced something similar, the fact that the origin of those preconceptions were questioned by others was also a reassuring point of view. Why can’t the act of producing a creative outcome be at the same time enjoyed by both artist and audience? Though I am yet to fully resolve this in my practice, the discussion has at least given me some motivation (permission!?) to carry on. This new painting is titled Yongzou Lotuses and is composed from photographs taken at Yongzuo Temple and pencil drawings made on site at Chong Shan Si Buddhist Monastery, both in Taiyuan, China. The recent work has been part of a bit of a reset period for my creative practice, I think and this is something I always struggle with. Though I recognise it is perfectly natural for things, work, creativity, life generally, to reach natural conclusions or fallow periods, I find it incredibly difficult to not do something. Whilst I know that rest and reflection is essential for progression in many fields (here I am specifically relating this to my experiences of running and training plans!) that doesn’t mean I’m any good at it. I’m coming to the conclusion that this recent series of paintings is something of a displacement activity as much as it is an exploration of the photographic material; something creative to do while I rest my artistic muscles and store up some psychological glycogen to power me into a new socially creative phase. I do have some genuine ideas for this that are slowly coalescing around the edges of my consciousness. Needless to say they involve running, community engagement, art, and… well I’ll see if I can squeeze some cake in there too and hit all my favourite things in one project!
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!
 April was a busy month for a variety of reasons but one of the main things that seemed to take up most of my time and head-space since my last update in March was my first ever attempt at running a marathon. I did this on the very clement April 6th at the Asics Greater Manchester Marathon and in so doing aimed to raise money to fund arts workshops to be delivered to users of mental health charity Imagine. This is a local charity, based in Liverpool but with ongoing work nearer to Manchester in Salford too. I was keen to support a small organisation as I believe this means donations go further and one of the additional benefits of doing so is that it is possible to work closely with staff to ensure the cash goes exactly where you want it to. Having raised over £400 for Venture Arts last year by running a 10k race (my first of those too!) I thought I’d push it a bit and set a target of £500. I was absolutely delighted that I managed to inspire such generosity from friends and colleagues alike who between them have smashed that target absolutely to pieces by more than doubling it. It was then lovely to receive a thank you card and letter from the charity director and arts group service users and even better because what I didn't realise is that the existing arts group for Imagine is actually based in Liverpool, not Salford. They are now however, in a position to use the money we raised to initiate a whole new programme for delivering arts workshops in Salford which is a massive deal in this age of budget cuts for the arts and for health and I feel confident that my supporters have really truly made a difference to individual lives without their donations getting sucked in to a huge charity with massive overheads and generic budgets. If you are interested in more details about race day, you can read the update I wrote for the charity on their own blog page.
Just a quick one; a couple of little updates!
 With thanks to Dave Bennett for photography and editing
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!
 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.  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!  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.
 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.  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.  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!  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..!  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!  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.  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.  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! |
Glittermouse has a background in visual arts and education. You can read more on the 'home' page of this site.
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