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!

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.

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…?

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!

I’ll dispense with the ‘Where the heck did January go!?’ comments and since we’re now half way through February get on with sharing some highlights of what has been happening in the weeks since my last update!

On the 26th of January, I was invited to participate in an artists’ networking event at Blank Space in Manchester. This was part of The Verb Project’s In-Between residency, and encouraged artists to engage in mini site-specific collaborations. This was a great opportunity to dust off the Placemaking Boards and I was genuinely pleased with the results of the day, which included some exciting developments (no pun intended!) in the temporary dark room that had been set up in the space. You can find out more about the day and see four sets of photographs here.

CRITgroup continues to go from strength to strength and having shared our first responses to the Creative Whispers project  at the January meeting, (these can be viewed here) we are just two weeks away from sharing our second. My own response takes inspiration from a series of sketches, painted samples and photographs inspired by the repetition and concealing qualities of brick as interpreted from one of the original starting points. When discussing these, the artist I ‘inherited’ the work from briefly mentioned the concept of ‘bricking up’ memories and so I have moved a bit outside of my comfort zone with this one and used it as an opportunity to try expressing (or bricking up!) my emotional responses to some current personal difficulties. This was something of a departure from my usual way of working which doesn’t tend to be very self-referential and whilst I did find the process somewhat cathartic, I am really not sure I am either happy with the outcome or comfortable with the idea of sharing it. Still, in the interests of the creative experimentation that the project aspires to, there it is, in all its slightly adolescent glory! I have used envelopes to form the ‘background’ in a brick pattern, each of which contain fragments of various documents that relate to the aforementioned challenges that I am currently experiencing. On to these has been sketched a portrait of a family member who is involved in some of these with me, but the envelopes and the portrait have been ‘bricked up’ using fragments of the samples I was given. There is also a photographic reference to a friend who recently died unexpectedly. Despite my misgivings about the personal nature of the piece, I am intensely curious to see if the person who takes it on after me will be brave (or nosey!) enough to ‘un-brick’ the contents of the envelopes or whether a sense of moral duty to allow me my privacy will prevent it! Something of a risk on my part but one guaranteed with a very interesting outcome nonetheless!

In addition, we have been pleased to contribute details of our work on Creative Whispers so far to the Patternotion book, a project by Alban Low which seeks to document the various systems for creativity and living that many artists and creative types impose upon themselves in order to facilitate progress. This seemed to be a pretty good description of the CRITgroup in general but of the Creative Whispers project especially, and so we were happy to send along a bit of ‘work in progress’. This can be viewed on the project Picasa album.


That’s about all for now; the days are getting longer, the weather’s getting warmer… (Well, It isn’t actually but we can dream) and the next SketchCrawlevents at Nexus draw a little nearer ever day!

Christmas and New Year are always busy times and the last couple of months have been no exception. I enter 2013 feeling like I’ve been a bit ‘out if it’ in terms of creativity but with one or two possibilities bubbling away on back burners, which I hope to start bring out for taste-tests over the coming weeks!

The main creative activity that I’ve been engaged with since my last update has been centred on CRITgroup (the artists’ networking group that I manage in Manchester). We recently decided to celebrate our first ‘birthday’ by starting off a series of
collaborative projects, the first of which is titled ‘Creative Whispers’. The simple concept is that each of us produced a ‘starting point’ in December which was randomly assigned to a new member. Our task through January has been to respond to that starting point in some way. This new outcome or intervention will be brought along to the next meeting on the 23rd. These will then be ‘rotated’ until each member has had some input. We’ll then review the outcomes and use them to help us investigate and discuss the differences (and similarities) between our respective practices.

I was really pleased with the initial take up; 8 contributions, which was almost our most highly attended meeting. I’ve also been enjoying thinking about and producing work in a slightly different vein to my ‘normal’ practice as I have found it refreshing to allow myself a bit of space to step away from what has become established about my work. I won’t pre-publicise what I have been working on as that would rather undermine the collaborative nature of it I feel, however I will share my starting point.

This was donated by Irena Siwiak Atamewan, a photographer who also studied at MMU. At first glance, the quote seemed so obviously related to my own existing work it seemed impossible to think of how I would produce anything truly new, however when she spoke of her own interpretation of it, in terms of domestic spaces, I began to think about it slightly differently. This has shaped my responses, and I have directed my interest to the contrast and in some cases the transitions between public and private spaces. There will be more to report after our next meeting on January the 23rd.

It’s not really been the season for too many outdoor workshops but I can share that following the success of the SketchCrawl at Nexus Art Café, two new dates have been confirmed. There will be a session with the This Place Is project on Saturday April the 6th and a new Placemaking Board workshop on Sunday 5th of May (Bank Holiday weekend). I’ll be publicising more details of those nearer the time but worth putting in the diary if you are interested, it'll be upon us soon enough!

I have of course also still been busy with my on-going Astronomy studies... That is still soaking up quite a bit of energy and brain power which is slowing up the development of some other projects but it is all in the interests of developing my creative practice too in the long run. I have some potential ideas brewing for bringing the exploration of the city and astronomy together into a project but these are just gestating for now while I do the course. Though to be fair, I have had to draw a star chart for my second assessment...
Visual Communication at its most fundamental!



That’s all for now. Some more updates hopefully in the near future before too much of 2013 escapes from me!

I sat down to write this thinking that I didn’t have much to say for this month but that in the interest of maintaining (reasonably) regular updates, I‘d chuck out a quick post anyway. I’ve had one or two other personal bits going on which have taken up some brain RAM, but when I come to think of it there have actually been a few things worth mentioning.

I think the biggest thing to mention is the SketchCrawl workshop which ran on October the 28th in collaboration with Nexus Art Café. Despite the characteristically Mancunian weather (i.e. rainy) a small group ventured forth into the streets of the Northern Quarter armed with a camera, some Place Making Boards and the promise of a cuppa and some cake included in the price upon our
return! We managed a series of 12 photographs as a record of our wanderings which share not just the state of the weather but also the participant’s memories and reflections on the places we chose to visit. It’s definitely the wrong time of year for much more of this sort of thing but the next SketchCrawl is planned for April 6th when I shall be running a new session to generate content for the This Place Is booklet project.

Last month, I also developed contacts with MidConversation; a new artist’s collective in Manchester. This was originally in response to a call out for artists to become involved with helping them to document their latest installation and following a meeting at their studio, they invited me to become involved with an event in which they would take their installation into public spaces. Unfortunately, this part of their project was cancelled, which was a disappointment; however there may be some future collaboration further down the line. You can read more of my comments about their latest work on the last CRITblog where they presented their recent piece.

Speaking of which, CRITgroup has now been running for nearly a full year, which I guess I should acknowledge as something of an achievement. We had our inaugural meeting last November and have been meeting at MadLab since January 2012. Though we’ve stated our ‘official’ birthday as December (as it’s a good party month anyway and falls between the two), technically it’s a year since November. Though this is something of a tangent to my practice and isn’t exactly a creative project, it has been an important part of my professional development and has supported and sustained the work I began on the MA by providing me with motivation and a peer group. I can only assume the fact that I’ve never ended up sat there on my own means that it has similarly benefited others!

At the next CRITgroup we’re planning into 2013 (we already have dates fixed up until June) and are going to start discussions with regards to developing a group collaborative project. We’ve been murmuring about this on and off since we got started but it seems the time has come to make a move on firming up some intentions. I have absolutely no idea yet what form this will take because we’ve all got very different practices but I’m hoping that I’ll be able to fit relevant aspects of my current projects in and use it as a bit of a vehicle to help me promote and develop those. I’ve recently been returning mentally to a project I proposed right at the end of my MA but never acted upon and getting quite tempted to start it off, however, I think that while I’m quite good at getting new projects up and running, an area I need to work on is the promotion and maintenance of my current ones so perhaps it will be an ‘excuse’ to try and do a bit of that! I’m not even going to mention the concept behind the ‘new’ project (though I’ll hint that it’s quite a delicious one!) but it’s there none the less, mulling away in the mental anti-chamber. I must be careful not to give in to only working on the ‘fun’ bits of projects though and probably need to do a bit more to generate content for This Place Is before I start any new ones!

The other thing that happened at the end of last month; another ‘sort of practice related but sort of not’ thing is that I have started a distance course in Astronomy. This was one of the reasons why I re sat my GCSE Maths last year and I have plans to develop this into a ‘test’ project that combines elements into my art work through social engagement projects but this is some way off yet. First I need to get my head around timing sidereal days, calculating luminosity and drawing Hertzsprung Russell Diagrams! In the interests of demonstrating the potential relevance to a visual arts practice, here’s a photo I took from my balcony in March of the moon rising over the (now deceased) wheel in Manchester!

Finally, whilst I don’t talk much about my teaching practice in this blog, I do like to share any public events that my students are involved in and this year they have been working on planning, promoting and making for a Craft Stall at the Tameside College Christmas Market on the 6th of December. So, in case I don’t get the chance to blog again before Christmas; why not come along and grab some handmade Christmas bargains whilst supporting local young people in an enterprise project? Sounds like a whole heap of Christmas Spirit to me!