Hand made

I finished the Play & Learn Resource packs for Nottingham Contemporary.  There are six packs, all delivered to the Contemporary and already being shown to various potential users.

Also, in my collaborative project Undiscovered Networks, Carole and I are just about finished making the maps as a result of the Wellbeing Walks project (visit the blog for the full story).

 

Hand drawing maps for Wellbeing Walks

There is something about the handmade that is special.  The Play & Learn packs have been well received so far, partly because of the tactile quality of them as they have been hand printed.  You can feel (and still smell!) the textures of the inks, the green is smooth to the touch, the cotton fabric is rougher, the gold colour has a slight sheen.  They feel substantial in the hand, and each one is slightly different and unique.

Although we are having to reproduce all our items for the Undiscovered Networks project, Carole and I did agree from the beginning that we wanted everything to have been hand made originally and to look that way.

Hand printing with Carole for Undiscovered Networks

There is something I like about making things that are intended for the corporate and branded but making them by hand, putting my own spin on it (Nottingham Contemporary has its own distinct branding look, and in Undiscovered Networks we are responding to the branding of the rail companies).  Instead of the polished, perfect look of the digital and reproductive print, the hand made has that personal touch.  With the Play & Learn packs I've stayed within the branding guidelines but everything is slightly off-set, the motifs are repeated but in a different sequence each time, the edges are sometime slightly blurry and you can tell that everything is hand cut.

The result is something that seems friendly, softened, that seems to carry my signature, or my "touch".  Somehow I feel this puts me in touch with the people who might pick it up and use it.  I introduced the packs to a group of family tutors last week, and just watching them open up the pockets and explore the packs, stroking the tactile surfaces with their fingers, somehow I felt the fact that I made these with my own hands and then passed them into their hands gave me a closer connection to the way they will be used.

It's exciting to launch something like this into the world.  I shall be watching with interest who uses them and how.

I am working on making new Resource Packs for Nottingham Contemporary.

They are going to trial this as an idea for visitors with children to the galleries.  They can pick up one of these fabric packs and use them to explore the exhibitions in a playful way.

Because I need to make several of them, I decided to screen print them.  Made of cotton, they unfold into a big mat that families can sit on in the galleries.  The mat will have several pockets containing objects, textures, and ideas for exploring the exhibition.

They're taking longer to make than I had anticipated!  But it's really good to be screen printing again.  At the moment the packs are half printed and hanging all around my studio.  I'm quite enjoying the abstract compositions that they make hanging up.

I'm also making each one slightly different, and I want it to be obvious that it is hand made rather than machine made.  I'll be layering other patterns on top.  Each one will be unique.

Not just a resource pack, but a unique piece of hand crafted art to play with when you visit the galleries.  Should be fun.

Hills and plains

A busy week, working on projects as diverse as sewing a fabric resource pack for Nottingham Contemporary, printing works for the Undiscovered Networks project and discovering more parts of the River Nene for the Three Jos in a boat project!

The county of Northamptonshire is very flat, hence the River Nene through here moves very slowly.  I discovered that BB visited a longer stretch of the river than I had previously thought, from Wollaston all the way to Alwalton.  So the project director Ros Stoddart and I decided to visit Wollaston to see what it was like.

The map of the River Nene produced by the Environment Agency for river users is interesting.  It focuses on the information that river users need, with just the briefest acknowledgment of surrounding roads.  Locks are more important to river users than towns or roads, these are the points for navigation and location.  This river map gives little information about the shape of the landscape around it.

So walking down from the hill from Great Doddington towards the river we suddenly become aware of how wide the river valley is.  As the village is up on a hill you get a marvelous view of the river below and some of the lakes around it.

I started to compare this with the experience I had had when travelling on the river as the Three Jos back in May and June.  When on a boat you feel incredibly "placed" with the river, the experience is very much on one plane.  So it was quite startling to see the river as part of a wider landscape and become aware of its valley.

The river from the boat.  Still waters.

Ideas for the River map are coming on well and I hope to do quite a lot of work on this over the next few weeks.

Drawing and redrawing a river

This week I have begun experimenting for my River Nene project.

Three Jos in a Boat is a commission by Ros Stoddart as part of a series of events inspired by Denys Watkins-Pitchford, a Northamptonshire naturalist, children's writer and illustrator who wrote under the pseudonym "BB".

My part in the project is to create a map of the stretch of the River Nene that BB wrote about in his book "A Summer on the Nene".

When I first start drawing maps I love the abstract lines before any information or detail is included. Each map has its own unique shape and beauty.

This section of the River Nene is incredibly lovely, it twists and turns but simultaneously has a distinct linear direction. I have been reading about how rivers are created and the bends in a river are technically called "meanders".

The meanders continually erode the banks by the movement of the water. The River Nene at this point is very slow moving, so the erosion is also gradual. You have the idea that the river is continually redrawing itself over time, but at a pace we cannot see.

Rather than being a fixed shape like a map, the river is continually changing itself, widening and redefining its edges over time. I get the sense that this drawing is less of a fixed guide map and more of a snapshot in time, a drawing of the river as it is at this moment but it is remaking itself just as I draw it.

Ros Stoddart is organising a number of events along the River over the next year, starting tonight! They include storytelling, music, walks with natural historians, poetry in pubs and more ... visit her website for details: www.rosalindstoddart.co.uk

Refugee Week Journeys

Coming to the end of Refugee Week and so time to reflect.

I have been working for Nottingham Contemporary in partnership with Nottingham Central Library to work with families of refugees and Nottingham residents. The results of the work I installed in the Central Library's exhibition space on Monday, and it will be up for a month.

My sessions with the family groups had the theme of Journeys, and the aim was to try to connect with Nottingham as well as people's places of origin. What I really enjoyed about this project was the unexpected connections that started to unfold...

The current show until the end of June at the Contemporary is two artists from other lands: Huang Yong Ping (a Chinese artist now living in France) and Wael Shawky (an artist originating from Egypt). Both artists deal with ideas about differing cultural viewpoints, East and West, and both reveal questions about things that their countries of origin would rather they didn't!

The discussions looking at the artists' work with the group of families were complex, acknowledging many different memories that they connected with, images that were familiar to them (elephants, mosques), their own knowledge of world history and parallels to their own situations in other countries.

Two beautiful mosques

I felt the exhibition helped the groups to open up and talk about their thoughts, not necessarily feeling they had to tell their stories (which is the approach I have so often seen by creative projects working with refugees), but more talking about wider issues, history, politics and social aspects that the work suggested and that they had differing experiences of.

The resulting installation that I have created at the library attempts to visually show all the connections that we made through our sessions. Using the artworks created by the participants themselves, I have stretched journey lines between them, to show real journeys, imagined connections and shared experiences.

I particularly like how the elephants appear to be flying!

I feel that the project promoted sharing, creativity and discussion, and each day ended on a positive note, looking to the future and seeing Nottingham as a place full of promise. Thus it appears at the centre of the installation!

Thanks to everybody who took part.

Myth Maps

It has been a year since I started blogging for the Undiscovered Networks project with my artist collaborator Carole Miles, and the project has really started to take on a life of its own now. So it's time to come back to this blog to have space to write about the other things I get up to in my artistic life!


The big news is the completion of the Myth Maps project for Snibston Museum in Coalville, Leicestershire. The private view was held last month, bringing all the four commissioned artists (me, Geoff Broadway, Brendan Jackson and Paul Conneally) together to show their responses to Snibston the place, the collection, the people and the area.


I was thrilled with the responses to my Myth Maps, which appear as three lightboxes which now hang in the Snibston Museum. Terrific to meet up again with four of the families who had taken part in my walks of discovery around the area (my Intrepid Explorers!), and to talk to them about the final results of the maps that I made.


The odd thing about the Myth Maps is that they are not so much maps of a place that can be used and followed in the way that we are familiar with using maps. They are not about information and measuring space, but about recording a particular journey on a particular day with a particular group of people. They are a part of what I refer to as a phenomenological practice, a term used in research for a practice that accepts that in every instance that an action is taken the results will be different due to the wide number of unpredictable variables that will apply to each instance. In other words, no two walks are ever the same!

This has been one of the most pleasurable commissions I have ever undertaken. The commissioners were supportive but never interfering and I felt I was given total free rein to develop my work in my own way. The care that the Museum took in ensuring that my work was displayed well was excellent and overall a great experience. I feel that I have got to know the area around Snibston, Coalville and Ravenstone well and I have developed a particular affinity with that landscape.

I hope that the same will be said of the new commission that I am now working on, discovering the River Nene in Northamptonshire with a group of other artists. Visit Three Jos in a Boat for the story so far and watch out for more posts coming soon!

For the back story of the Myth Maps project, visit my previous blog posts here:
Preservation and persistance
New commissions and a little Coalville history
It's underneath our feet
Myth Maps in Snibston: story so far
Snibston lines and connections

I am currently blogging as part of a collaborative project at undiscoverednetworks.blogspot.com, please visit me there!