Seeking Unknown Land

I have written a guest blog post for Beauty & Utility Arts, click here to read it:
Seeking Unknown Land in Hinckley

The footsteps of pilgrims

I'm planning a trip to northern Spain and France, which brought me to read about the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or The Pilgrim Trail.

Two recent interests connect me to this route: walking and the Achurch scallops.

I've been developing a book of drawings and thoughts about walking since January. As I write and draw the book, the ideas of walking as a symbolic action have become quite prominent. The idea of the pilgrim, walking a route that thousands of others have walked over centuries, as a personal journey, as a statement, but also as a physical accomplishment of travelling under one's own steam. The physical nature of walking is what really interests me and is always hardest to convey through drawings and writing, it is the sensory experience of a walk, being out in the elements and feeling the terrain under your feet, that makes walking an especially profound way of travelling, for me.

I've just started reading Robert Macfarlane's lovely book The Old Ways. The idea of routes that have been trodden by others over thousands of years, like the Camino de Santiago, inspires a strange connection with strangers one will never meet, and a sense of being a part of the continuum of history, through the simple act of treading of paths. Macfarlane writes that his guiding spirit for his book is Edward Thomas, poet and essayist, and the first chapter looks at Tracks and this idea of walking over history:

"To Thomas, paths connected real places but they also led outwards to metaphysics, backwards to history and inwards to the self."

The reason for a pilgrim to walk a route rather than merely travel it is fundamental to the experience described in that sentence.

The other interest is the scallop, or rather one particular scallop. Whilst creating the river map for Rosalind Stoddart last year (which I have written about in a number of previous posts, including Reaching Conclusions and Riverlands ), I walked with the two other Jos (Jo Bell and Jo Blake-Cave) along the River Nene to the church in the village of Achurch. Attached to a post just outside the church I found a scallop, the one I sketched for the map and shown above, with the words PILGRIM TRAIL and a cross painted on it in red. A little further along in the hedgerows I found another one.

I don't know who put them there, but it did inspire me to read about the scallop as a symbol for the Pilgrim's Trail.

The scallop seems to have two meanings. One relates to the idea of things washing up on the shore, the way that individual shells might travel, taken by the ocean, and all eventually ending up on the same coast, attracted to the shore by the very rhythms of nature (or God?).

The other meaning is symbolised by the grooves in the scallop. Each of the grooves represent the different paths that pilgrims take, but all converge at the point of the shell, like pilgrims from around the world all ending up in the same place such as Santiago de Compostela.

The history of the Santiago de Compostela and how it became such a revered site (the city became the third most holy site in Christendom after Jerusalem and Rome) is also fascinating and based mainly on unsubstantiated rumour and legend! But we all know that faith does not need facts to be real.

The Sainthood of James is worryingly tied up with bloody tales of faith wars and division, but the more innocent symbol of the scallop still intrigues me. The idea that modern Christians still walk the same paths as those people so many centuries ago, who had very different beliefs and understanding of the world than we do today, and still converge onto the same point as they did, is fascinating to me. And even though I am not a follower of a particular religion, I could also follow those footsteps, see the same sights and feel the weight of history, and see what the path might reveal to me.

Well worn track to the River Nene

To the see the whole of my map of the River Nene, click here.

Smell of Bread

Here is the text that introduces the Smell of Bread exhibition, on throughout June, 1st floor Nottingham Central Library.

‘The Smell of Bread’ is a simple phrase that binds many of us together. It carries with it the ideas of sustenance and comfort. For some, especially those who may be a long way from the country of their birth, it evokes a strong memory of home.

This and the other phrases, images and models in the exhibition have been created by ‘the international group’, a wonderful group of people from places as diverse as Syria, Palestine, China, Swaziland, Poland, Italy, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Turkey and of course Nottingham.

Through a series of highly inspiring workshops led by artists Jo Dacombe and Gillian Brent, participants explored the themes within the Thomas Demand and Decolonizing Architecture exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary.

The group discussed, debated and created artistic responses to the ideas of architecture and how the spaces in which we live can affect the ways in which we live. How do we create places that make us feel secure? How do changing boundaries impact on our lives? How do we begin to imagine and create shared spaces in which we are all equal?

The workshops also supported the group engaging more deeply with contemporary art, improving their artistic skills as well as their spoken and written English. We also hope that the project brought a new set of people together to begin to imagine a better world.

We would like to thank Sam Abbas, Zubeda Rasul, Dudu Bhembe, Tammy Tchi, Allan Njanji, Faisal Ballan, Shaista Khaliq, Banu Ozveri, Hoda Alfake, Samreen Zia, Edyta Frackowiak, Teresa Napiorkowska, and Dwain Bent for all their thoughtful contributions and artists Jo Dacombe and Gillian Brent for supporting and shaping their contributions all the way.

Working with Nottingham Contemporary   

Gill and I will be running workshops as part of a celebration to launch Refugee Week on 16th June at Nottingham Contemporary, drop in between 12 and 5pm.

Dream Walking book published

I am very pleased to announce that our little book, Dream Walking: a Sidelong walk in Nottingham, is now available!

The book is 20 pages of writing and images by LJ and me about our first project collaborating as Sidelong. We wanted to record some of the ideas and thoughts behind the night walk we staged in Nottingham, so we decided to make this book, describing our influences, how we put the walk together and some of the ideas we had discussed as a collaboration. You can preview the book online here.

LJ and I have some more ideas about further walks we hope to stage together and we're talking right now about how to make them happen. I'm really excited about this, not only do I find LJ's ideas and enthusiasm refreshing, I am also discovering a lot more about Nottingham. Follow this blog, our Sidelong blog or follow the Sidelong Facebook page for updates on our future adventures! You can subscribe to this blog by email at the top left of this page to keep you informed of new posts.

We are interested in creating walks further afield than Nottingham too and have had a few interesting conversations over the past few months with people about possibilities, but so far this has not come to anything. If you know of somewhere interesting that we could explore for a walk, or would like to invite us to be part of an event, please get in touch or leave a comment below. We'd love to hear your ideas.

Smell of bread and little houses

Working towards the exhibition as a result of my work with my International Group at Nottingham Contemporary. We are calling the exhibition Smell of Bread, taken from something that one of the group wrote on their architectural piece.

The International Group have been wonderful to work with. Originating from places as diverse as Syria, Zimbabwe, Poland, China, India, Palestine, Georgia and more, the group have been working with me and another artist Gillian Brent for eight weeks.

We started by being inspired by the exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary, at the time one of them was the Decolonizing Architecture exhibition that I've written about in two previous posts (Exploring Common Ground and Dividing Lines) Gill had an idea about using little wooden houses to create village layouts. I tried this with the group in one of our sessions.

With my interest in urban planning and social spaces I found this activity brilliant for generating debate and discussion about how we use spaces, how we build spaces and how those spaces then affect us.

We split into three groups and each group was given a set of wooden houses and a word. I asked them to create a village inspired by that word. Each group had similar sets of houses, but different words. The words were Secure, Shared and Nature.

Having created their villages, we then looked at each group's in turn. This simple activity turned into an hour and a half of debate and discussion about how we live: how space is shared, can we force people to share, can we police ourselves or do we always need an authority to make decisions? By building a secure space do we create elitism and exclude others? The shared space had similarities to the secure space - the shared space was only shared within the village and still excluded those outside the village, and the secure space was surrounded by a wall but still needed a shared space in the middle. Contact with the outside was made by the creation of a railway.

In contrast, the space created by the nature group was chaotic and anarchic, requiring constant negotiation between neighbours about who could use a space. At first this seemed attractive to many of us, but on closer inspection would this result in survival of the fittest? (or the most brutal?)

As discussions continued, people tried to re-order elements of their villages. Should civic buildings be central or on the outskirts? Could we have a space for shared faiths?

The theme for our project had been "Building a better future", and this activity really got deep into the issues about peoples living and sharing together as well as how we build.

Only a week later I came across a brilliant report of a lecture by Richard Sennett at Harvard, "The Architecture of Cooperation", discussing how people co-operate in spaces and how the spaces we plan affect this. He spoke about edges and boundaries, something our group has also talked a lot about.  Sennett suggested the need for a "membrane approach":

"In many planning classes, they say that when there is a rigid separation between two communities, classes, or functions, the best thing you can do is erase these divisions. This is an error. We need to mark space, and space has to have some quality of protection as well as opening to the outside: a membrane condition."

This inspired me to pick up a book on my bookshelf again, "The Social Logic of Space" by Hillier and Hanson, discussing "global-to-local logic", and the ideas of Durkheim who distinguished two types of social cohesion, or solidarity: organic and mechanical. Organic solidarity is based on the interdependence of peoples through difference, for example through the division of labour. Mechanical solidarity is based on integration through similarities such as belief and group structure.

These two types of social function require different types of space. Organic requires dense space, whereas mechanical organisations require segregated spaces.

Thinking all this through, I come back to the idea that we can plan our spaces to correspond to the way a society is working, however what happens when planners try to orchestrate the behaviour or social function of people by the way they plan the environment? I am reminded of my work some years ago for my Thinkspace project, when I met with architects of new school buildings who were trying to "design out" bad behaviour, and town planners who were redesigning housing areas that had disintegrated socially. At the time I made a speech as part of Architecture Week and I am reminded by the opening of the speech where I quoted Churchill:

"We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us."

Yes, and the spaces between them too.

The Smell of Bread exhibition will be on show at Nottingham Central Library throughout June and a special celebration event will take place at Nottingham Contemporary on 16th June.

Winter into Spring

 

If you have been following my project to make a drawing each month, tracking the changes of nature by drawing the plants that I see on my walks, you will have noticed that there were no drawings for March.

Ah ha, given up already! you thought. Well, no, the drawings continued in March, but something had changed. It became Spring!

I was seduced by the snowdrops' tiny bowing heads, the early tree blossom, the blue of the hyacinths. Colour began to appear in scattered dots amongst the brown twigs. It was beautiful, promising, awakening and I loved it! But...

...the drawings stopped working. Depicting pretty spring flowers just wasn't doing it for me, it seemed too much like I was trying to be a botanical artist - which I'm not - rather than to do what I'm interested in. It took me the month of March to figure it out.

The drawings in winter worked because of the lack of colour. Lacking leaves or the softness of petals, the winter twigs topped with rose hips and the cones hanging like tarnished earrings from the hazel were all about structure and line. I had written the previous autumn (when walking by the river) about the architecture of plants, resulting in my drawings of teasel, thistle and hawthorn berries. This was what was missing in the drawings in March.

Too much colour, pretty flowers, blousey petals - I was seduced by them and lost the idea of the structures. I had to rethink.

In May, I made a drawing of a bunch of pink blossom from a tree lining a road near where I live. A remarkable colour, but I needed another approach. Having made a drawing in pencil, I realised that for a long time I had really loved the linear quality of the drawings, and this was part of the tracing of the shapes. With the blossom, the linear drawing was about working out how the petals, stamen and stem all fitted together. I decided to go further with the linear quality and make the drawing as a linocut.

I carved the lines detailed and thin into the lino, to give the impression of the delicate quality of the blossom, but also to emphasise the intricate linear quality of the drawing that I loved. Printing the image in pale pink onto a grey paper kept the subtlety and prettyness of the blossom, but revealed the thread-like lines of the structure.

It feels like I'm back on track. It will be interesting to see how these develop throughout the year as the seasons change and throw up new challenges for me! But for now I will keep pursuing that linear quality and see where it takes me.

It's also interesting how, having decided to focus on line and structure, my perception of the world has shifted slightly too. I'm noticing more of the linear qualities around me, not just in nature but in other things too: cracks in walls, snail trails across slabs, the rhythms of fencing. What we see feeds the art and the art feeds what we see.

I'm collecting some of the drawings and prints in my shop, click here to see them.

Also, you can now follow me on my new Facebook page.

Riverlands and Spires

The premiere of Riverlands, a performance by Jo Bell and Jo Blake Cave, took place at Aldwincle All Saints Church in Northamptonshire, with the artwork by me and Kate Dyer on display.

Photo by Kate Dyer

The event was mesmerising, the venue magical, lit by technician Andy Eathorne to create gently rippling coloured light across the columns, evoking the animation of light on water.

The performance was rich with romance, humour, characters and birds. The audience (sold out on the first night!) were riveted from start to finish, not a sound or a stir until the double encore at the end.

I had worked with Kate Dyer to create artwork that incorporated my maps and drawings with Kate's photographs from the river. This had been a challenge as my drawings are linear and delicate with limited colour, whereas Kate's images were rich in colour and texture. Making them work together on one piece was a challenge! However, once I struck on the idea that the map was all about the shape of the river rather than the elements around it, this resulted in Kate's images also working with the shape of the river and creating the impressions of colour and texture that you experience on the banks.

I included my sketches and notes from the river on the reverse of the map. The drawings were received really well and I had some great feedback from the audience. This is particularly encouraging as I have just launched my shop of drawings for a personal project I have been doing, originally inspired by this commission.

I created an extra addition to the project, the Church Spires cutouts. My sense of travelling on the river was punctuated by the appearance of church spires slicing into the sky, so surprising when juxtaposed with the horizontal planes of the river. The spires along this stretch of river were significant to my experience and I wanted to find a way to include them.

The Church Spires cutouts is a set of unfolded spires, a selection of the shapes that I saw from the river. The spires are an A4 sheet of quality card laser cut to produce 5 shapes. When pressed out and folded, the shapes create miniature spire shapes.

These were really popular at the event and I sold quite a few. It's the first time I have worked with laser cutting and I was delighted with the results. Folded paper, paper forms and working with 2D into 3D is something that has interested me for a long time, so I will definitely be doing more laser cut paper sculptures in the future.

To see the map, drawings and Church Spires cutouts in more detail, click here.

Riverlands and the River map were commissioned by Rosalind Stoddart, Cultural Engineer.