Found in Frankwell – Part 2

The uncertainty I expressed as the first Covid lockdown came to an end has not become any clearer in the world, although with the emerging possibility of a new Democratic US president, some sanity might begin to return. Whilst not becoming immune to the uncertain future, we are learning to live with it, sustaining hope and making plans cautiously, but with plenty of contingency.

And so we return this week to a second lockdown, albeit with slightly more reasonable restrictions. The walking I did during the Spring and Summer (see my last post) was a huge source of creativity. It resulted in a series of books, collaborations with other local artists, collaborative walks, a collage for community consultation and various writings.

Some of the books are on sale with all profits being donated to the Shrewsbury Food Hub. Four of the books were also donated to the artist books archive established by Sarah Bodman at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University for the West of England in Bristol.

All of this work is discussed in an article I was invited to write for the Living Maps Review (see Walking Territory: In and Out of Lockdown in issue 9 of the Journal) as part of their Mapping the Pandemic projects.

A mapping of all of the walks I did during the first 10 weeks of lockdown

The Walking Territory artist book is a single edition comprising a series of route maps for ten weeks of Covid walks restricted to within 2km of my house and text responses to the choreography of social distancing entangled with the unfolding of Spring. The book is made with paper made from plant materials gathered from my garden and from walks, and using ink made from oak galls from my garden.

Ordinarily, I do not use an automated GPS tracking of my walks, preferring instead the ritual of tracing the route on a map after the event, which helps to fix the walk in my memory. Seeing the shape of the routes, set against mapped topography gave the walks a tangible presence linked to sensory encounters. As I reflected on this, the shape of the walk took on greater importance to me than the scale accuracy. I recorded the shapes of the walks expressively using Chinese calligraphy brushes so that each bend and twist triggered memory links with moments from each walk. Ingold talks about the difference between threads and traces, wayfaring and transport and so it is important that these maps express this as walking through the territory not merely across it.

As I overlaid tracings of my routes, the grain of the town revealed itself with the sinuous loops of the river, first around Frankwell, then the isle of the town centre being a dominating influence on the walked terrain. 

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Walking Territory artist book

With the onset of Winter, another lockdown, and a mix of busyness, personal setbacks and general confusion, my enthusiasm is waning for revisiting these Frankwell walks I now know in such detail. This seems to be reflected in the numbers of people I see trying to carry on, not showing the same fear or wonder I observed first time around. There is no strange awed silence this time. But I never regret a walk … so I will be exploring the darkness, reveling in the contradictory sense of cosy intimacy and separateness one gets, pacing the streets at dusk and dawn.

Found in Frankwell – Part One

Now at the beginning of July, in a chaotic time of uncertainty, rage and hope, I look back at those first few weeks of lockdown with a mix of wistfulness and incredulity.  Still too close to make objective sense of it, yet it already feels distant as many people return to pre-Covid activities.  Despite superficial familiarity, there is no doubt that both the atmosphere and physical environment have changed.  The restrictions imposed a simplicity to life, which could be relaxing in the moments when I could submit to that.  As the environment became busier again, an air of tension built up – there is now a nagging drive to be productive, to return to something, only to find that it is still not possible to make much progress on projects, without difficult adaptations.  And there is very little funding available.

What of those weeks,  those strange times in which I walked?  In the first 2-3 weeks of lockdown in March and early April, I did not go far.  Partly out of obedience following Government instructions to stay at home, and partly because I was focused on spending time with family and homeschooling.

In that early stage, my daughter, Eliza and I looked at old maps of Frankwell, the place on our doorstep, and we researched as much as we could find in books and on the internet about our local history as we couldn’t get into the library any more.  Then, inspired by Common Ground’s local distinctiveness projects, we created a Frankwell alphabet using images of letters taken from local signage.

A Frankwell alphabet

I began to think about whether I could create an A to Z Book of Frankwell with drawings of places for each letter.  These are some of the drawings in ink made from oak galls from the tree in our garden.  Some of the drawings refer to old photographs of places, since demolished.

This seed of an idea developed into plans for more artist books to be made in response to my walks during lockdown.  At the latest count, I have five of my own books, a collaborative book and two maps on the go.  These comprise a set of black and white prints exploring distinctive lines and patterns found in Frankwell, and two series of photographs inspired by some of Robert Rauschenberg’s image sequences and screenprints.  I got in contact with some of the artists I know living in or connected with Frankwell and we developed an idea to create a collaborative book which could help rejuvenate community interest and, perhaps, raise  some money for charity.  I’ll post about these books as I/we complete them.

Linocut and relief test prints of structures, lines and patterns distinctive to Frankwell

When I did walk it was usually early in the morning when very few people were around.  Those weeks of Spring will be remembered for seemingly endless days of perfectly warm sunshine and crystal clear blue skies, not an aircraft trail in sight.  Few people failed to notice the Spring this year, as so much time could be spent outdoors, listening to bird song and watching the emergence of seedlings and flowers.  Through regular walks, it was possible to pinpoint the day swifts arrived, or when hawthorn came into flower.

In about the fourth week, I began to record my walks a little more formally beyond taking photographs to making notes of observations and experiences.

Inspection cover cast at the Atlas Foundry, originally located in Frankwell, where Theatre Severn now stands

I collected wax crayon rubbings of surfaces, and occasionally some found artefacts, like fragments of pottery I found in the River Severn both upstream and downstream of the town.  Someone later advised that some of the fragments were likely 17th or 18th Century slipware.  Other pieces, like the earthenware fragments, looked like they could be even older.  Each fragment must have its own story.  It was fascinating to think of the journey of the clay, from its formation thousands, if not millions of years ago, to its extraction, processing and making into utensils which were somehow lost and broken, transported and eroded in the river to be collected once again from the shore.

Ceramic fragments collected from the River Severn

The government had tried to clarify guidance about where and when people could exercise.  There wasn’t any definitive distance set, but at that stage, we were not supposed to drive anywhere to walk.  So, I restricted my walks to within a 2km radius of my house, and I also restricted myself to not walking everyday.  The imposed conditions increased my anticipation of each walk, and exploring within the local boundary became a highlight of the week.

Ordinarily, I don’t use an automated GPS tracking of my walks, preferring instead the ritual of tracing the route on a map after the event, which helps to fix the walk in my memory.  Seeing the shape of the routes, set against mapped topography gave the walks a tangible presence linked to sensory encounters.

Weekly mapping of walks

A walking web of routes with 15 minute and 30 minute radial points to be connected by walking as close to a straight line as possible

Having lived in Frankwell for over 22 years, there are few if any places I haven’t walked in before, but the heightened awareness, the disrupted sense of time and space, meant that I did see details with fresh eyes.  The urban environment is a gallery of contemporary art.

As I went slightly further afield beyond Frankwell, I did occasionally find a new pathway or a road that I had never previously visited.  I was conscious that I might be viewed as an intruder, as being a potential asymptomatic virus threat, in the quiet residential streets.    What was the purpose of my walks?  Was I staking some kind of psychological claim over territory, was I the self-indulgent flâneur, was it just exercise?  I don’t think it was any of these particularly, although it was certainly as much a mental exercise as physical, a chance to let my mind breathe in the open air and escape the confines of domesticity.  I was curious to experience directly how the world was reacting to this new situation, to record and reflect on how we can find positive routes out of this.

That said, I couldn’t help feeling pangs of selfishness when hearing about or seeing for myself how people were discovering local paths that were completely new to them, paths I had walked many times, talked about, made artwork about, and which had generally been met with disinterest.  Rightly or wrongly, these are places where I felt some kind of ownership.  Really though, it was great that there was a surge of interest in our surroundings and slowing down, which offers renewed optimism about future attitudes.  It is what this blog and much of my artist practice is about encouraging after all.

Against all this familiarity, I was noticing the differences – changes in the natural and built environment, and changes in people’s behaviour.  Children were making the best of the sunny weather and chalked pavement drawings and upbeat, hopeful messages were much in evidence.  Trees became decorated with bunting, ribbons and curious paraphernalia, boxes and piles of junk appeared at the end of driveways as people found time to sort out their house.  Desire paths were worn across verges and patches of grass, sometimes a parallel line appeared 2m from the main path.

As the weeks passed, the choreography of encounters with other pedestrians evolved.  After the initial awkwardness of crossing the road or stopping and standing well aside to avoid passing close to someone walking in the opposite direction, there was a period in which there was the briefest of eye contact, smiles and gracious thank yous and careful, elegant swerves to maintain 2 metres’ separation.  These actions became more unconscious then from around the ninth week, it was noticeable that a small number of people were not only intent on ignoring social distancing, there was an element of aggression in the way they steadfastly maintained a line along the middle of the footpath.

Once it was announced that lockdown restrictions would be eased and some non-keyworker school children would be able to return to school, I detected a renewed sense of purpose in the people I saw during my walks, traffic had been getting busier again, and my walks began to lose their charm.  I stopped recording the walks after Week 10, a suitably round number, and suddenly my interest waned.  The sense of community cohesion that had grown during the lockdown began to dissipate, but there continues to be many voices calling for a more sustainable recovery and hope remains that whatever world we return to, it will shed some of the old baggage and head in a socially just direction.

Walking on the spot

During the last few weeks of the Covid lockdown, projects I’ve been working towards over 2-3 years have been halted in their tracks, maybe irretrievably, and my walking artist practice has been curtailed somewhat.  Having come to terms with that, for the time being at least, I began to refocus on my local walks in and around Frankwell in Shrewsbury.

Very soon I found myself working on ideas for three or more artist books (more on that in a future post or two) and developing some areas of my practice that I had planned to use in a couple of projects.  These involved using plant materials and found objects to make and adapt paper or fabric for further use in drawings, collage, painting or printmaking.  I began to create a process of making work about the landscape using materials from the landscape.

In addition, with schools being closed, I was able to spend more time working with my 11 year old daughter, Eliza.  We experimented with materials and learnt some new techniques together.

Some of the paper we made with plant fibres, scrap paper and flowers

Preparing a stack of paper for printing

Unrolling our printed paper

Eliza assisted in making a couple of short videos demonstrating paper making with plant materials and scrap paper.  These videos can be used by anyone as a resource to try this out for themselves.

Here’s the first in which we prepare pulp from garden plants:

Here’s the second explaining how we then made paper with plant and scrap paper pulp using some simple equipment:

After this, we did some sketches and paintings of some garden flowers.

We tried printing on our paper using flowers and leaves gathered from around the garden – I’ve enjoyed doing this with groups following walks in the past.  Here is a brief downloadable guide to dyeing/printing paper or fabric using plants and rust:

Plant dyeing

A small selection of examples of our prints:

Just to add a durational aspect to our work, we planted some woad seeds, and hopefully by the Autumn we will have a good batch of leaves so that we can make some beautiful indigo dye to add to our dyes using madder root and weld.

 

Acts of Resistance

Choosing to walk is invariably an act of resistance:  resisting threats to our mental and physical wellbeing and resisting trauma caused by natural or malign forces – forces that may not be in our control.  But this is not now a call for civil disobedience, quite the reverse.  As we face an uncertain future with personal restrictions imposed to maintain public safety, we must consider how even walking in the open can impact on others.  This is a call for community and inner resilience.

There is much to feel positive about in the response of the local community to the coronavirus.  There are also other more worrying reports of selfish and exploitative actions.  In the moment that lockdown measures were imposed, I used my solo walking exercise and made small interventions to support the reserves of community resilience, if it should falter in the weeks ahead.

 

I’m without symptoms and barely been in contact with anyone outside close family for over two weeks, yet in making these boxes and taking them outside, I was conscious of the need for cleanliness.  They are fully recyclable and no batteries required!

I last made similar interventions as part of the Act of Resistance event that I led with a group of about 20 participants in Dewsbury at last September’s Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography.  That event took place at the time when a “no deal” Brexit loomed, and it felt as if an emergency was imminent.  Seems a lifetime away.   I asserted that actively challenging the control of space and place is an important part of psychogeography.  Participants made small interventions in the urban landscape to foster community kindness, before gathering for a short performance walk as a demonstration of unity.

Read more here: Act of Resistance_ahowe_4wcop

Walking is a political act.  But also important to recognise when control of space is necessary for our own survival.

The experience of walking is a dynamic balance between sensory perception, memory and imagination.  Taking away the physical experience does not prevent walking taking place in our imagination, so amply demonstrated in Phil Smith’s “Guidebook for an Armchair Pilgrimage”.  From your room, you can travel anywhere your imagination takes you.

 

 

Scour – the museum in the landscape

Over the Summer I was delighted to be invited by artists Elizabeth Turner and Keith Ashford to lead two art walks and workshops in the River Arrow valley in Redditch as part of their Scour 2 project, funded by Arts Council England and funding partners.  This follows their successful Scour project which was inspired by the Forge Mill Needle Museum collections and the relationship between the needle industry and the surrounding landscape of the River Arrow valley and Bordesley Abbey.

For the Scour 2 project, the two lead artists have taken the art work into the landscape of the Arrow Valley, making sculptural work including a grass cut map of the river and immersive sound and video projections in the space below concrete highway structures.  A performance entitled Machine in the Park is scheduled for 7th March 2020, details here.

The series of public workshops also included events with Nicky Ashford (botanical drawings) and Hanny Newton, contemporary embroidery artist, who exhibited work in the Follow the River exhibition at the Bernie Crewe Gallery, Palace Theatre, Redditch.

I led group walks in May and August in the north and south of the Arrow Valley Country Park followed by collage and mapping workshops at the Bordesley Abbey Visitor Centre.  For the first of the walks I was accompanied by local historian Tony Green.  He explained about the fascinating layers of history along the river associated with the medieval Abbey and the various mills, when Redditch was the centre of the world’s needlemaking industry.

The groups were lovely to work with, and we enjoyed making work using materials and imagery found on the walks.  During the walks, we had tried to awaken all senses, and a few of the participants used visual responses to sounds in their work.  Here are some examples:

There were two fantastic outcomes from the workshops.  The first were two collaborative poems turned into songs by Kate Allan.  She collected phrases and responses to the walks from members of the group and combined these with some recordings of ambient sound from the walks to create song performances whilst everyone worked on their collage maps.

One of the poems turned into song by Kate Allan

The second outcome was a collaborative zine that I was asked to put together using the artwork and poems made in the workshops, and photography of the landscape.  It was quite a technical challenge to convert the colour images digitally into separated colour layers in yellow, blue and black for risograph printing by the Footprint Workers Cooperative.  I was really pleased with the results:

 

The Arrow zine is for sale for £3, or £4 including postage and packaging!  Email liz.sculpturelogic@gmail.com to order your copy.

A Journey with Mary Webb School

Earlier this month, it was my pleasure to lead a project under the Meadow Arts Inspires arts education programme with 14 Year 9 children and teachers at Mary Webb School and Science College in Pontesbury.  The project took place over four days from 2^nd July to 5^th July 2019 and supports Meadow Arts work towards the Arts Council’s goal 5 for children and young people.

The project explored the theme of Journey using found materials from a rural landscape.  I adopted a spiral as a symbol of a life journey in which a person keeps close to inner beliefs and experience but continuously moves outwards to new and wider horizons.  The work was also built around a quote from Rebecca Solit’s book ” A Field Guide to Getting Lost” after Plato’s “Meno”:

“That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find and finding it is a matter of getting lost”

I hoped that the project might help the students develop ways of working so that they could find independent solutions to problems from uncertain situations in which there are many choices.

Aims

High level aims for the project were to:

• Explore an artist practice using observation and findings from immediate surroundings
• Experiment, improvise and take artistic risks

The students were also invited to take part in activities towards an Arts Award Discover certificate.

Activities

Day 1: Andrew Howe led the group of students on a walk from the school into the woodland surrounding Pontesford Hill.  Students were encouraged to pay attention to all their senses and to gather objects, photographs, tracings/texture rubbings and other materials for later use in artworks.

In the morning, the students split into 3 groups and spent an hour working with sticks, branches, leaves and other found materials to construct sculptural works based on a spiral.  The students were aware of Andy Goldsworthy’s work using natural materials.

After lunch, students had some time to make observational drawings from the landscape.

On return to the school, leaves and other plant matter were gathered and placed within stacks of watercolour paper for dyeing by boiling for an hour in two batches using iron and alum mordants. 

The resulting papers were later put together into a large spiral and stamped with the Solnit quote for mounting on a wall in the school reception area.

Day 2: The artist demonstrated a method for developing abstract designs based layers of tracings and drawings made directly from found objects and photographs.  The students learnt about the work of Joseph Cornell, Ingid Calame and Mark Bradford.

Students created initial studies from their found materials, using drawing, photo transfers and mixed media techniques.  Some of these studies and the found objects were developed further into 3D assemblages housed within wooden boxes.  The boxes were constructed by the school technician and displayed on a wall in a spiral formation.

Days 3 and 4: Students created work using one or more techniques including:

• Drawing
• Painting
• Photography and digital manipulation of images for photo transfers
• Printing/stencilling (monoprinting using gelli plates and screenprinting); and
• Collage

These works were incorporated into A5 size handmade concertina books for display alongside the box assemblages.

The students chose to interpret the theme of journey in different ways.  Some considered the artistic process exploring print technique and designs as a journey, some took a personal view of their own life journey, some took inspiration directly from their observations on the group walk, some worked with maps of the local area.

At the end of the project, all of the students worked in pairs to reflect on their own and their partner’s work.  They each then shared some positive comments to the whole group on what they enjoyed about their partner’s work and why.

Review

The two key aims of the project were met because:

• After some initial hesitancy, all of the students took the opportunity to experiment with techniques that were new to them. There were good examples of students taking a simple design based on found objects or photos from the walk, and developing this through a series of drawings, prints and or collage to successful work which they could incorporate into a book.
  • This encouraged students to innovate and strive for excellence in their future work
  • This also enabled a personal progression as students became willing to try new techniques which they could see would be valuable in future
• Most of the group commented in their art logs how they made the realisation that art work could be inspired by what they observe in their immediate surroundings. The walk forged new connections between the students and their surrounding landscape.
  • This provided a means for students to be authentic, making their own personal responses to what they experience around them
• The dyeing with plants made a big impact with the group and with teachers, as everyone could see how beautiful results could be achieved simply and quickly using found and readily available materials
• Everyone found that Gelli plate printing was an accessible method to experiment with designs, stencils, textures and paint and achieve effective, expressive results
• The box assemblages and outdoor collaborative sculptures presented greater challenges for the group, although most people enjoyed these activities and made some successful work
• The students engaged with the project with enthusiasm, and many expressed how much they enjoyed the experience in their art logs.
• It was observed that the students worked well together in small groups, sharing ideas, helping each other with difficulties, all of which helped to create a positive and inclusive experience. As these students will all progress towards GCSE level in art, the project will help to build teamwork, belonging and ownership.

A couple of feedback comments:

“This week has linked with my everyday life because it is a journey.  I do many journeys a day.  This week has shown me that walks and journeys can teach you something…

“…I have enjoyed learning new processes, including the gelli plate printing, and I got to stamp the spiral with the quote.

I have enjoyed this experience greatly”  Student

 

“Students were encouraged to ponder on problems and develop their own ideas which was great and what we wanted throughout the workshop”

“Thank you again for all your efforts with our students, this was a really valuable experience for them.” Teacher

A Wander is not a slog

During the last month, I took part in two walking exchanges with Blake Morris, post-doctorate researcher and one of the founders of The Walk Exchange, who is nearing the end of his A Wander is not a slog project.  This involves completing all 54 of the walks in Clare Qualmann and Claire Hind’s “Ways to Wander” book, itself a collaborative effort collating walking scores from around 50 different walking artists.

The walks we did were:

43 – created by Vanessa Grasse , dance and multidisciplinary artist

45 – the city as a site of performative possibilities, Kris Darby, pedestrian performer/researcher

Our responses, authored jointly, are published on Blake’s blog here and here.

In this meta-post, I am reflecting on the experience of the walk exchange and adding a little more detail to my responses to the walks.

Blake lives in London, and I live in Shrewsbury, and for various reasons of cost, available time and convenience, we did the walk remotely in our home locations, but used a combination of phone calls, SMS text and email to share the experience in real time and retrospectively.  Our responses were gathered together quickly within a day or so.

The walk itself did indeed feel like a shared experience, and the self-imposed time restrictions added a sense of urgency and intensity.  The need to share and reflect on the experience heightened my attentiveness during the walk.  There were many possibilities for making the exchange using digital technologies, and we could have opened out the event to more people.  Indeed, Blake has done this with some of the walks in the project.

22^nd October 2018 – Walk 43 by Vanessa Grasse

A walk in four sections in which we explored the town as an urban performance space in which movement and relationships are considered to be choreographed.  I observed the human, non-human/inanimate participants .  It was as if, each has a multitude of tiny filaments which continuously latch onto other agents and unlatch as connections form and dissolve.

In the first part, we were encouraged to identify discrete “performances” and to determine their conclusion – so considering the scope and duration of performance.  In doing so, one quickly notices the overwhelming stream of details, movement and interconnections that are going on at any one time.

One of the performances:

DSB

Sunlight streams directly along the bridge towards me

A dog down by the river bank scrabbles in fallen leaves

Leaving a deposit for its two owners to find

A cyclist in black sweeps smoothly along the wide pathway from my right

Intermittently appearing/disappearing behind trees

Then passing by the end of the footbridge a few paces before I reach it

Further up the hill opposite, the buzz of a leaf blower starts up

Like an aggravating gnat, increasing tension in the moment

On both sides of me, ripples shimmer

A silent crescendo of colour

A swan flaps, wings slapping against the water surface

It surges towards another swan which swivels and moves away aloof

The dog walkers pass in front of me, a man and woman

In a hasty almost surreptitious movement, they lift the lid of the dog bin

And clang, the bag is gone

In the second part, we focused on one interconnection, which we decided would be between “an inconsequential thing and a tree of consequence”.  Of course, under the gaze all things, however ephemeral and inconsequential, gain gravitas.  I walked between a water hydrant, connected to Conduit Head, a historic water supply to Shrewsbury since Tudor times and a horse chestnut tree in St Alkmund’s graveyard.  Although this is in the busy centre of town, the route between follows narrow shutts or passages in which one is forced to experience the town more by hearing and smell than visual observation.

I reflected on my two things tied, gripping into the earth linked by dog-legged pathway, a  connecting path burnt into memory, the space holding an invisible thread in perpetuity that only I can sense.

The third part was about following and participating in the performance.  Keen to avoid following people, fraught with questionable ethics, I went to Doctor’s Field on the edge of Shrewsbury where cattle and horses are often kept on grazing land.  Ironically, however, I almost immediately needed to hurry past a woman to avoid an awkward moment.

My following formed a linked sequence:

Long tailed tits gathered in a crab apple tree

Their sharp ticks prickling the air with conversation

A jay flew overhead then dipped low

A burst of speed for me to head towards the large ash tree

Zig zagging diagonally across the meadow, I sped after a great tit,

Its looping, dipping flight finishing in another apple tree

A magpie emerged to pull me further on into the field

High above, an aircraft took me at steady pace

Until buzzards appeared

Three of them, piercing shrieks from a clear blue sky

They circled, soaring on late Autumn thermals, for five minutes or more

I allowed myself to drift, handing over control to the birds

Driving me steadily to the hedge at the edge of the field

Briefly I let myself be nudged by a soft breeze

Feeling ever lighter as I tried to catch up with insects caught in the sunlight

My attention was interrupted by sounds of hammering and chainsaws on a distant building site

I moved towards them until my route intersected a desire path

Meandering back across the field, through long grass to the river bank

The wind rippled the river surface as I slowed my pace even further to match the river’s flow

Sensing the pull

Feeling impetus

Recognising the changes in pace, in rhythm, in direction

Tethering

Being with

Connected

Just for the moment

I re-emerge into the street as a cyclist passes

I accelerate but cannot keep pace

And there is a cat, young ginger

We circle each other

Wary, tentative

Growing comfortable in each other’s company

The cat settles, stretches on the tarmac

It curls up in the sun

And drowses off to sleep

Finally, returning to the place I finished my walk (i) in the morning, I stayed still to explore my visual frame.  Over time, the visual gives way to other senses, but I also gain a greater sense of the overall pattern of movement within the frame.  A frame which at its extremities includes deep blue sky, structural cabling high above the concrete pedestrian footbridge before me, and footpaths stretching away to my right and left.  My feet are planted on stone paving, obstructing my contact with the earth.

I begin to map the rhythms, character, scale, speed, direction, proximity of the different types of movement, noticing that in the urban terrain, these are dominated by human structures and routines.  These repeated movements are choreographed.  But below this fundamental human pattern of movement, there are more subtle, less predictable traces of movement by non-human participants: birds, insects, cats and at other times of the day, there may be foxes, rodents, squirrels and other creatures.  Then there are the trajectories of wind blown leaves and litter, shadows from lampposts moving with the sun.

The performance space is illuminated by the afternoon sun, but I look for the streetlights and reflect on how the feel of this constructed space will change dramatically under lighting.

 

 

10th November 2018, Walk 45 by Kris Darby

With Armistice Day the following day, we walked to our “tree of consequence” via war memorials.  Like the previous walk 43, this score had a number of options for groups, pairs or individuals.  We opted just for the shadow and light score in which I stuck to the shadows and Blake headed for the light.  This became quite challenging as, in our respective places, the weather alternated between sun and rain showers.  So we needed to be more creative about what were light and shade.

I walked in the shadows of:

• The black cat
• trees
• war
• bridges
• confusion
• narrow passages
• greatness
• memory
• myself
• life
• death

Keeping to the shadows altered my spatial awareness on the walk a lot more than I expected just from reading the score.  I was constantly aware of the sun and the weather conditions, the orientation of streets, the heights and positioning of the objects/buildings en route, whilst attempting to navigate towards a destination.  The location of light/shadows caused me to divert on a more circuitous route quite often.  The nature of keeping to the shadows meant that I sought out narrow, confined and quieter spaces, so in fact, I did in a way complete two other parts of the walk 45 score i.e I became more agoraphobic shying away from open, well lit spaces, and my destination is actually positioned in the quietest part of the town.  Also I was forced into walking differently, crouching, slinking along walls etc – it certainly felt like a performance.

As for future performative possibilities, I began to think about how the route of my walk could change at different times of the day and even at different times of the year.  A midday walk in Summer might offer very little shadow, whilst the sunny late afternoons of Autumn and Winter offer greater freedoms.

So thinking of a destination, keeping to the shadows and noticing how the route and way of walking changes at different times of the day or year could be one possibility.

I also began to think about how being in the shadows felt colder.  Certain areas of the town can “feel” warm (perhaps because they are more sociable spaces or near places like pubs, libraries, theatres, bakeries, cafes) or cold (because they are more austere like churchyards, banks, characterless offices and bus stations) so perhaps another score might be to walk noticing the temperature gradients, perhaps keeping to the warm or cold zones, or starting from a cold place attempt to navigate along a gradient of increasing temperature.

Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography

The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography reconvened at the University of Huddersfield for a third time last week.  Having previously only attended the Friday talks, this year I was able to attend both days and enjoyed some great walks.

 

 

On behalf of the self-titled politburo of 4WCOP organisers, Phil Wood introduced the event, referring to a derogatory tweet from an anonymous but high profile psychogeographer, who would not be attending.  Whilst the “politburo” is entirely comprised of white males, the event itself played host to fresh perspectives from a diverse range of participants, some of whom came from Istanbul, Slovenia, Italy, United States and Germany.  Difficult to say if there was equal representation of men and women, but it seemed to be fairly well balanced.

The event format, and many of its principal protagonists and attendees, have become familiar to me, and there is a danger this could just become a cosy get-together.  So I tried to take a more critical view of the proceedings with a few questions in mind:

• Is psychogeography practice evolving and including new perspectives?
• To what extent is detournement used?
• How was the terrain vague addressed? (This being the theme suggested to those proposing talks/walks for this year’s congress)

There was a packed programme of talks and walks which had been oversubscribed (and indeed the joint proposal that Gareth Jones and I had submitted didn’t quite make the cut, much to our frustration!)  This meant that there was a choice of two events to attend throughout the 2 day programme.  Inevitably then I missed some events that I would have liked to have taken part in, such as the talk on retail environments by Andrew Taylor/Katrina Whitehead/Kasia Breska, or the walks/events by Sonia Overall and Elspeth Penfold, Sohal Khan, John Rooney, Victoria Karlsson and Ewan Davidson/Michelle Woodall, and Irena Pivka.  The discussion led by Tim Waters  on What is Psychogeography in 2018? would have been good to be part of. I heard very good reports about “The Zone” walk led by Sohal Khan around the Paddock derelict mill area in which he used Tarkovsky’s “Stalker” film to frame the walk.

The first session of talks focused on Identities.

It was refreshing to hear about her work on feminist theory and social justice in the landscape being carried out by Anna Davidson.  Davidson admitted to be in the midst of  research and the short film she presented which combined the rivers/water/steam, mills/women’s role, and sugar/colonialism felt insubstantial.  It will be interesting to see how this work develops as it certainly prompted a more critical view of the landscape.

Lesley Wood is an artist who walked from Leeds to Newcastle retracing maternal connections over three generations.  The art work she produced incorporated these personal experiences and interaction with the environment (such as kinetic traces made by pastels carried in paper tubes whilst walking).  This is an area of my own practice that interests me, and which I find challenging because it is difficult to express the depth and complexity of walking experience in these relatively simple combinations of materials.

Alex Bridger discussed a series of walks in Huddersfield, Holmfirth, Manchester and Batley with participants from the LGBT community to draw in fresh insight into the landscape.  Again, this was interesting but the output seemed only part formed and may develop further as research continues.  Perhaps it should be unsurprising that the landscape is not viewed so differently by other communities, yet there are nuanced differences which merit acknowledgement and sharing.

At lunchtime we drifted into and around Huddersfield’s fabulous Queensgate Market. and learnt about its pioneering hyperbolic paraboloid roof structure.  Over lunch in a cafe, a group of us observed several empty stall spaces, which were like stages awaiting a performance.  Most people skirted reverentially around one them, until someone started a “desire line” straight across, soon to be followed by others.

 

 

 

 

Tony Wade was a highly engaging speaker, and I can see how he could generate a lot of interaction in his community-based projects.  His talk described the 60 mile walk he did around the Wakefield Metropolitan Boundary and the undertaking to paint 20 (triptych) acrylic paintings of views outwards from the boundary from suitable points within each of 20 x 3 mile sections.

Other talks considered the post-industrial landscape.  Martin Eccles described projects in former lead mining sites at Small Clough and walking the river underground to create soundscapes.  Perhaps, harder to see where the detournement is in this, but his work creates fascinating immersive experiences of environments that are otherwise difficult to access.

It was disappointing that David Sable and Kerry Hadley-Pryce were not able to attend due to sickness and as this was notified at short notice, 4WCOP were not able to bring in any reserve talks.  They were able to present David’s film about a mining community near Doncaster.  This powerful film was based on Sables’ own experience of the mine closures of the 1980s and those of communities involved.  As this is an area I had researched in regard to making a film for the Cinderloo project, I felt the film could have gone further, and at times it veered towards sentimentality.  There followed a good discussion about how we can acknowledge mining heritage without taking a rose-tinted nostalgic approach.  Ursula Troche had visited closed mines in Germany and Belgium where as much of the original infrastructure was left intact and or put to new use, unlike the UK where, very often industrial land is swept clean, taking all sense of history away from the communities that identified with the place.  In his notes, David referred to how the now rural land had reverted to agriculture and private ownership, inaccessible to local community, and how all that children could learn in schools about former employment was to visit the nearby (restored) stately home and learn about working in service.

I enjoyed the talk by Roger Boyle about taking various slices through his home town of Aberystwyth mapping, amongst other things, coal holes and Royal Mail postboxes.

The last talk of the day featured Nasli Tumerdem and Sevgi Turkkan, both recently completing or completed PhD degrees in Istanbul.  Their work involved walking in northern Istanbul with over 250 students.  This was an impressive logistical exercise in itself.  The talk was interesting in presenting how Istanbul is one of the most rapid developing cities in the world with the result that large areas of land are being subsumed into huge infrastructure projects (a third airport, highway and river channel parallel to the Bosphorus).  This top down development was disrupting communities – they referred to the type of development taking place as ad hoc urbanism.

In their architectural practice Tumerdem and Turkkan referred to an inherent vagueness in architecture that fits with using psychogeography to explore terrain:

• absence of dominant discourse
• discursive and contingent
• process of “unlearning” to be encouraged
• provoked vagueness
• learning by doing

So onto the walking, which, through the day, followed a progression out of Huddersfield up the Colne Valley to Marsden.

I started with Ursula Troche and Simon Bradley’s “Platform Seven” which began at the amazing brick tunnel ventilation shafts in Huddersfield, and ended underneath the railway viaduct where we found ourselves joining the pair singing and dancing to Underneath the Arches, an anti-austerity song.  The walk was a playful reinterpreting, subverting, deconstruction of what can be observed.  For example detourning “Trespassers will be prosecuted” to “Passers be cute”.  Some of the little scenarios performed by Ursula and Simon were madcap and obtuse, but always referring back to serious messages about peace, love and anti-war.

 

 

 

 

Phil Wood then lead a hauntology walk in Paddock Brow which was both informative, thought-provoking and highly atmospheric.  In the drizzle we explored 50 year old ivy-tangled woodlands where hundreds of mill workers used to live and learnt about a Jamaican club known for attracting famous reggae artists, world renowned Huddersfield-made sound systems and domino championships.  We reflected on the lost utopian dreams of a young Harold Wilson who went to school along the road we walked on many years ago.  And saw where some of the Luddites went on trial.

 

 

 

We reached the Milnsbridge Red and Green Socialist Club for lunch, for an excellent pint and sandwich, and we were treated to a talk by David Smith about the Huddersfield MP Victor Grayson who mysteriously disappeared in the 1930s.  We were invited to look for evidence of his living in the area in the 40s/50s.  I didn’t find any.

 

 

By the time we reached Slaithwaite Civic Hall by bus it was proper siling it down.  Vicky Ola and Anzir Boodoo invited everyone to make shadow installations using what we did/didn’t like about urban landscape.  I joined a walk led by photographer Kevin Linnane which included all kinds of activities to disrupt or enhance the normal experience of walking e.g frottage, water graffiti, blowing bubbles as way of sending words out into the air, divining, drawing etc.  I had a good discussion with Kevin afterwards, and he told me how is work is influenced by ritual and cycles.  He has a belief that”ritualistic, performative roles lie within spaces and materials, as an ethereal heartbeat sustaining the status quo”.

 

 

I loved the Colne Valley Sculpture Trail, which had entertainment value whilst seriously questioning the value of art objects/found objects. It was originally set up about 5 years ago and made national news.  It immediately caused all participants to look critically at encounters and their potential as artistic creations and possible meanings.  The walk was brilliantly led by Graeme Murrell who kept up a convincing commentary to go along with the labels for each work, and accompanying trail leaflet and AS Level exam questions.

 

 

 

The scenery was beautiful as we headed up into the hills and then back down to the canal for the approach into Marsden, where we finished in the Rivershead Brewery Tap.  I couldn’t stay long as I returned to Holmfirth, where I was staying with friends, and so I also missed the final walk of the day.

 

 

 

Psychogeography evolving? – certainly there was evidence of practices treading old ground, but there were also some new advances that are to be welcomed, such as the inclusion of feminist and queer perspectives.  There were several artists using sound, performance or film/theatre to augment or respond to walking practices.  Hopefully,  the international input will continue to grow.

Detournement?  All of these speakers discussed responses to psychogeographical walks which mostly resulted in art works that aimed to provoke, challenge established viewpoints or provide new insight into the landscape.  Their intentions were not necessarily to tackle the Spectacle head on, rather they offered alternative views and encouraged a multiplicity of response in our everyday experience.

There were a few references to terrain vague and by its nature, it is a term open to interpretation and application to many different contexts.  It was fascinating to hear the architects from Istanbul talk about how they encourage an indistinct vague approach in their architectural practice.  Otherwise I didn’t leave with the impression that the terrain vague had been addressed particularly.  Maybe it was in the talks I didn’t attend.

Apparently, there was no quorum to formally close the congress, so I expect it will reconvene for a fourth time… probably around September 2019 I’d guess.  Predictable?… maybe; entertaining?… definitely.

Rea Brook valley

How quickly the Summer slides into Autumn.  Whilst there is plenty of warmth in the sunshine, you know that as soon as you move into shadow, the air is thin and chilly.  This is a great time of the year, and I shall be planning some walks for the next few months as time allows.

Back during the midst of the heatwave, at the beginning of July, I did an early morning walk along the Rea Brook in Shrewsbury from Meole Brace into the centre.  I had been reading various books and writings of Richard Jefferies, Edward Thomas, Richard Mabey and Robert Macfarlane, and so their detailed noticing of the landscape and nature were fresh in my mind as I made this meditative wander alongside the river.

Shropshire Council owns most of the land and manages the meadow, wetland and woodland habitats as a nature reserve.  This green sliver connects right into the heart of Shrewsbury, but it was hard to ignore the tightening encroachment of housing all the way out to the outskirts of town.  There are some 8,000 new dwellings to be built in the town by 2036, and the pressure is being felt on all the undeveloped green spaces.

There is plenty of edginess to this edgeland landscape with graffiti covered bridges, corrugated tunnels and patches of tangled woodland.

I was early enough so that I saw only a few dog walkers and a couple of runners.  I shared the walk mostly with the birds, and I stopped on the bend in the river by a rope swing and listened to their conversations, the buzzing of insects and the gentle rippling sounds of the water.

I have seen a kingfisher along the brook before, but not today.  Today, I noticed how many houses had been built on the bank from Sutton Farm – lacking distinctiveness, confidence or any sense of their place in Shropshire in the 21st Century.

Back in the studio, I made a series of about 10 little paintings in just under 2 weeks.  Unlike my more recent large and expressive paintings, these were more finely detailed and representational.  I tried to capture the early morning light that I had enjoyed.  Four of the paintings were in acrylic on wood panels (23cm x 19cm):

The other paintings were acrylic skins made by painting in reverse layers onto glass, then peeling off the skins once dry for mounting in frames.

Three of these paintings were selected by curator Mel Evans for the Lawn and Meadow exhibition at Participate Contemporary Artspace in Shrewsbury (24th July to 11th August 2018).

 

 

Whixall Moss Wandering

Following my previous posts about the walk to Bettisfield Moss, I revisited Whixall Moss on Friday 23rd March with a group of fellow artists/writers: Ted Eames, Ursula Troche, Ruth Gibson and Adele Mills.  We met up with Mike Crawshaw of Natural England who guided us on an excellent walk around both Whixall Moss and Fenn’s Moss taking in a section of the Llangollen Canal, Furber’s Scrapyard and Fenn’s Old Works.

It was interesting to hear about the BogLIFE work that the Natural England project team are managing to restore this special peatbog.  This includes tree removal and drainage/water management to ensure that only rainwater enters the area and is retained as much as possible in order to encourage growth of sphagnum moss in pools which will begin the long process to create peat.  We could see where the moss is thriving and natural peatbog is rejuvenating.  There is great biodiversity here, and the site invites the wanderer to look ever closer at the little details.

Long grasses sing high

Beyond the reach of human ears

Silent ditches flow 

Sounds disappear in

a breezy expanse of sky

Sun glistens in pools

One of the most fascinating aspects of this landscape for me, is the wealth of evidence of human impact.  It is easy to view the area as a wild and natural landscape and, at this time of year, it is quite a bleak, almost monochromatic place.  But it is also easy to see that it has been industrialised until very recent times.

The Furber’s scrapyard is slowly being cleared.  Most of the cars are gone, and since my last visit, most of the huge mounds of tyres have gone too.  But there is still much to do, and the ground is thick with fragments of wrecked vehicles.

Tanker carcass smashed

In birch and bramble thicket

Blackbird finds Spring voice

The skeletal remains of Fenn’s Old Works stand stark against the sky.  It was built after a fire in 1938, and holds the last 110 hp National diesel engine left in situ in Britain.  This powered milling and baling machinery which can still be seen.

Peat was dug from the Moss from early medieval times until 1992.  The large scale drainage caused the collapse of the raised bog, and from 1968 there was a peat cutting machine which increased extraction. Commercial extraction initially used the Llangollen Canal which was cut across the Mosses from 1801 to 1804.  There are signs of the old narrow gauge railway which took peat to the works for processing before being loaded onto trains on the Oswestry, Ellesmere and Whitchurch Railway, part of the Cambrian Railway.  This line was closed in 1963 by the Beeching cuts.

The Mosses have also had links with the military, having had 10 rifle ranges in the area dating back before World War I.  During the Second World War there was a practice incendiary bombing range, and a strategic “starfish” decoy site intended to divert German bombers from Liverpool.  Here’s one of the shelters used by those manning the site.

The theme of boundaries and borders drew me to return to Whixall Moss as this is a theme that Ursula Troche and I have been thinking about.  The Anglo-Welsh border crosses the area in straight lines following ditch courses and running within a few metres of the Natural England Manor House base.

How wide is a border?

There are many aspects of borders (which might be viewed as permeable zones) and boundaries (which might be viewed as limits or binary divisions) which can be considered beyond the physical markers, although there are plenty of interesting boundaries visible around the Moss.

The woodlands surrounding the Mosses have a distinctly calm, peaceful atmosphere compared with the open heathland where wind ruffles through the grasses, and sound seems to be swept away up into the sky.  Many of the trees, especially silver birches, which are on the Moss itself will be removed due to their uptake of groundwater.

Since returning from the walk, I have had a little studio time to experiment with markmaking using small samples of peat and sphagnum moss, and handmade birch brush.

We hope to do further art walks in the future.  Please get in touch if you are interested.

 

Ref: Daniels Dr JL,  “Fenn’s Whixall & Bettisfield Mosses Natural Nature Reserve.”, English Nature, 2002