hepworth

Yorkshire major new art gallery, opening spring 2011.

I'm thrilled to be appointed as a creative practitioner at The Hepworth Wakefield. We will be responsible for inventing, developing and delivering the educational and outreach programmes in the gallery. I'll be working on primary, secondary, post 16 and family learning programmes and can't wait to get started. This is the first time I've had the opportunity to build from scratch, there is NOTHING in place - it is truly up to us.

The gallery is due to open in May 2011 and last week we had our first team meaning and got to see the building in progress and the 10 rooms that make up the gallery. It was a real privilege to see the empty spaces, some with work already installed. We got an insight into the story the rooms will tell of Barbara Hepworth's work, legacy and the role she played on an international stage. We got to see the building as sculpture, it's light, scale and angles. The slopping roofs mirror and comment on the factory buildings around and about and the buildings surface is cleverly designed to become darker when wet, a purple hue that reflects and responds to the moods of the sky and landscape that surround it. Rooms 7 to 10 will be dedicated to three contemporary temporary exhibitions per year, and I know who the artists are - whoop!

Beyond The Hepworth the land is a building site, I enjoyed seeing it in its transformative state, it felt provisional, unfinished, unpolished, the earth trudged up and suiting the cold static of winter. When The Hepworth opens in the spring this earth will be landscaped and grassed, with a zip wire, picnic area, community stage and lots of space for our art activities which we plan to take beyond the building.

chocolate eclair

After my first interview in a long time I amused myself while waiting for the return train to Sheffield by idly finding a rude word in Scunthorpe. This is something I do, look at signs and mentally remove or add letters to make them vulgar - I didn't have to try too hard on this one.

Once on the train I sat next to an elderly gentleman who began to tell me how the scenes flying past the window were so different from his youth, it was the emptiness that he commented on telling me that as a boy and young man the fields would have been full of working folk, a landscape teeming with people. I found this fascinating and profoundly sorrowful all at once. He told me of memories of war, of landing in France, of his friends who had been killed and his time as a student in Oxford - the time of his life apparently! I'd assumed he was in his 80's when he began to talk but he told me he was 99 years old, 100 on 15th December 2010.

I've often thought about him since and how he let me into his world. His memories projected onto the fields revealed a missing, a lack for him, when to me the fields were as they had always been. Now they are not and I think of his view. The past is always present, memories haunt landscapes, cityscapes, interiors, the everyday and unremarkable only visible from our vantage point of now. Today will one day look dated and strange to us, to others, what we will miss is still unknown.

He got off in Doncaster, I got up to let him into the aisle, he didn't say goodbye. I don't think it mattered to him who I was, anyone with ears would do but I felt privileged to sit next to him. I shuffled over to his seat, watched him become part of the crowd and disappear. At my feet were a pile of chocolate eclair wrappers, a remnant of his presence and I smiled as internally I reprimanded him for not putting them in the bin. 

I didn't get the job and that doesn't matter, I'm just glad it allowed me to be in the right place at the right time.

less new

I'm less new than I was. The area of the city that I regularly walk is becoming familiar, I'm aware of being at the cusp of not looking so intently, at staging my way with landmarks and personal way-markers of things I've noticed. My walk can also be timed by the passing of familiar but unknown people at particular times of the day.

These past few months have been stressful, more so than I was expecting. Its been an odd time of limbo. As if I'm waiting for my life to start, soon I'll be busy and plugged into the city, with work, with friends, with my own memories being laid unseen upon the topography of streets. But for now these notions are of a future I've yet to meet, as if unseen ghosts are haunting this future and yet to take form.

On one level I love this time, (practically though, not earning money is just plain crap!) but sometimes I allow myself to feel the energy of being unknown, incognito, that at least my future is not planned out, I really do not know what tomorrow will bring.

A familiar refrain from people I meet who ask 'Why Sheffield?', is that I am brave and I somehow find this hard to take in. On many levels I am brave, I'm a freelancer and have never had a regular income my entire adult life. Though I may not have the possessions of others I own a flexibility and resourcefulness that has provided me with an abundant life in many ways. Sometimes change is the only path, by turning a situation on its head old doors close, new doors open and having faith that it will all work out is a mantra worth repeating. AND staying where I was wasn't an option.

open studios

I'm in studio 6 of the Porter Brook Studios on friday 5.30pm-9pm and saturday 11am-5pm, all welcome!

spark

During my time as an educator I've met a number of children that were particularly fascinating and have lodged in my memory, some struck me as vulnerable, some as creative thinkers, others as bright bright sparks. Once during a screen printing workshop a boy was so full of delight about the printing process that he could hardly contain himself. I recall his energy at finally getting hold of the squeegee and afterwards saying, ‘That was the best lesson of my life’, he will be a young adult now and I dearly hope he got to follow his creative interest... In Nottingham I met a hard girl who was pretty unlikeable to be honest, on one particular occasion I told her, ‘You did that really well’, for a second her face softened and became childlike, and it dawned on me praise was a rare commodity for some. The ways we keep ourselves safe are complex and variable.

This is a photograph of a young girl I met during a project in Islington, London. She was in the park with her parents and younger sibling and was an incredibly bright kid. She had an intuitive understanding of special awareness and was very curious. We all struggled with some basic origami, but she didn’t get bored with our folding and re-folding and took to our discussion and problem solving process with a learners delight. She made a lovely word piece using white cups pushed into a grid fence which spelled out the word n i c e.

more = less

A video with music and narration made for the NEWLY DRAWN exhibition. It’s a double track affair combining “the history of urban planning in 2 minutes and 33 seconds set to music” in the form of U =Utopia and the low carbon club anthem More = Less, based on our work for Low2No / Sitra on sustainable urbanism.

From: http://nowoffice.org/

NOW for Architecture and Urbanism

saving face

Fashion Street E1 - this creature brings to mind the animation in Spirited Away, a fantastic film directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The visually fascinating streets off Brick Lane are an endless source of wonder.

Symbols invented by a Year 4 class to help them decide where to draw non porous and porous rocks during our rocks and soils project.

Walton on the Naze... presented with the choice of a happy or sad doughnut which would you choose?

we walk

These are the sights that greet me on my way to the studio. I’m assuming the large text works were commissioned by the council: EVERYONE’S A WINNER and YOU CAN’T GO WRONG enliven the walls around the redevelopment of The Moor shopping area.

My route tells the story of a manufacturing past, buildings in varied states of dereliction line the streets just fives minutes walk from the city centre. Being drawn to places like this I'm happy to observe the present rubbing shoulders with the past.

Some interventions are quietly glued to the city. I especially like broad ribbed warrior maidens. Large text works and graphic's by Kid Acne.

My window, 'K' marks the spot.

The Avec Building, isn't she lovely?

signs of life

Text to marvel over, everyday settings and surfaces.

'Graffiti' using polystyrene cups and a fence - a fast and very effective way to get your message across... love it! 

This sweet little sign was found by a crossing on Forest Road, Walthamstow.

The platform at Lower Hutt as I waited for the train to Wellington. This commute has to be of the prettiest I’ve experienced, especially as you near the city - I've dreamt about those views across the sea. Glancing up a street in Wellington I saw 'a thousand times over I love you' writ large on a wall. Intrigued, I returned later to photograph and frustratingly couldn't find it! The words float in my memory and are written on a pink post-it note by my desk.

Lerwick in January, the day after Up Helly Aa 2010. Something compelling about seeing my own initial writ large, especially in such a well proportioned painting.