News

See below for news from current projects and events

Writers and Regeneration: Getting Started – workshop, Wednesday 15th February

I am running a workshop exploring opportunities for writers to work in the field of regeneration, at UCF on Wednesday 15th February.

This event will be of interest to writers and creatives working in the field of community arts and regeneration projects, and practising writers looking for further outlets for their work.

The event is free to all Canterbury Christ Church University staff and students. This event is open to the public, but unfortunately if you are not a member of Christ Church there is a £10 charge.

Venue: Folkestone, UCF
Time: 10:30 – 3.30

Contact: Jane Seaman
Telephone: 01303 760600
Url: www.ucf.ac.uk

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Collecting Home

Cuming Museum CaseWhat object from your life would you put into a museum?

I am really excited to be working with artist and photographer Eva Sajovic on Collecting Home, an extension of the work we did together on Home From Home, which culminated in a book published last year, and which is being exhibited at the Cuming Museum 22nd Nov – 18 Feb.

Collecting Home continues our exploration of stories and people local to Elephant and Castle: an ongoing conversation about the objects people would choose to represent themselves, their lives or the history of their area.

Visit the project blog to find out more, and if you’re interested in getting involved, please drop us an email: collectinghome@yahoo.co.uk

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Framing the City – winning entry!

I’m really excited to have been chosen as the winner of CRESC’s Framing the City writing competition!

My short story, You Would Leave All This, will feature in a forthcoming issue of the New Manchester Review, a really nice online publication.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Audio Obscura, Lavina Greenlaw, 13 September – 23 October 2011

The Audio Obscura booth sits in the centre of St Pancras Station. Audience members can borrow a headphone set (leaving a credit card or phone as deposit) any time between 12 noon and 8pm. The ‘performance’ lasts for 30 minutes and audience members are invited to wander around the station and listen.

The piece has two main ‘layers’: text, written by Lavinia Greenlaw, and performed by 12 actors (who represent a mix of ages, accents and genders), and a soundscape designed by Tim Barker and Harry Escott. The headphones block out surrounding noise, so only the loudest of announcements invade the piece, and there are times that feel almost magical when the audience watches the bustle of the station with no accompanying noise – an experience which heightens our attention to the visual, and our response when sound resumes.

Greenlaw is explicitly exploring the ephemerality, proximity and fragmentary nature of our experiences in train stations. The accompanying leaflet states that Audio Obscura “is situated in tension with our compulsion to construct narratives”, and it is this aspect of the work that is both intriguing, and potentially frustrating. The audience is placed in the role of detective, and active participant. The characters give us snippets of thoughts and facts, half-glimpsed insights into stories, which insist on us filling in the blanks, or perhaps simply reveal our desire to find meaning and create narrative from what we come across.

A woman discovers a traumatic secret about her husband of thirty years. We know it is connected to a computer, we are given the image ‘like meat on skewers’, we have her reaction ‘you fucking bastard,’ and hear her fear that he, and perhaps she will go to prison. From this we are left to find our own response.

Other stories are even more fragmentary: a woman refers to a procedure that ‘can be messy’ and questions if she should have shared the information with ‘him’; a man says ‘I shouldn’t have told her about my brother’ – but we are given no other clues. The piece is all about what is not said, and how we find meaning (or don’t find meaning) in the spaces in between. Some may find that frustrating, but that frustration, that raising of questions and then refusing to fully answer them, is in fact the core of the piece and speaks to its site-specificity: a train station filled with people arriving, and departing, a place that offers us only momentary glimpses of people’s lives.

Perhaps a better way to assess the effect of Audio Obscura is to think instead about atmosphere and theme, rather than narrative arc or drive (Greenlaw does create a male character, who punctuates the piece with rising urgency, looking for his train platform, which he eventually finds, and then boards his train. Despite giving the piece some narrative drive, I actually found this the least satisfying strand, perhaps because it was the least mysterious). Through carefully chosen language (the piece throughout has a strong poetic quality and rhythm), and a soundscape that both supports the tension and melancholy of the words, and creates another rhythm – of silence, not quite heard conversations, train announcements, traffic noise – Audio Obscura creates an overwhelming mood, encompassing secrets, leaving, fear, regret, and what cannot be said. On a personal level I was left with more questions than answers, and a strong sense of disquiet.

Greenlaw switches between third, second and first person narrative voices, utilising the different effects of each – the ‘objectiveness’ and intrigue of ‘he is not saying what he wants to say’; the uncomfortableness of being addressed as ‘you’; and the voyeuristic feeling of having immediate, fleeting access into a stranger’s head in the first person sections.  I was less convinced by the lists of nouns, although they did lead to the final moment of the piece: ‘step, step, step, step’, which effectively drew me back into the space I was inhabiting and watching.

Station

Audio Obscura is a piece that exists at the intersection between the text/sound, the audience and the space. St Pancras station was a fitting selection of location, with its stunning architecture, a layout which allows the audience to wander without feeling hassled, and to stop and take in a view, and its own atmosphere of peace and reflection. I couldn’t help thinking that the piece would have been significantly more problematic if located in King’s Cross Station during the building work for instance. The piece gives significance to the everyday, creating a performance (or perhaps just revealing it) from the daily bustle of a station. The isolation of the headphones, the almost complete blocking out of external sounds, and the shifting narrative voices result in a shifting relationship between the audience, their environment and the people around them, and lead us to question our own visibility/invisibility in the space.

A high quality, free experience that enhances the audience’s experience of a fantastic piece of London architecture and immerses them in an absorbing atmosphere, Audio Obscura challenges and perhaps exposes our desire for narrative and meaning. For me it didn’t go too far, or disintegrate into mere fragments without any meaning or connection, which is a risk with a piece like this. It did frustrate me, but I see this as a deliberately created effect which only enhances the piece.

 

clock image: zawtowers | station image: darapo

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Never, Never, Never Give Up

I am very pleased with my new poster from the fabulous Clerk Ink Well. A must for every writer I think!

 

Posted in News | Leave a comment

South Kilburn Studios to be continued

I was so delighted to go to the exhibition of work by the trainees at South Kilburn Studios last week. I commissioned the Studios as part of the South Kilburn Public Art Programme, with the intention of animating a disused space and providing opportunities for local young people to gain skills and experience. Through the hard work and dedication of The Architecture Foundation, Practice Architecture, Brent Council and the tenants and trainees of the Studios, the project’s been such a success that the council have agreed to fund it for an additional 6 months, and Number 10 are arranging a visit to find out more!

The exhibition runs from 9-23 September. For more information visit the South Kilburn Studios website. There’s more information about the wider Public Art programme in the Consultancy section of this site.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

The Shop of Priceless Things: an interview with Adrian Riley

Adrian Riley is one of the designers of The Shop of Priceless Things, an example of how creativity can influence positive change in the community and environment by introducing art into the public realm. In this short interview he talks to Neelam Shah about the impact of the project and what made it successful.

1. What made you design the project?

Rotherham District Council wanted to do something about the empty Burger King building in the centre of the town and put out a shout for ideas via Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance. The brief was basically ‘do something with the windows’. It was in the lead up to Christmas and poet John Wedgwood Clark and I put our heads together and came up with the idea.  We wanted something that reflected on the time of year when so many people are focused on shopping – could we offer something that brought a different perspective to the commercial hustle and bustle whilst still appearing to speak the same high street language?  We asked ourselves “what are the things that money genuinely can’t buy?” and then thought “what if there was a shop that actually sold them?” (although by its very nature, those things would not actually be for sale). And so ‘The Shop of Priceless Things’ was born.

2. What made the project work?

The key was asking the people of Rotherham to tell us about their priceless things. It wouldn’t have had the same impact nor been an authentic artwork for Rotherham if it had been the things that John and I valued. So a day was spent in the town centre stopping shoppers and asking if they would share the sights and sounds they value, evocative smells that trigger memories, things that are special to touch. That formed the ‘stock’ of the shop – the phrases on the windows are pretty much as they came out of people’s mouths and there’s some really special and quite touching stuff there. John also wrote a poem that explained the shop, which we put on one of the windows, but we both think there’s genuine poetry in the things the people of Rotherham shared.

Our initial instinct was to design the vinyl on the windows as if it was a high street store mimicking existing logos and ‘sale!’ notices so that you’d only realise it wasn’t a real shop once you stopped to read – a kind of visual joke. Then we thought that these cherished thoughts ought to be treated with more respect, and arrived at something partway between a high-end furnishings store and graphic artwork. I think we made the right decision, as it has strong visual impact and yet a simplicity and purity that you rarely see on the UK high street. I’d have felt bad if the end result had appeared to cheapen the words by using commercial or discount visual language.

3. What impacts will your project have on society in general? Do you think people/website users who see your project will think differently about words, design and architecture in an urban society?

Well, our main audience is the people of Rotherham and we wanted to give back to them something of themselves. Beyond that, there’s a bit of tension between putting something positive and, we hope, beautiful into the middle of town and the property remaining empty. In an ideal world the building would be put to commercial use as the town becomes more prosperous and permanent public artworks be commissioned as part of intelligent thought about urban space (or even better – artists invited to be involved in the design of urban space). Whilst I’d rather see empty shops put to creative use than just stand there unwanted and unloved, temporary projects like ‘The Shop of Priceless Things’ ultimately draw attention to a society and economy where the town centre needs to rediscover a role beyond just being a collection of shops. Town centres have to become an environment where people can also play, dream, be culturally enriched and just enjoy being a community.

You can read a case study of The Shop of Priceless Things on the A Place For Words website.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Central line Stories web pages relaunched

In 2009 I spent 6 months as writer-in-residence on the Central line, a commission by Art on the Underground. It was a fantastic experience, giving me the opportunity to meet a huge range of people from across the line, from tube drivers, to station staff to managers, and to create new work through different kinds of collaborations. I spent 5 days, travelling the entire length of the line, writing a 7,500 word story with 55 members of staff. I wrote two new short stories inspired by conversations and journeys with tube drivers. I collected a whole range of fantastic stories about how staff got their names, and I created an online, non-linear story pulling together the key themes of the residency. Art on the Underground have just relaunched the project web pages as part of their Central line Series. I am most excited about Across – the non-linear story written specifically for the web and which is available to read in its online form for the first time.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

Park Bench conversations

I took part in Kamala Katbamna’s Park Bench project yesterday afternoon. Kamala has commissioned a beautiful bicycle/bench and has been inviting people to join her for a conversation about the Elephant and Castle.

I always find it interesting how conversation, and being asked unexpected questions, helps me to articulate and realise things I’ve never quite formulated before. When Kamala asked me to describe my journeys through the Elephant, I realised that I was happy describing journeys to the Elephant, but I struggled with the idea of going through it – getting lost in the Shopping Centre, trying to avoid the roundabouts, plunging down into the subways and always ending up in the wrong place. We discussed how the Elephant feels like an atomised place, with lots of distinct (though frequently hidden from view) places to visit, but little sense of physical connection. I found this interesting in the light of Home From Home – a book of portraits and stories from Elephant and Castle which I created with Eva Sajovic – which revealed to me just how many complex connections there are between individuals and communities in this area.

Kamala has created a series of postcards – asking bench conversationalists to choose a view from the bench that epitomises the Elephant to them. I chose an image of the word ‘HERE’, graffitied onto the top of the boarded-up Heygate Estate.

Visit the Park Bench flickr site for images from the project, and look our for Kamala’s exhibition of the project, which starts in early September in Elephant and Castle shopping centre.

Posted in News | Leave a comment

The Shop of Priceless Things

I came across a beautiful project recently – The Shop of Priceless Things by Electric Angel. It’s a great example of utilising ‘dead’ space in a city centre and bring imagination and playfulness into urban space.

Posted in News | Tagged , | 2 Comments