During my year of DYCP in 2023, it became clear to me that I needed to update and refresh how I presented the work I’ve been involved in. Thanks to a collaboration with Leanda Ryan – someone I’ve worked with on numerous websites, including cambridgerules1848.com – I’m delighted to have a new virtual space to which I can add work, that now allows filtering by project and topic.
Going forward, I will also be adding book design work that I complete for other artists, galleries and institutions, as I bring the other strand of my worklife’s history ‘Axis’ to a close and focus on my studio practice.
Axis Projects Publishing will now be incorporated into this site and will continue to be serviced and developed here. We are just finalising how the e-commerce aspect of that will function, but books can still be purchased here until that switches over shortly.
During the 2023 Memory Studies Association International Conference in Newcastle, I met Ann-Marie Einhaus, Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Northumbria University Newcastle. She is project lead on ‘Ephemera and writing about war in Britain, 1914 to the present’. It is a 30-month collaborative research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
I was invited to write a blog about La Vojo Returne which is now available on their project website here.
International Memory Studies Association conference: Communities and Change 4th – 7th July, Newcastle Upon Tyne
This week, along with Dr Corinne Painter from University of Leeds, I will be presenting a paper about my ongoing project and artist residency in Grandpré, France.
Un regard alternatif sur GrandpréArtistes , traducteurs et résidents 30 Avril 2023
As part of my Arts Council DYCP funding for 2023, I created an experimental community engagement as part of my ‘La Vojo Returne’ project. Corinne Painter from Leeds University visited my residency to review how an artist can have a conversation with a place and its residents, and I made the most of this opportunity and invited both Corinne and Lara_Marie Hägerling from Braunschweig Universitat to give readings in German as part of the walk.
The walk was a collaboration of voices both local and distant. Postcards written during WWI were translated and read for the first time in the place they had been written, details and alternative stories told in locations infrequently populated, residents told stories of distant relatives, and the audience added to conversations, as we walked around the town’s paths and back alleys.
8 attendees were also given disposable b/w film cameras to document the walk in whatever way they felt appropriate, these were then processed on my return and I shared scans of the images with each participant photographer.
Click here to review the pdf of the accompanying booklet each attendee received and here the script used on the day – significant parts of the walk were unscripted by readers.
Grandpré has a small Secondary School, which services the town and surrounding villages. As part of this trip in conjunction with Corinne Painter and Lara_Marie Hägerling, we also ran a classroom-based postcard workshop. 2 sessions were developed to look at how the postcards of the town reflected on students’ understanding of where they lived. It was an opportunity to practice their english both verbally and written, and was a very dynamic session, German reading of the cards was also shared. We received very positive feedback from the teachers. This fed into a second session that I completed two weeks later, where a creative writing session in english on a set of specially insitu-printed postcards of archive and photographic images, was completed. The resulting postcards were then posted by me from Grandpré’s post office, to a list of artists, emigres and academics, who then shared ‘selfies’ back on receipt of the cards, so the students understood this early analogue type of social media and the nature of card writing.
Extremely pleased to say I am the lucky recipient of an Arts Council England ‘Develop Your Creative Practice’ (DYCP) grant for 2023.
DYCP will allow me to explore a more experimental output to my practice: combining new research, mentoring & practical skills. I’ll develop inclusive analogue & digital approaches to visual storytelling & establish a network of national & international partners for future collaborations, building strategies to support the sustainability of my long-term practice.
Focused on my interest in place, memory & the messages from a WWI postcard collection, I’ll undertake a residency in the French town of Grandpré, Ardennes to test new approaches within collaborative engagement. I’ll experiment with live performance, audio & film installations & how these can build potential for digital storytelling platforms in future projects. Documentation will be disseminated digitally & via pop-up installations for feedback/critique to help build an important legacy for future social art projects.
I’ll research my core themes, including visits to archive La Contemporaine, Paris; Anti-war Museum, Berlin & Postcards for Peace. Dr Corinne Painter (Intercultural Studies Lecturer, Leeds University), Lara-Marie Hägerling, (Technische Universität Braunschweig) & Prof Matthew Jefferies (Programme Director German Studies, Manchester University) will provide translation expertise and cultural context to increase the conceptual rigour & build relationships for future commissions.
I’ll complete training in virtual platform storytelling & coding: audio production & editing; video techniques, editing & integration. Mark Devereux Projects will provide mentoring to reflect on my practice development, build plans for future projects & establish a strategy for new opportunities.
On Saturday 5th November at the public view, it was a wonderful privilege to have George Szirtes read from the collaborative text that accompanies the images in the book of the project. George modestly calls his text a series of marginalia accompanying the Gearing archive and my new responses, but they are a wonderful way to explore the edges of the work. Along with the readings, third generation distant cousins from the Gearing and Gower families met for the very first time as I brought them together in Norwich.
Thank you to everyone who came to the artist talk, the book is still available to purchase at the special price of £15 + postage during the exhibition and includes a free pack of extras including an A5 archival print of ‘Norwich Cathedral, dying flowers’ from the series.
