Guy Begbie & Lawrence Upton

http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/gbegbie11.htm

Follow the link to see an interesting book arts collaboration between Guy Begbie and Lawrence Upton.
About their collaboration they say;

The collaboration has continued beyond the Dundee commission and has produced both a range of realised and planned works; and, also, a colloquial meditation upon what it means to collaborate which declares itself through the works.

It involves considerations of conscious and unconscious decision-making, the integration of differing skills and the reconciliation of aesthetic assumptions in order to achieve empathy, which, they suggest, takes them beyond mere cooperation as they seek to merge what is, clumsily, called individual creativity to achieve what might seem to be, in effect, the work of one mind, what Burroughs and Gysin termed “a third mind”.

Their work, however, does not seek to remove, disguise or smooth over different physicalities; it retains its gestural origins.

Hulks

The drawings are developing particularly with the Dickens' text. I've been given a copy of the new biography of Dickens which I've just started reading. It's quite helpful to understand the construction of such wonderful images through words that Dickens created. My last post was called Devastating me to the Hulks. This was in fact, a misappropriation of his phrase 'devoting me to the hulks. It was only when I showed a drawing to Rick which was based on this phrase, did it come to light that I had made this error. When I looked at the drawing, I had mutated between the two phrases. I have found that repeatedly writing one phrase is actually quite hard because my mind wanders in the process and it becomes quite an hypnotic action. I am usually listening to the radio when I am drawing and I find that words from the radio leak into the drawing and I have to then make sure that I reconnect with the Dickens phrase.

I have just completed the longest drawing in time in this series so far. I have worked the phrase 'devoting me to the hulks' into an A1 drawing on tracing paper. This one was more sensitive to gradations of pencil and I worked a lot in 2H & 5H. Part way through I began to ponder on the existence of prison hulks that lay out in the estuary during Dickens's lifetime and what an eerie and strange sight they must have been. Years ago, when I lived in Rochester, I visited the Guildhall Museum which had an scene from the prison hulks with fake prisoners laying in hammocks and a sound of creaking and groaning in the background. My elder daughter used to love this part of the museum and was hungry for the drama of it. So I decided to consider incorporating the hulks in to my latest drawing and have used the same repetitive writing technique to create subtle silhouettes of the hulks as though they were strung out on the estuary on a flat river with no movement. I can imagine the fog and peppery mist clinging to them and oozing into their planks.

I have taken the hulks and begun applying the image to some previous small drawings on Japanese papers. I've used graphite for these which has given a smudged inky quality. I am quite pleased with the way the paper has absorbed the powder.

devastating me to the hulks

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I've been doing a series of drawings in response to text from Great Expectations by Dickens and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. They are based on repetitions of selected words and phrases from the books, which are continually written and rewritten to create a drawing. I started the first ones on tracing paper which is a material that I love. As the surface builds up the pencil marks become more and more shiny and glossy. The words that I kept coming back to were mostly from Dickens's G.E. ; marsh mist is so thick and devastating me to the hulks. I was also working with a phrase from Conrad's novella; i lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet - drills- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them..
It's really fascinating to work with a minimal amount of the text in a continuous way. You begin to lose it's context and it is hard to keep track of the correct pattern of words after having written it for the thousandth time. Even thought the text is being obliterated and becoming illegible through the drawing, I still had to hold onto the correct phrase and way of writing it, trying to keep a continuity going.
It becomes mesmeric.

Drawings before tracings and light

These images are of the 2 drawings that I have been working with in the tracings and light post.

Tracings and light

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I have been developing the drawings which I have been working on with the text from Heart of Darkness. The original drawings have been printed onto tracing paper which is a medium that I am particularly fond of with its translucent quality. It always seems to offer so much potential to further drawings. The tracing paper I was using this morning had been rolled up for months so kept wanting to return to its rolled up state. After I had photocopied the drawing onto the sheets of tracing paper I stood them in a group intending to then deconstruct and reconstruct them. However, I liked their collective quality with the light coming through the rolls. Some areas of text were subdued or lost whilst other areas were bold. I decided to get my lightbox out again (an increasingly favourite tool) and play around with arranging the drawings in various compositions. The images here are some of these outcomes. I find the light box, such a magical tool, it to seems absorb my focus -dreamlike.
I then layered some flat tracing paper drawings that I made on Wednesday with straight white paper copies in the top images (second to top image) and by shifting the position of the pages into different angles, the resulting images start to have interesting patterns & shapes.
The first image captures my interest in returning to the tonal aspects of drawing through multi layers that sit lightly on the box thus trapping light between the layers.

Drawing

Greedy Phantoms

pilgrims; dead; tenebrous land; greedy phantoms; hollow sham; diabolic love; monstrous bends; grimy fragment; massacres, of blessings; leaky cylinders; abominate; toiled; fascinated; surrender.

On Anna's recommendation - a short film by Runa Islam

Video two - A sketch for a London Gateway Video Poem

Video One - Video Notebook

Estuary Prologue - Early Draft

I am developing a text pieces as part of my response to the Estuary Dialogue project. It is a fluctuating thing. At times - as you can see in an earlier post , it is a fairly short poem, but recently it has evolved again. Here is a extract of my present draft of a longer piece of fiction set in a near future:

Estuary Prologue

           I stand and listen to the renewed silence of the Stanford marshes. Look out at the Thames estuary, and beyond that the weak outline of Kent. Look out at the marshes I played in as a boy. With its huge flat sky and its marshland maze. The marshes I got a knife pulled on me. The marshes I came back to the day mum died, walking aimlessly through the needy mud in the stinking, salty breeze. The oil refinery still sits in the distance, standing warning tall in all this flatness.

           My filthy overalls hang on me as heavily as wet cardboard, the respirator hangs limply from my bruised hand. Barely able to sit up straight on the mud, my feet dangle toward the shore uncomprehendingly. I think about my name for a moment and how far I have come away from it in these last few days, how alien it sounds to my own ears.

            Pristine traces of curlews and waders like a repetitive scrawl in the mudflats. A conservation area of some renown throughout Western Europe. No sign of the birds now.

            I hope the others will come for me – I have no more energy. I hope someone will come to hear my warning, this thing that has marked me out for so many years. Hear my warning, make my sacrifice worthwhile. But more than this I want someone to hear my story. To believe in my memories, the ones that are mine now, even if this name is not.  

            I hope the sound I can hear is the beating of the new arrivals not just my own heart. I see everything becoming specks of electricity on the untroubled estuary waves. Huge indifferent river. Smelling of brine and rotten waste. And then coffee. The beautiful coffee from the Plaza café. How much I would give to be there now.

            I have to close my eyes, I do not want to. No sooner do I wake, than I close my eyes forever.

Fingerprint detective

In my quest to find out about the owners of copies of the novels Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, I have bought a copy of each secondhand, from Amazon. I really want a dog eared number but of course most buyers want them in good condition so we will see what comes. When I get them I hope to scour them for evidence of their previous owners in particular, with fingerprint detection. I have just been searching the internet for the right material to detect what they call 'latent fingerprints'. Apparently on porous surfaces such as paper you need a chemical spray called Ninhydrin. In my quest for this information I got talking to a really helpful man called Hugh who works at a company called Foster Freeman who manufacture machines for detecting finger prints. He has given me the name of a consultant they use who is a top expert in the fingerprinting field. I am so excited. He was vaguely bemused by my project as most people phoning are from companies or organisations such as the police. It's amazing to hear about all of these complex worlds out there that you know nothing about.
Anyway, I have ordered some of this spray from a company in the US at some expense but can't wait to receive it and start forensically documenting these books.

The Remarkable Likeness of Being: Faro

This is Faro in Portugal. I've just returned from a short break there and I was very excited by it's similarity to the Thames Estuary, in terms of its marsh and site for birds. They even have flamingoes there in the winter months which has a link to the Thames as there were rumoured to be a colony of flamingoes there in the 1980's who had escaped from a zoo in Essex. 

I know the weather is slightly different and the lagoon is fed by the Atlantic sea but the terrain reminded me so much of the Thames Estuary. Faro itself is an interesting place, a small city or large town? It has an historic walled centre and as you venture further from that, the buildings become more modern. When we flew into Faro, we had missed the bus and so my husband Pete decided we could walk the 2 miles. It was quite an interesting walk, rather like an Iain Sinclair novel because we ended up for most of it, walking down this busy highway. I find it fascinating what you see in the gutters of the roads; numerous plastic bottles of course (universal tokens of convenience), plants, old tyres and scraps of tyres, discarded mobile phones, chicken bones.

Houses that once must have been quite pleasant were suddenly abutted right up against the extended road system into Faro. They still retained the architectural riches of the past, on friezes and windows but were misplaced and brutally ignored in this urban development that we were part of in our tourist seeking mode.

Faro had one or two nice artist spaces so I contemplated the idea of bringing the estuary dialogue project to Faro. Any Portuguese artists out there who would like to collaborate on the collaboration? 

Collecting marks

I have been on a bit of a sabbatical from all work recently as I have needed to clear my head but I have been thinking about the relationship of the literary connections to the landscapes i.e. Conrad to Essex and Dickens to Kent.
With this in mind I have been working on some ideas of gathering marks made by previous owners and any unique hidden identities in paperback versions of the stories of Great Expectations (Dickens) and Heart of Darkness (Conrad). I bought some carbon powder to dust onto the pages and then try to pick up the dust and any marks with scotchtape. So far what I had wanted to achieve has not worked as I thought it would but then as with all things, there have been unexpected discoveries. They are only small things but nonetheless exciting (to me). I was using the tape to apply to the dust and pages and when I peeled it off, it took some of the text with it. Continued application of this process on the same area meant that the text became more worn away and degraded which left its own mark on the book.

One of the other interesting results was observing the words which were worn away and isolating those words from the bulk of the text. So I took the sequence of words which had been affected by the tape and then wrote them out.

Here is one selection of words;

limits to the

must take care

long reaches that

that were exactly

of secular trees

of another world

of massacres of

shutter" said Kurtz

I did so. There was

he cried at the

invis_

- as I had exp_

an island. Th_

Review of the exhibition Atsuko Tanaka; The Art of Connecting

http://www.a-n.co.uk/interface/reviews/preview/1450615

Please follow the link to see the review that I wrote for Interface, Artists Newsletter on the exhibition at the Ikon in Birmingham of Atsuko Tanaka; the Art of Connecting.

Heart of Darkness Reading

Heart of Darkness from Anna Falcini on Vimeo.

Please click on the link to go to the reading of Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness reading

http://vimeo.com/26120640


Please go to the above link to hear a short reading from Heart of Darkness.

Some notes, the beginnings of a poem

London Gateway development on the estuary at Stanford-le-Hope and Coryton
distant trucks viewable through the haze of the windblown radio-song

workmen hanging like puppets from the pylon,

whose newly painted golden legs stretch out across the field

"3.5 million container movements a year, 3,000 metres of quay"

the birdsong & pylon crackle & lumpen broke tarmac-cracked roads

- plastic wrapped notes of condolence, discarded socks and tractor tyre,

warming in the same sun

"the development is not in accordance with national and international conservation policy and will adversely effect local residents with noise, traffic and pollution"

light on the mudflats - 25 years older, 

familiar graffitti and the untouched marsh,

windy emptiness of the coastline

a place where people go - inhabit a second silence,

nearby Canvey Wick, highest levels of biodiversity in Western Europe

"don't worry - they took all the wildlife and sent it over to Kent."

Rick Goldsmith July 2nd updated July 11th 2011

It's Been Awhile

I feel like I've been strangely silent on this blog, and I guess that's not the form with a blog but I'd just like to put up a few photographs based on Anna's side of the estuary and post a short film that was shot on mine. Film to follow.

Coffee and Ponderings

Rick and I met up to discuss the Estuary Dialogue project. It has been a while since we talked about it because we have both been busy with other projects and work. It is frustrating sometimes but that is how you have to juggle things.
We talked quite a lot about the expectations that we may have of the project. I have been thinking of working with objects such as books, particularly the texts of Conrad and Dickens. Rick was saying that he is developing ideas around the periphery of the subject and wants to give that time to develop. Our expectations are that we want to make something satisfying, something which connects us to the place. We have no funding which means that we are not bound to those expectations. I think that I am willing to work towards an exhibition if that was right or to make work that is tangible. However, I am very open to the idea that the end result could be a sound recording for example or a book. We might share one collaborative piece but then add other individual pieces to it.
I think our collaboration is about a dialogue, where we generate discussions around a common theme. At some point it will probably tie up into the work.

These are my own views and Rick will have his own perspective on the project too.

The project essentially feels right; my heart is in tune with this work. I am returning to a place I find fascinating.

Alamar - Habana, Cuba

Mauro D'Agati is an Italian Photographer who has documented a place called Alamar in Havana, Cuba.
Alamar is a place that was constructed to house workers of a steel smelters, Fabrico Vanguardia Socialista in the 1970s. The resulting city was constructed by the workers themselves and it 'was to be a miraculous example to the world, an obligatory first stop for all the people who arrive at the island.' The place is described as 'coarse and crude' but looking through the portfolio of images there is a melancholic beauty to it, where a few treasured possessions glisten. Internal spaces are curated with perhaps, unknowing intensity. Few possessions dominate the spaces. Budget jacquard woven images of swans or dolphins drape on concrete walls.
The empty swimming pool is a trophy of dreams.

Alamar - Habana, Cuba
Mauro D'Agati
Published by Steidl, 2010

I need to Edit!

A current project, AdventureLand, is currently included in a group show at Portland House in Malvern (62 Church Street). The show is called 'One Thing Leads to Another and is curated by Charlie Hurcombe. It has been so good to be involved in the show and the act of installing work has helped me to think about and prioritise my work. I consistently seem to spread myself too far and thus can lose the impetus of the work. I felt as though I had edited enough but some of the work is not resolved enough. I have to think about the finishing details.

It is useful for this project to reflect upon these issues. Every project helps to refine the next one.

It has been a frustrating period recently as my teaching jobs have taken precedent due to the heavy period of assessment. Time has been given over to this and taken from my own practice. It will be relinquished next week and I will get time back. I'll be able to pick up the threads again.

I have suffered from a crisis of confidence and there are times when it is so hard to maintain an arts practice alongside other employment and domestic stuff. It has all hit hard recently but I am so thrilled to be involved in One Thing Leads to Another and to be collaborating with Rick on this project. Breathe......

Heart of Darkness

Since visiting the sites on the Thames, I have been thinking of many potential ideas. The two books Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens seem to be natural starting points for creative work. I have read that Dickens used to take regular walks from his home near Gravesend to the marshes, sometimes walking upto 20 miles. His writing was done in a unique wooden chalet which was built in the grounds of his house and looked out upon the estuary. Conrad spent time in Essex on the opposite bank of the Thames estuary at Stanford Le Hope. I don't know so much about his life but in the introduction to Heart of Darkness by Paul O'Prey, the estuary clearly has a profound impact upon his writing. Conrad talks of the sky as a 'benign immensity of unstained light'. He draws parallels between the Thames and the Congo river through the suggestion that 'all seas and rivers run into one another: from the 'end of the world' the Thames 'stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway', 'leading to the uttermost ends of the earth....into the heart of an immense darkness'.

O'Prey, P. Introduction to Heart of Darkness, Penguin Books 1983, page 8

This literary image conjures up notions of the 'sublime' and I wonder if Conrad was provoking ideas around this? I was watching a fascinating programme about Yellowstone Park called Unnatural Histories (BBC4 9.00 pm Thursday 16th June 2011) where the image created of Yellowstone was associated with this search for the sublime. This was a connection to God, a place where one could feel the danger and true sense of a wonderful landscape. In the case of Yellowstone it was through the spectacular geisers, the mountains or waterfalls.

Yellowstone was basically a construct of a wilderness where native Americans had been ejected so that the land could be appropriated for use by settlers. Below is the information from the programme.

As the world's first national park, Yellowstone has long served as a model for the protection of wilderness around the world. For Americans it has become a source of great national pride, not least because it encapsulates all our popular notions of what a wilderness should be - vast, uninhabited, with spectacular scenery and teeming with wildlife. But Yellowstone has not always been so. At the time of its creation in 1872, it was renowned only for its extraordinary geysers, and far from being an uninhabited wilderness it was home to several American Indian tribes.

This film reveals how a remote Indian homeland became the world's first great wilderness. It was the ambitions of railroad barons, not conservationists, that paved the way for a brand new vision of the wild, a vision that took native peoples out of the picture. Iconic landscape paintings show how European Romanticism crossed the Atlantic and recast the American wilderness, not as a satanic place to be tamed and cultivated, but as a place to experience the raw power of God in nature. Forged in Yellowstone, this potent new version of wilderness as untouched and deserving of protection has since been exported to all corners of the globe.

From Essex to Kent (over the Dartford Bridge)

Day two of the site visit was spent in Kent. After leaving my wonderful B&B (Beeby's in Rochester) I went to Cliffe to meetup with Rick. I found Rick in the car park by the Church and we decided to go in my car down the long track that leaves the village, towards the marshes.

It is a long rutted track that is tortuous and can only be attempted at about 5MPH. As we drove down past the beginning by Court Sole Farm which is a Georgian farmhouse that has been there for years, we passed points of interest such as the clay pools and the half house/half barn. The RSPB had erected signs and benches where birds could be sited and the whole place looked a lot tidier than when I first came down here over 10 years ago. In some ways I am pleas

ed because it means that the site is more secur

e than before from development with a big organisation like RSPB involved. On the other hand, I liked the more rambling and confused nature of the place where it was hard to discern between public footpaths and industrial motifs.

We parked the car up in sight of the sea wall and then continued on foot. As we came up to the seawall we came across an old door with a metal pier behind it. The door was locked with a heavy padlock but when I came here 5 years ago, the door was o

pen and you could walk out on to the pier which was magical. Underneath the pier is a thick pipe and on the door is a label for a dredging company so I presume the pipe is something to do with dredging?

We walked on around the sea wall following the edges of the land. The wall is set up

high so you have to walk either on the shoreline, on the wall itself (precariously) or along the marsh. We walked on the marsh

with short diversions up to the seawall every now and again.

It was interesting to swap roles; Rick became the one who was looking out intently to Essex from the seawall, eyes scanning details, whereas I relived past sitings and points of interest. Things were so familiar, yet also there was evidence of transition and change. Buildings

crumbling, the locked door of the pier, more birdsong then I remembered. We wound our way to the group of old buildings which were part of the Munitions Factory at Cliffe whose production peaked during WW1. It seems so ironic that here was the manufacture of such violent objects and yet it is one of the most tranquil places I've experienced. As we approached the scattered buildings, a big ditch of water lay in between us and the buildings. I had miscalculated the crossing of it and so we searched for a point to cross. Eventually we found a ramshackle piece of wood that was slung across thesmall channel. I had forgotten the need to navigate your way through these ditches and small channels of water that criss cross the land. Early visits to this place had often resulted in hours of trying to find points to cross these barricades.

The buildings were more derelict, a roof caved in on a Victorian single storey building.

I still found the series of round brick built structures intriguing. Grassy banks of earth surround the exterior but you can walk through the doorways into the centre.

Apparently they were where the explosives were made. At the centre of each one is a water pipe, to dampen any explosions.

These round structures are dotted around the marsh, humps of earth with muted trees

atop them lie in between like prehistoric

tombs. Some of these irregular shapes were I think, to stop explosions spreading.

Here I began experimenting with the camera and a piece of blue fabric across the lens. I have been thinking of filters, handmade ones, so I wanted to try out some ideas. I liked the

blue fabric as it reminded me of those Cynotope

images from early photography. I also tried out a crotcheted scarf. The image was more fragmented but nonetheless still has potential.

Hannah Collins

http://www.hannahcollins.net/home.html

This is an artist whom I find interesting. I like her approach to photographing scenes. The Ghosts series is good too which has taken old black and white photographs from Russia - '...where the 'dead' images of historic portrait photography come(s) to life.'

(Finding, Transmitting, Receiving; Hannah Collins 

Black Dog Publishing 2007

Through the Dartford Tunnel to Essex

Last Tuesday (26th April) I travelled to Essex to meet up with Rick for a site visit to the locations of the project in Stanford Le Hope (Essex) and Cliffe (Kent). The idea was to preview the locations which will help us to frame the collaboration. At the moment, it is fair to say that we have some work to do on how we want to progress with the project.

I was fascinated in advance, about how the Essex site would look in comparison to the Kent site. I have become so familiar with the marshes at

Cliffe and have looked across to Essex on many occasions. After crossing the river at Dartford, through the tunnel and into Essex, I met up with Rick to check the map and have a quick cup of tea at his Dad's. We walked from there, leaving the post war housing and roads, to venture in to a country lane that was part farmland and part receptacle for discarded objects. Amongst crops we found vagrant lumps of concrete that looked like they had been flung from trunk road improvement schemes and somehow become contemporary monolithic stones worshipped by

the jogger and P reg mercedes that ventured down such obsure lanes. Above us were

lines of electricity cabling, held aloft by numerous pylons, crackling softly. It was at once comforting and disturbing, reminding both Rick and I of the presence of these in our childhoods. (These very pylons for Rick, one solitary one in a field by the canal in Surrey for me). In one

of the pylons, men were suspended on cables whilst they painted the structure; their van parked at a distance broadcasting the latest events on Radio Essex. As we walked, there were constant connections to the human existence, whether through cars passing, dogs be

ing walked or through the shrine to a mother on the roadside. Pre-scripted verse and epithets to a mother were clustered and huddled against the noise of everyday activity. Somehow this intervention in our journey resonated with Rick and I for very different reasons. For me it somehow underpinned human sadness that I have often discovered around the marshes of Cliffe and its surrounding area. Back to the prison ships which were moored out in the Estuary in Dicken's times, to the explosions from the Munitions Factory at Cliffe that killed workers.

Walking on we passed familiar places to Rick, where he had played as a child. They had remained intact but as we looked out to the river, there were large areas of land being developed, with clouds of dust flying up into the skies. This is the Thames Gateway project in full swing. The extension of London. The sweep of government brooms to clear swathes of unique land to accomodate the continuous swelling of the South East of the UK. Where will the children of the future play?

The road petered out and became a rutted dirt track. I was glad of the track, of compressed plastic bottles and rubbish embedded in its layers. This was what always greeted me when I went to Cliffe. It seemed like an imminent sign of the marshland. A huge steel barricade lay ahead, to halt any motor vehicles lest they head unwittingly into the seawall. There the track narrowed and we crossed a huge pipe (oil or sewage?). One side contained a substation, a hub of the pylon. Ahead we could see the seawall, its concrete barricade a perch for endless gazing at the Thames. A branch railway line was directly in front of the wall which seemed to fit into the scenario like a glove.

As we hunched over the seawall, the familiar outline of St

Helen's Church at Cliffe was visible across the water. The atmosphere was slightly hazy which softened the colours and sharpness of the image. I regretted not having a watercolour paintbox and paper, to record the muted greys and greens. I had to rely instead on the mechanics of the camera.