Listening Posts Project

AdventureLand Project

The End (of the collaboration but not Estuary Dialogue)

Rick has decided he no longer wants to be a part of the Estuary Dialogue project so it is with great sadness that the collaboration is now finished.

The good news is that I will continue with the Estuary Dialogues project as a solo artist. At this moment in time I have plenty of ideas about ways I would like to take it forward and in the next few weeks I will be planning how I take it into the next phase.

Thank you to all of you have so kindly encouraged and supported the project so far and I hope that you will continue to enjoy the development of the project.

Below are some recent developments where the Estuary Eulogy drawings and texts which I have produced have been applied to hand built ceramic pieces by the reknowned ceramicist, Ken Eastman. These are some early test pieces and Ken & I are keen to explore the cross over between 2D and 3D. We may explore using ready made domestic ware too and I have included some test pieces here on vintage plates.

From Test Images (Eulogy)

From Test Images (Eulogy)

From Test Images (Eulogy)

From Test Images (Eulogy)

Estuary Eulogies

At the end of November I visited the Thames Estuary site at Cliffe again. It was a cold Wintry day and magnificent for seeing the place in its harshness and greyness. I took a different pathway whilst there without a map and ended up seeing the seawall but not being able to navigate a way through due to the ditches that criss cross the place. I liked being reminded that this place is not easy, has geographical resistors and is not a visitor park with carefully laid down tracks. I spent time just gazing to industry laying heavily on the horizon with a fascinating collection of pipes/chimneys that were stacked together which I began to draw from. In front of me lay an apron of tough marsh grasses and then a smattering of these pipes poked up like a grand collection of organ pipes in a cathedral. Except these emitted no Bach, Mozart or Jeruselum. Far from a 'green & pleasant land' the marsh was soon subjecting my hands and body to the damp and 'rimy' cold. What I kept seeing though was the container ships and oil tankers entering and leaving the estuary. One in particular was piled so high with containers of every colour that I became intrigued upon what was inside the containers or what had been delivered. The sheer volume of commerce in one ship coming into the estuary was incredible. Our hunger for stuff, visually apparent.
Later I ventured back to the car and drove further up the marsh to access the seawall (a tried and tested route without watery traps). There I came across the remnants of consumption; finger prints of our capitalist obsession with possessions. Objects, intact and the remains of plastic and metal corpses lay scattered on this shoreline, brought up by tidal waters. A bereavement for short lives lived, for real lives sacrificed to fabricate these objects. I recorded individual pieces with a camera, plucking out and elevating objects that seemed especially poignant like the single mattress or just odd like the handle of a fire extinguisher.
When I came home to my studio, I reviewed the images from the camera. There seemed to me an immense beauty in some of these objects and their stripping away of manufactured gloss to reveal ugly materials like foam, nylon or plastic tubing. I began to imagine the brief period of use, the owners, the point of rejection when objects ceased to have value or use. I wanted to write obituaries for selected objects. Aiming to re-elevate these objects I wrote eulogies instead.
Each object was translated into a simple line drawing rendered by means of tracing paper on the computer screen. This seemed to me to remove sentiment or my own interpretations. I wanted to achieve a clinical kind of drawing. I've always like the Haynes car manuals and those wonderful diagrams of the casing for the gear box of a Vauxhall Viva or Mini Metro. I then wrote individual eulogies which accompany the drawings. If any emotion or sentiment is present then I wanted it to be through the words. Eulogies would celebrate these objects.

Some images have returned

Some of the images on the blog have returned. Rick and I are still trying to resolve the problem. Answers on a postcard please. Thanks :-) Now I know the official name of these symbols by the way (emoticons). Thank you to Mr Goldsmith for keeping me current.

Images are temporarily unavailable

I am sorry to say that all of the images on Estuary Dialogues have mysteriously disappeared and we are working on retrieving them.
Apologies for this technical blip. Hopefully normal service will be resumed shortly.
:-(

The Wonderful LV21

This is the wonderful LV21, a retired Lightship now rejuvenated into a floating arts venue. We are hoping to screen the Estuary Dialogues moving image piece here when it is made, in Autumn 2013. I think the space is just so perfect for the work.
The Captains of the LV21, Gary and Paivi have taken this vessel on and are lovingly regenerating and restoring it, preserving the a part of our marine heritage as well as creating exciting spaces and opportunities for contemporary art in North Kent. Moored at Gillingham Pier, LV21 is a sturdy steel riveted vessel with a tardis-like internal space. We visited her in October and Paivi and Gary kindly took us on a tour around the ship. The best part was climbing all the way up a vertical ladder to the actual light itself. Standing inside the glass case for the light, we had a panoramic view of the Medway and could even see Upnor Castle. (O.k., Paivi's coffee was a contender in the highlight section too with introduction to LV21's resident volunteer maintenance mariner, Dave a close third).

http://www.lv21.co.uk/

Notes on Journeys and Reflections - Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner

UCA Gallery Space

The recent exhibition Journeys and Reflections created by artists Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner in response to a commission from the Kent Architecture Centre was unveiled in the UCA Gallery space in The Pentagon Centre in Chatham in North Kent at the end of October (22nd-27th). Once a beacon of the modern shopping experience, The Pentagon now seems out moded. I used to shop there and never did I think the shopping experience was the pinnacle of capitalist enlightenment that I am sure the architects of the Pentagon had in mind when they designed the concrete arrow of style. Nevertheless, like many such shopping centres from this era, it evokes a nostalgia in me, admiration even. I cannot fail to enjoy this neon stark, retail experience. It's vintage. In this environment a gallery space is a stroke of genius. Artists have a direct connection to untapped audiences, people who may never feel comfortable going to a regular art gallery. They may just be curious enough to come in and engage in contemporary art en route to the toy shop next door. I hope so because the exhibition is all about the margins of life, the beauty and unexpected or overlooked that get caught like flotsam in the edges of places. Roberts and Turner extract these delicacies through hand drawn daily maps (Roberts) and botanical essences (Turner) and encourage us to re-evaluate these places. 'Edgelands...' write Farley and Symmons-Roberts in their book of the same name, '...are not meant to be seen, except as a blur from a car window or as a backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities.' Roberts and Turner have mined this rich, often ignored seam which exists in these edgelands and created work which calls for the senses to take note - to smell, to calculate, to excavate a place off centre, to document journeys or plants. A forensic exploration of a place.

Work by Jo Roberts

Roberts cycled around these fringes of Swale and Medway in Kent asking people where this Urban fringe might be located and subsequently produced hand drawn and painted 70 Maps of the Day. These maps were tweeted daily which I received via my Twitter feed. They were current for a short time on Twitter, soon eaten up by other tweets of chatter. Seeing the collection of 70 Maps hand crafted and of an intimate scale was more beautiful and resonating. On Twitter, the maps were as Farley and Symmons-Roberts noted about the journey through these Edgleland, seen in the 'blur from the car window'. In the gallery space, I had opened the car door, smelt the air (thick with Turner's botanical essences) and seen the fringe. Artists are canny at finding places which are undervalued, grimy: spaces which niggle the obsessive bureaucrats who want to dismantle the uncomfortable truths about the discrepencies of society. These places along the fringes are usually cheap, economically in decline- the scar tissue of constant wounds inflicted. Artists observe though and find value where others see only particles of failings. Turner, like a shaman, has long found the lyrical that exists around Medway and Swale through tinkering with the tricky, the forgotten or abandoned places battered by industry, military or the geographically inaccessible.

Guided by Faith, a fly tipped doll retrieved from Sittingbourne, Turner collected aromatic plants that thrive alongside tips & waste processing plants of the area. Through alchemical processes, Turner collected the individual aromas of specimens which were presented at the opening of the show on Saturday 22nd October to unsuspecting visitors. Like a kind of ad-hoc rogue pharmaceutical company, Turner had created testing stations where visitors were invited to smell these individual aromas and comment on how they made you feel, what they reminded you of and if you liked them. There were cups of coffee grains available to clear your nose from particularly pungent ones and not mash up the essences of these fringe plants. Gathering all of this information, Turner would then select and mix a unique fragrance like a perfumier of the North Kent marshes. The resulting essence is to be named Eau Du Bordure and will be available as a limited edition.

Stephen Turner

This surely is a poignant thing- a scent of a place that will change, will move from borderlands, may be gentrified one day under a canopy of red and buff bricks and promised lifestyles that will teeter along these fringes. The notion of what constitutes the fringe will have been archived for posterity and the hand made maps by Roberts will be charming vignettes of a life that used to exist, briefly, before Boris's army invaded.

Bottles of plant essences collected and arranged by Stephen Turner. Sample of Yarrow, gathered from the Urban Fringes by Turner. Edgelands; Journeys into England's True Wilderness,2011 Farley, P. & Symmons Roberts, M., Jonathan Cape, London.

An extended version of Misplaced

This is the extended version of the test film Misplaced which Rick and I filmed and I have edited. There are some imperfections and improvements technically that we want to make but in essence this has some of the visual ideas which we might develop further. Rick did some filming last week at Mucking Marshes in a grey and misty atmosphere and the footage looks wonderful. I hope he shares it with us when he gets time to look at it again.

One Year On: The Wolverhampton Riots - Sally Payen

In August 2011 the streets of Wolverhampton erupted into violence and disorder. Sally Payen has been commissioned to respond to the events of last summer through paintings and drawings using CCTV, newspaper images and social media as source material. Her previous work has touched on the subject of anarchy and unrest and gives a fascinating insight into the way that people behave in crowds. I visited this exhibition to see Payen's work and was struck by such an intimate yet powerful body of work in the gallery spaces of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery. Here are my thoughts which I wrote at the gallery. Notes on Wolverhampton Riots: One Year On – Sally Payen Stepping in to the gallery was both intimate and powerful; within the space, fragments of the event unfolded, taking siege of the audience in a space.

Ring

I liked the way the figure (?) in the foreground melts under duress from the effect of being overpainted, imposed upon by a new figure. The scene has a translucency to it, a sense of a moment that has passed, a fracture of despair. It is a fable that is retold but in the retelling, changes mutate into something beyond the original actions. An enlightenment and a lens. Generally the colours in the paintings intrigued me because they have a muted, soft tone except for flashes of cerise or red. It reminded me of paintings from the genre of Romanticism. Tintoretto colours. It challenged the raw, gritty and violent scenes that were relayed via the media during the events. I like the ink drawings on vellum very much. I enjoyed the spatiality of them, the way the paper sucks up the liquid and wrinkles slightly, disturbing the surfaces which reflected the consequences of the physical nature of the events. My own perspective of the riots was seeing the events from a 360 degree vision from transmitted images, yet never being there or directly involved. I don’t know the back stories, the intricacies of lives that were battered or reduced to rubble, before, during or after the riots. The work

Riot

has a biblical connotation for me, like a scene of figures clustering around an apostle. One of my favourite pieces. Anna Falcini 2012

It Is Only I - A New Estuary Dialogue film from Rick

My new video: https://vimeo.com/51858106


While making this piece thought about many things. Is there a point to making a cinematic poem? How do people engage with this form? The accidental. Finding the landscape through video-making. The electronic huddle of pixels shaped by light through bulbous eye-like, hill-like lenses making shapes from your own sense making.

Masculine and feminine elements in art emerging subconsciously - the feminine pushing forward into an abstract masculine. Walking as a metaphor a la Richard Long and Gary Snyder. The joining of disparate moments that is editing.

Thought too about Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' with it's dizzying looping movements around a fixed space telling of (male) nostalgia and desire. How this is echoed in the film with Anna walking around that fixed space - somehow a hint that we can stay fixed in space like that without a way out, unless, unless.

And of course Tarkovsky ( damn still haven't read the Geoff Dyer book) with reference to 'Stalker' (with my favourite scene from his films, or rather the one that has haunted me more than any other and fed me through the years) and 'Mirror' ( my personal favourite of his films).

Enjoyed too the subtle energies of the continuous shot (which is edited in the film) where Anna's face and hair and fingers visually touch the water and how this came about in calm and spontaneous ways using focus and exposure and coming close with the camera to give on reflection a sense of immersion - again a statement about art itself to my mind. And the last shot deliberately echoing Caspar David Friedrich, although on a less monumental scale.

Here is the poem too that happens in the middle of the film - spoken with a male voice ( my own) but overlaid with the images of a woman's hands - it is a text about forgetting and the burying deep essential parts of ourselves and how this leads to a kind of warfare. It's central metaphor began as a small wood, a forest so this is why  I thought I would try juxtaposing it with the rest of the film:

It is only I

Restless leaves stroke away all clues,
They too it seems
Have something to hide.

I wonder if it is only I
Who perceives a single crime and
Only I who cannot see those who turn away.

Fearing my task is good impossible,
I take notes all of the time, but
These are removed at twilight - when the forest is noisier than any city.

Less & less:
The fallen white berries like full-stops, the tall building
In front of the old school-house,
yesterday's dream of immediate water.

My mind shrugs
And moves to a different bough, scored
With dark rain and heiroglyphs.

There are numerous crimes,
Fragments of bones and weapons
Half-buried.

I wait, and barely note I have stopped wanting not to,
This barbaric radiance
Is a mother to me now.

Instead, I ponder if their investigations led them
Elsewhere, or if they got scared
Of what I can only guess.

by Rick Goldsmith

Misplaced - Test Bed

This is a link to a clip from a test film which Rick and I have been developing in anticipation of our real moving image piece on the Thames Estuary. This is my rendering of the footage we shot. It was filmed at a local site called Bodenham Lake which used to be a working gravel pit until the mid 80's and it is now a nature reserve. There are still remnants of the site such as concrete aprons and slabs and rows of uniform trees, planted to block out the chaos of industry and destruction on this once precious meadow. The River Lugg which runs alongside the land, left handy deposits of gravel in the land and it was originally excavated by hand until it became worked by machinery.It has a kind of faded beauty to it and an oddness. The manmade lake is now like a Karl Stockhausen electronic performance piece with the multiple bird sounds which rise and fall, echoing around the flat spatiality of carved land. I think Rick summed up very well what our intentions with this particular test film were in the previous entry (26/06/12 - Bodenham Marshes). It was never intended that we come with a tight script, narrative or bunch of ideas that would be self explanatory. We are aiming to approach the final ED film on the Thames Estuary with a sensitivity to the space, trying to work in a more responsive manner, absorbing the nuances and letting the delicate details of the landscape emerge. At the moment it feels like there is an urgency to complete this sooner than rather than later, with the disastrous idea of the area being threatened for the development of an airport. Of course we inevitably bring our own back stories into play, our individual perceptions. It is almost impossible to remove such stains. I think of it rather like the Stan Brakhage films with those translucent marks painted onto the film strip by hand. It's hard to erase such marks. I'm still thinking of ropes by the way. And drawings.... Link for Stan Brakhage - Dog Man Star http://youtu.be/mTGdGgQtZic

Journeys & Reflections - Jo Roberts and Stephen Turner

I've recently been sent a link to an exciting project in the Medway and Swale areas of North Kent by Urban Fringe which includes the work of Jo Roberts & Stephen Turner. I've long been an admirer of Stephen's work and followed his interactions with the landscape and area around the Medway over a number of years. This is the first time I have encountered Jo's work and I love the idea of hers to explore the perceptions of boundaries through the local community which she has then mapped. It is interesting to note that Jo studied Geography before developing her creative practice. Stephen has been amongst other things, distilling plants and created an essence; Eau du Bordure. I love the twist in exploring what some may consider wasteland, spaces which render little value and then extracting out of it, something of wonder. Well i haven't sampled the essence yet but I bet it is delightful. http://urbanfringes.wordpress.com/exhibition-events/ http://urbanfringes.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/stephen-jo-at-milton-creek-lr.jpg Stephen Turner and Jo Roberts present Journeys and Reflections around the edges of Medway and Swale; a multi media exhibition of drawing, maps, photography, video and pressed flowers, as well as distilled plants oils and papers made from local flora. The exhibition will include an Urban Fringe Library, contained in a small leather suitcase.

Bodenham Marshes Film - beginning a moving image aesthetic conversation'

Anna and I decided to visit Bodenham Marshes last Saturday. We had planned to try a few ideas for the ED film. Before going down to the site I spent some time looking at my own poetics and texts that I feel are linked to the work. Much of this is site specific or landscape-based.

In terms of my normal film-making practice this 'shoot' was very differently approached in terms of pre-planning. There was no storyboard or script. No treatment. I had only have a very abstract sense of what we were going to do on the day - which was exciting. I was thinking of certain structural modes of working e.g. using fixed lengths of camera movements in different directions, and also ways of mapping a space visually, but beyond that i was keen to let alot of the thinking work to be done by my 'back-brain' unconsciousness.

We knew we wanted to try out some techniques e.g. tracking and particular hand-held shots - but beyond that little else was decided. We did try some tracking with a dolly which a local film-making friend, Neil Oseman had lent me. But these didn't really work out - we wanted a very slow and very smooth movement that we couldn't really pull off to our satisfaction. We'll probably use some Hollywood Dolly tracks and dolly from a B'ham based company.

I did have one recurring approach that I wanted to try though - that of the camera hovering close to a figure as the figure explores an environment and bring it vividly to life. On the day this really became an interesting point of departure for both Anna and I. We tried this many times, using different Olympus prime lenses on my Panasonic AG-AF101 camera. It worked best when the camera hovered close to the figure - without revealing the face - it brought up alot of questions and interesting lines of enquiry, which I intend to investigate further.

I wanted to respond quite rawly to the place, and also leave an openness so that Anna and I could truly create an 'a moving image aesthetic conversation' at the site. Of course this could prove quite a dangerous thing to do, but this became a positive.

Later, looked at the footage from Saturday and really, really liked some of it - there were a few shots that I found very effecting - and I started to look forward to begin editing it. I have a poem which began speaking with the imagery, which was weird as I was hoping to record it on the day.

The early filming was very much spoilt by the tracks not doing what we wanted but it's helpful to look at the footage as it gave me some ideas of what we could achieve. A wide shot of the the landscape was particularly good. The main revelation was the footage of you walking through the landscape and then to the lake. Some of the shots really began suggesting some possibilities.

Anna and I both now intend to work on the footage from the day's filming seperately. 

Rick

Incarcerated

I've been focusing on preparations for a funding bid for Estuary Dialogues recently so my drawings and other practical work have taken a bit of a back seat. Going back into my studio last week, I was playing around with some ideas when I picked up a box of these small clear bottles with stoppers, that I had ordered from a company who make containers for collecting insect specimens for my last project, Adventureland. There is something about the scale of these bottles that I liked so I thought about using them in the ED project. On a very thin strip of tracing paper I began to draw a reductive version of a prison hulk. These hulks were originally naval ships but were decommissioned and used to house prisoners offshore in the 1700's to late 1800's. Conditions onboard were grim according to records in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich and the Guildhall Museum in Rochester. Prisoners were poorly fed and clothed, had to do long days labouring shackled together and disease was rife. Often prisoners were sent to America and then Australia as convicts. I wanted to draw these hulks on a tiny scale, with fragility and attention to detail which was quite challenging. I then put them inside the bottles reminiscent of old ships in bottles. I like the fact that the drawings become incarcerated; both a nod to the historic version of events but also a reversal of events. Instead of being the prison, the hulks have now become the imprisoned.

Momentary Presence/Absence (sooty shadows)

I photographed the lengths of rope on Wednesday in a studio setting. This was a much more orchestrated process compared to the scanning of the ropes, which I have been doing recently. Setting up the ropes was much more tricky than I thought mainly because I wanted to suspend them and be able to get the whole length of the rope in. I selected a grey backdrop which softened the coarse nylon orange rope. The rope lengths were surprisingly heavy, even small pieces. Initial experiments involving a line of fishing wire going across the studio where I tied the rope on, failed. The weight of the rope pulled the wire down and the rope was only partially suspended. I then noticed two metal eyes, in the ceiling and they were positioned in a good enough place where we could tie the rope. Brilliant! The ever patient Cai, who was the studio technician, threaded fishing wire through the eyes and then attached two pieces of rope. Cai then helped me set up the right lighting and finally I could begin photographing the ropes. Once the ropes were suspended they looked magical, as though they were on a stage for a performance. I mused on their life, thinking about where they had been before I picked them up from the shoreline in Kent. It was interesting to think that they had been discarded, lying flaccid on the shore. Suspended they appeared majestic. I selected two very different lengths of rope, one long piece that was tight and neat at one end with a small bristle of fibres at the other. The other was less tightly bound and each end had unwound into unruly sections. As they were suspended their forms unfolded. I began photographing them and fixed on the rope to begin with. I worked from distance then close up. I moved the light source around. As I did this I noticed the shadows from the ropes altered, either virtually disappearing or suddenly emerging soot black. The camera began documenting these momentary impressions which were like drawings of the softest charcoal on the grey paper. I found them mesmerising and seductive. Somehow the shadows dominated the stage and as quickly as they were created, with the touch of the lamp's off switch, they evaporated.