Research Journal summer 2018

view from Greenwall to Malling Down

May 26th

I am reading Olivia Laing ,the Lonely City , about artists and writers in New York 1970s,80s, which moves seamlessly between her emotional life and theirs – raw and honest, it links with journals/autobiograpical writing that I have read of : Anne Truitt, Annie Dillard, V Woolf, Amy Liptrot, Susan Sontag, and Rebecca Solnit.

8th June

Notes on Massey and Land art

Kings Wood : A Context. 10 years of Stour Valley arts . Independent arts organisation. Not just a linear history, looks at place, history, geography, how forest developed and the people. Doreen Massey wrote the introduction :

“On the geology map, it is the bright green of the Upper Cretaceous, curling round to the coast and stretching west to Salisbury Plain and Dorset. The tourist map distinguishes if by demarcated areas of protections and acknowledged heritage. Kings Wood itself is part of this… the relief map contours the hills. Even the road map detects it as the motorway skirt north and south of the great sweep of the North Downs in which this wood is set. Special country.”

“Along the hills of chalk, so much more easily travelled and worked than the marshy valleys below, remain traces and tales of some of our most well-known prehistory. The chalk of the North and South Downs encloses like a cupped hand the Weald of Kent : the garden of England. The combination of openness and woodland that characterises chalk is an important element in that iconography of Englishness that centres on the countryside. The very way we experience it – the lightness of the breeze in your hair, the particularly dappling of light – is influenced by those tales. The material and the imaginative intersect. It is part of our inheritance...and everything is on the move. Even the rocks beneath our feet. And in consequence everything is also from somewhere else – even the chalk.” P. 26/27

Talking about compressed time in chalk landscape, beautiful writing. Visiting the burial meadow in May felt very different to last year, it felt as if N was of the landscape, and all around, rather than in one particular place.

Massey again,

…”but we can find here a place of the imagination of longer, deeper, temporalities, and wonder at the forces that have brought them here. Place as a passing moment within the depths of time”.

“Kings wood, as a place, is like this. An interweaving of negotiations, layers of negotiations; of complex intersections of histories. Between human and human, human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. What makes a place a place is the uniqueness of the set of histories that meet up here, and what is made of it. Scuffing my shoe on the flint in the the path is one tiny encounter. But it will have altered things, just a little.”

Interesting essay about land art in this book : land art films of Gerry Schums ready to shoot, (ref to Gerry Schums _ broadcast art films through German national public television. This was a radical model which bypassed traditional institutions with a direct dispersal of artwork into domestic space. Films of Beuys, Boetti, Dibbets, Long, Merz, Serra, Smithson etc ), land art 1969. ( maybe link this to further notes on land art and how has changed since I was at art college in 1983 with visiting tutors and visits to Margam sculpture part, and Nash, Goldsworthy , etc, encountered in in 1983 while at Bristol,and , then doing PGCE at Bretton Hall I had the experience of being within the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (Hepworths, Moores, etc and visiting exhibitions) . Also, of course there is Chris Drury who lives in Lewes and his heart of reeds in the railway land here. The lecture we had by Edwina Fitzpatrick with examples of her practice very different from the land art of 60s, 70s, 80s...much more conceptual, ephemeral.

Doreen Massey

Social Scientist and Geographer. Died 2017.

Watched some of film on London the secret city and Massey talking about Occupy movement and London as global city with power of financial markets, ownership of land, making growth of other sectors difficult and the privatisation of public space.

Also, essay A global sense of place 1994 explains her theories of sense of place meaning for today and how places like London have to look at all the different threads and power structures and from wider perspective.

13th June

opening at Lewisham art house. The crit notes are in reflections section of website.

Amys testimony to her depression and suicidal thoughts was very moving. I felt very sad today, maybe to do with the arrival of Rach G from Australia, staying with me for a while and acting as a daily reminder of last summer, just after Naomi died. And of course the difference of Lucy not living at home makes everything very different . I am reading to the Lighthouse, Woolf, which also lets face it is very depressing , though also occasionally and of its times :

“And like everything else this strange morning the words become symbols, wrote themselves all over the grey-green walls, if only she could put them together, she felt, write them and in some sentence, then she would have got out the truth of things.” The metaphor of the sea and passing of time, and sensation of impending world war is powerful. From the train, reading this I saw a fox slipping through some railings looking exposed and and furtive in the daylight, just before Three Bridges.

Interim show, Lewisham Art House, June 2018

Wednesday 20th June

Eleanor Bowen talk re unit 4

I really found this useful. I also liked very much her way of engaging students by getting us to work in pairs quite early on and describe our practice to each other and then recount each other’s to see how well rembmeered /explained. She did this early on enough so we hadn’t all zoned out.. timing is key. She was very useful on describing her own practice and practice based PhD and how her wrriting links to her practice.

Key statements :

Your practice is the driver.

Read the learning outcomes and understand what you get marked on.

Start with where you are and what you know and your research question begins with your practice .

Use key words as pegs to hang your work on : Research, subject knowledge, criticality, argument, evaluation

Your argument will be an informed position involving critical analysis interpretation and evaluation rather than a conclusive answer, and more about examining questions. You are mapping your way through via critical analysis key sources and examples and how you analyse your practice (explore it in depth) and its position in relation to painting. Ie seeing your practice in a much wider context.

To locate your core ideas. Reflective writing is evidence of reflective thinking.

You need to demonstrate your critical position.

And What you want your reader to learn. Your point of view, your key issues, (space, absence, empty buildings, marginal landscapes)

So… in terms of my Unit 3 tutorial this week I need to think of following :

In relation to space, sense of place, absence, marginal spaces. Which cross disciplinary practice can I relate it to ?

Currently, I have 2 strands going :

The sense of absence and a journalistic, personal journey , element to my practice. How to write about this, include it and present it. I am interested in semi autobiographical writings of Olivia Laing and how she uses writing about artists specifically in Lonely City to write about her personal journey. So follow this through and maybe email/meet up with Laing and talk about her work and how she weaves personal into other lives.
The geography and human geography aspects of my practice and the site I am working on leads me to think about making links with architecture and urban geography. I would like to talk to Doreen Massey but she’s died unfortunately ! Maybe Jane Rendell at Bartlett would be another good person to try and talk to. And or the South Downs National Park, this is relatively new and Lewes is right in it and therefore all the planning etc for new building / development goes through them and district council.

20th June Camberwell

Key note talk Yves Alain-Bois at Camberwell

Fascinating talk, so glad I went. It is so interesting when someone with lots of knowledge around a subject delves particularly deeply into a small but significant part of an artists ouevre in this case Matisse bamboo and stick drawings (description of his stance and posture looking at photos, at 60 years old and 80 years old !) for Vence and for stations of the cross. How whole body movement influences and lack of wrist movement and how different from using squared up cartoons. For Matisse, transposing must reconceive the whole composition. Also mentioned how he “dashed” to Italy to look at Giottos in between two lots of these drawings, and different result with flat planes of colour when he returned. Very engaging delivery and little film of Matisse and his dog on big steps up ad down up an down, like a circus act but completely natural.

Camberwell lecture theatre great and large and with huge screen but, deep underground, slightly claustrophobic, I have been before to K Grosse talk last year and felt same.

June 26th

Demolition starts of certain sections of Phoenix site in September. This means it will change very quickly. I a actually looking forward to seeing the change from derelict semi derelict site to building site. seeing the earth dug, and possibility of collecting earth etc. But in terms of materials I need to collect as much as possible in next few weeks. In terms of space a building site can offer similar feelings of alterity and liminality, and juxtapositions of materials.

I collected some abandoned yellow tape from a building site elsewhere (NHS ambulance building being transformed into studio apartments) and want to collect some earth from where they are digging.

Inspired by show at SLG Liz Sibthorpe re Camberwell House lunatic asylum and the Mustard Spoon

Effect. I especially liked the A3 printed handout with her description of how she started accidentally digging for these found objects and the history she unearthed of Camberwell House. I like the name too, the mustard spoon engraved CH was the first object she found.

5th June

I thought maybe I could try and speak to Olivia Laing about her art writing and bringing in the personal stuff ? Lonely City is very good especially how she brings in her stuff which is very personal – I think especially brave female to be open and say stuff. Ok so

Journal writing for in relation to women as have to juggle to keep separate bits of life. Impossible as all merges and gets messy and disordered. Journals depict the quotidian and somehow ground the thoughts and reflections. Also why are women artists who retreat and become hermit like are just pigeon holed as eccentric and off their heads ? thinking again of agnes M, I keep going back to her, returning to the biography and actually especially later in life she had many friends and was quite social, so just a bit of a myth that she was a strange lonely hermit.
Archaeology, ??? to go back to earlier maybe thru museum pieces of finds and drawings and who found ?
Photograpy/film ? could use with journal entries ?

11th July

Need to write 500 words for unit 3. Not quite sure about this and how to make it relevant and useful. South downs national park ? Town planning ?

Jane rendell interesting. Local archaeology. I think its important to find quite a different field.

Research at the museum and education, talk to Al Bell ?

15th July

Walking around the site by the new Wenban and river, going over steps to river bank, I met a man sitting under the trees, he looked biblical. Still and sitting there and could see can of beer, I ended up talking to him for a while, called Paul, homeless, originally lived down the river at Southeram. He talked about how lewes was much more linked with farming when he was young, with many more businesses in town serving the agricultural sector. The Council , homeless department based in Eastbourne, are trying to rehouse him in Deal in Kent ! he wants to stay round here though as always lived here. He used to be a monk. And that somehow explained maybe his biblical appearance, under the tree like a latterday pilgrim. Highlighted the reality of peoples stories and also the way that this particular space by the river, used to be a natural way for people to walk but now hidden and he was in a hidden space. Will there still be these hidden spaces after new development is built ? you cant architecturally design hidden spaces ?? this is opposite the strange vernacular of tesco on the opposite bank.

I must get map/plan site and draw out to see shape and see shapes of older medieval maps of lewes.

The walking round the site is very important, and repetitive.

19th July

Drawing in the back of Kess van on the way to Peckham for Rachels graduation, wooden structure that they’ve built in the back, like the shop sign taken away, the temporary structure underneath any hoardings, barns, compass bus garage, the layers, skins of building materials – nothing precious – coming apart, seeing the construction, also reminiscent of painting stretchers constructions. Make and use as frame to build out from. And create skins and layers, wit different hard and soft materials – canvas, tarpaulin, mesh etc. and reference to building sites and road works. Adriana Varejao – paianting of baths and architecture, and meat, juxtaposition of decorative tiles and meat.

Also, architecture of borders, materiality of borders. In Arizona there is a The design at natures edges. moving fence which rises up – terrifying. Haiti/ Dominican republic border marked by a line of deforestation. Israel/Palestine banksy murals. Berlin, scar tissue remais where wall was, and the inner german border, the look out points.

The US/Canada the 49thparallel, marked by a gap in vegetation, all 5500 miles of it.

Conflict – destruction

Architecture – construction

Hoarding, fencing, wood, concrete blocks, iron sheets

6th August

Archive show, I haven’t managed to get anything submitted for this but never mind as actually propelled my thinkings re practice to thought that I am creating an archive of sorts, my own archive of photos, found objects, montage, collage, intervention, and other bits like Parsons wood mouldings catalogue, the ledgers from Parsons, and the archive of my own personal wanderings since Naomi died. How it is all tied up with that. Another Cardiff visit / anniversary is looming, N’s birthday on 14th and always oppressive the anxiety and anticipation in the run up to this. I come back to the idea of record cards with notes and small, not very good photo copies of b/w photos of summer of her death. A part of an archive. Archive : A collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people. Archive the verb comes from word to pigeon hole.

An archive can be physical place where they are stored. In my case at the moment it’s the plastic record box. The shape and simplicity of the box seems to convey a sense of privacy, which contains feelings, and it may well be a good outcome to bring together these fragments.

18th August

Sitting in Town Hall for my small exhibition here. I made these notes on the portraits surrounding me :

In relation to the history of industry in town, the business men who founded major industries were all linked to the church in some way, and all had wives.

Audrey Marchant Wimble, 1780 – 1846

She was wife of Nehamiah Wimble, lived at the Friars, Lewes. The Tabernacle, history of non-conformists in Lewes.

Diary of Mary Sophia Morris, b. 1831 – 1916 (ESRO)

Daughter of Charles Wille of Cliffe. Look up ESRO.. AMS 5569/88

Drawing of cottage with notes for diary,,, Charles Wille

Timber merchant Charles Wille, married to mary Wimble, Nehemiah sister, part of founding fathers of tabernacle. Tombs in southover church. Charles Wille kept a diary (ESRO)

Protestant dissenters in lewes, these are all references that I can look up when I finally get round to visiting the East Sussex Records Office. I read quite a bit about the non-conformists in Lewes while I was sitting there and it was a very turbulent time.

Ouse Valley Navigation

I talked to Jim Smith who visited the exhibition who helps run the Ouse and Adur Valley Navigation trust. He was fascinating to talk to about the industries that used river navigation such as cement industry in Lewes. Are there any barges still in existence from then ? he thinks not now. He suggested visiting the Newhaven Museum. There is very little in the museums in Lewes about victorian industrial history.

Mrs Nehemiah Wimble 1780 - 1846

27th September

Sunny and warm, enticing autumn day. Propelled to walk round the periphery of the entire site taking photos of every border, intersection, materials, landscape. how all the work places, how placed, the topography of the riverside, and how the Phoenix Causeway intersects the site. That was built in 1974, how must have been then. And all the trees, the plants, the seeds, the flowers, the extraordinary endless living ness of it all. Changing – Massey quote about endless moving. And randomness, fragmentary nature of my bits of work, drawing, collecting etc, how to fit into intersecting map/constellation of compressed time/space etc ! and also to distill my experience of being in these spaces at this time.

Industrial estate from the other side of the river

January 7th

Today was the day ! the start of demolition day. I went down to take some photos and saw just one digger clearing and piling up rubbish, over the top of the blue hoarding, like a lone tyrannosauraus.

I also met Paul who lives in the yellow van, one of a few, always parked on Phoenix Way. There is still quite a community living down here and looking out for each other in various customised bespoke vans, with traces of their former use like palimpsests on the sides, British Gas, Southern Water etc.

January 11th

I met Brian down by the entrance to Phoenix site by the Pells pond. Near Waterside House. I asked I he would let me record him he said no !!! He was walking around site and striding purposefully walking quickly, with his flat cap on, looking like a young boy, but up close you could see he was old. He described running , jumping , skipping among black sand dunes, the black waste from the foundry which was dumped just here. He created such a quick live picture of it I could literally see him running and jumping with a back drop of bonfires and fireworks and a burning tree ( described by him) in a different time. He worked at Chandlers when it was where the pine stripping place is now.His mother lived in terraces where Brook Street car park now. There were houses and lots of shops all around there and by green wall. Then. I also talked the other day to Sarah Baylis who wrote the book on the portraits in town hall,,,, about how many women worked in the foundry too. (listen to recordings at keep of oral histories)

January 25th

Watching the demolition, the troop of diggers, like an army, and the huge amount of earth moved between them and then the cleared up site, with the exposed foundations of the old factories, like earthworks, how did Robert Smithson move so much earth, with money and help I guess. It also makes me think of the rubble mountains outside berlin, the slate mountains, spoil heaps, in Wales, and all the landscaped little hills next to new housing estates,like the ones made next to Phoenix Causeway in the 70s, the endless cycle of our use of land, pushing nature around; though just look at how quickly nature comes back and takes the upper hand.

March 18th

I walked along the river by Tesco, after going to Homebase. It was a very blowy beginning of march sort of day, though some people were eating lunch on benches by the river. Like watching a film, and reminiscent of Doigs kayak painting, I watched as a couple rowed along in an open canoe, blown about on the river which was windy and full,at high tide, and moored alongside the recently cleared section of the Phoenix site, actually probably at the very site of the original wharf which was used to transport pig iron etc up river when the Ouse was a busy navigable channel, hence the many riverside industries. They tied up, nimbly hopped out and then toured the demolition site, taking photos, all of five minutes, like ruin tourists, then they were quickly in their boat again and casting off.

June 21st

Cleavers, ragwort, groundsel, valerian, rosebay willowherb, herb robert, speedwell, bent grass, buddleia, elder, yellow hawkweed, hawkbit,bindweed, wood sage, green alkanet, hedge woundwort, dead nettle.

On this, the longest day, I met Jo Carter, contacted through the Lewes wildflower forum, down by Green Wall to look at wildflowers, ‘weeds’, that have flourished there since Gosnells moved out. Where we were standing will have a view of a car park in front of it, though providing access to a much needed new doctors surgery. At the moment the corrugated grey roof of the old soap factory building has melded with colours of landscape, all very pleasing on the eye, sorry it will go. How shall I record, just this conversation ? I like the idea of a conversation being a remnant remembering the vision of this bank covered in wildflower profusion over years of plastic and rubble.

May 14th

Two years on and we are all moving on. We lay on the earth and all drifted off in the hot, hot sun,a memory of the burial day how hot we were , dizzy with heat. Our global warming in your face, and sunburn. Us all part of and together in this, moving forwards. We found the fir cones left to mark the place, but it is ever shifting, belongings less imbued with significance, within us. Dried out, still meaningful but less soft and less exposed.

Wandering and walking. How to use as part of practice. A practice of pluralism. The weeds, the names, the colonization of brownfield sites,the hierarchy of weeds, how develops, lifespan of a wasteland. How can we have wastelands forever. We need areas of change, evidence of our scars, our pasts, and therefore our futures. Caitlin Desilvey, curated decay. Brachen of berlin, natura urbana. Attention to all forms of life, the non-human. Rebecca Chesney observations films of urban wildlife. Still and watchful, respectful.

Feelings of confusion, but have to remember this is an art project not a clear, pathwayed research project. There is no outcome, just a journey through time, space and constellations. How I feel in space/place at different times, from one visit to the next, from one walk to the next.

Constitutes places to dream, a liminality, a threshold, to our dream spaces. We need evidence, folded up photos, creased and faded.

June 19

Walking through and around site in the summer there are many more vehicles, customised bespoke portable homes, here in uk for summer festival season. I saw a suitcase sitting by the hoardings, feeling of people haunting all around this place.

A reminder that people need space, affordable homes. The hoardings too give echoes of borders and forced displacement of people and border walls to keep people out.

Photos of hoardings at Phoenix, the new ones near furniture now, and the really high ones at st Anne’s.

May 26th

Swimming in clear waters at the Pells, conifers silloietted like a mediterranean skyline against the blue sky, a bright blue line to swim along. And behind the pool, the sound of demolition through a tactfully shrouded building, a systematic, thourough demolition that leaves few traces, of those black sand hills. The Pells, and land that became pool, were given by a charitable benefactor, history of philanthropic benevolence other parks in Lewes, give history of the business men behind them, the Every ironworks donated Paddock field to its workers, and built houses etc. is this similar to our sponsorship by big business, of tobacco and oil companies. Are we entering a more responsible times when development of economy and therefore business is no longer seen as advantageous. End of capitalism brings with it realisation that economic growth has actually increased gap between rich and poor. How do art galleries and museums function in this environment ? does a museum which is responsible and hands back artefacts to countries of origin develop with fewer actual exhibits ? ( ref) have to look to a curation of events, experiences, temporary artworks, as ways to curate art of the now ?

Thursday 6thjune

Visit to mums to help her move back upstairs.

Swimming in the river at Mums, a deep brown colour with mud and smell of minerals – beautiful light of shadows of clouds flickering over the water , a sudden swooping of a flock of very fast canoeists, passing me in the water so close I feared for my head and waved vigorously at them in case they didn’t see me. River pollution, time passes.