nowhere/somewhere/everywhere 2

Playing in the dark with the models produced quite poetic moving shadows and I felt compelled to make a video.

The sounds reflect my thoughts on an uninhabited arctic wasteland, where installations are left from one year’s end to the next. Like the nuclear-powered lighthouses built around the northern coasts of the erstwhile USSR now looted for their copper wiring, the looters will have got hotter swag than they may have hoped for. 

For the degree show, the models were attached to a conveyor belt mounted on filing cabinets so that they circle relentlessly. There is a light shining on them so that moving shadows are cast on the wall behind the machine.

Models attached to the conveyor

Detail of models on machine

The machine.

The filing cabinets were a particularly lucky find and added considerations of bureaucracy.

The piece is displayed in dark space and can be viewed only through a narrow slit, like a gun-sight in a thick concrete bunker. This is significantly frustrating; clearly for the convenience of those within not those without.  It is suggestive of paranoia and concealment as well as  of value; something here was considered to be in need  of preservation through extreme circumstances.

The conveyor circles between the cabinets. In the drawers are forgotten, official looking documents. Everything is grey. Overall the work has an air of ‘retro-futurism’ the circling of the conveyor reminds of bureaucracy; regulations and restrictions are engendered because they become possible to enforce not because they are ‘needed’. Statutes remain though the reasons for their existence are lost, their original purposes subverted.

Like a Kafka office, empty but for a ringing phone, this office is long forgotten, down some secret corridor. No knows who is meant to work here, yet edicts continue to be ground out; directives circle endlessly. The models though small are not benign, like the creeping restrictions which are enacted unnoticed, and morsel by morsel freedoms are eroded as governments draw secrecy and paranoid around themselves.

The models are enigmatic – military? Industrial? Functional? Derelict? They do not reveal their secrets.

Secrets can be old and decayed but secrets they remain.  Secret graveyards of abandoned nuclear submarines and naval ships of the USSR in arctic seas were far from prying eyes until Google Earth revealed their slender silhouettes. They will remain for a long time, slowly seeping radioactivity and other noxious effluents into the sea. Biological activity in Polar Regions is so slowed by cold that insults to the environment remain as unchanging scars. Vegetation does not grow over exposed soil; the detritus of World War II fighting is still scattered on the surface of battlefields of north Finland and the Kola Peninsula. Poisoned land and sea will stay poisoned. The sounds evoke this arctic coldness and desolation, a whistling wind and clanking metal with an electrical hum, suggesting activity but deserted.

The title, Nowhere/Somewhere/Everywhere, suggests that though based on nowhere  and despite a slightly ridiculous, pathetic air there is much in the world to which it could refer and that which it references – the will to power – is something to be universally guarded against.

the Rebirth project- Goodbye Fanny Deakin

Rebirth is a celebration of the move, during the spring of 2009, of the maternity department of University Hospital of North Staffordshire from the old City General Hospital maternity block, opened in 1968, to a new building.  Various local artists and students from Staffordshire University responded to the call for proposals for work to contribute to the celebrations.

Following the transfer, on 31st December 1970 of the work formerly undertaken at the Fanny Deakin Maternity Hospital, Chesterton, and in continuing appreciation of the services rendered in the field of maternity care by the late Mrs Fanny Deacon this floor was named the FANNY DEAKIN MEMORIAL WARD

On a visit to the old Maternity Building I noticed a plaque on the fifth floor, which was no longer a functioning ward but had been entirely given over to administration, labelling it as the ‘Fanny Deakin Memorial Ward’. Investigating Fanny Deakin I found she had been born in 1883 and was an activist and politician from Silverdale. She was the first woman elected to Wolstanton council in 1923 where she lead a successful campaign for improved care and nutrition for mothers and babies in the desperately underprivileged local communities, which resulted in free milk being distributed by councils to pregnant women and children. Only one of  her own five children survived to adulthood. She died in 1968.

In recognition of her work a local maternity hospital, opened in 1947, was named after her. It was closed in 1970 and the work subsumed into the Maternity department of the City General Hospital.  So by stages the memory of Fanny Deakin and her championing of the working people of the area is fading away.

The piece is entirely sound. When the building ceases to be used, the sounds of its functioning will be lost irretrievably: the particular squeak of a particular door, the echo of footsteps in the stairwell, the clunk and tinkle of a specific person’s inimitable way of pushing the tea trolley. These sounds are so prosaic, so un-noticed and ignored, but they are totally specific and unique to the building.. To any one who worked or spent time in the building they would be intensely evocative.

The piece is a journey from the entrance lobby with a visiting child chatting to adults and running about, up in the lift to a functioning ward where a new-born is having a nappy change; he urinates suddenly and the nurse hoots with laughter and suggests she now needs a shower!! The phone rings and nurses and ward staff chat. We then move to the stair well and hear footsteps and other noises, from there to a floor above where banging doors and light switches echo in the emptiness. The lift then descends to the ground floor and out into the dusk where birds are cheeping sleepily in the trees and traffic passes, as do we, on our way to the new maternity facility.

I am interested in sound, it seems to access old, deep parts of the brain, as does smell, and somewhat bypasses the newer more rational functions.

I wanted to create an evocation of the working of old building which has now been totally lost and is almost impossible to recall or re-create. I would like to think that people who spent large amounts of time in the building would recognise some of the sounds.; the door that shouldn’t be pushed until just the right moment after the buzzer sounds, the particular voice of the lift. It might also be of interest to people who have changed from visiting that building to visiting the new one during their pregnancies.

Sounds in the new building will be completely different , despite the fact that both buildings are designed to fulfil the same function, hearing the sounds of the old building in the new one will create a kind of bridge to accompany the transfer of function from old to new.

In a hospital visitors spend quite a lot of time hanging about waiting for something to happen, in that context I think art needs to be a bit more complex and engaging than – ‘oh that’s pretty’.

Nowhere/Somewhere/Everywhere 1

From the shadow photos it was clear that either they or the models must move, moving the models seemed easier so I embarked upon making my machine.

Now we are on the home strech to the degree show and if one has time to think the only rational response is deep-down-where-it-really-counts panic and stress.

Having shown the tank rubbing the question was – where next? As usual I was bereft, idealess.  So, perhaps,  make a textile tank, full sized? In which case, one place to start is by making models of the sorts of structure which might support the floppy tank. They could all match or all be different; such things as church towers, houses, classcal columns, pylon-like structures…

Naturally the models got a life of their own and seemed likely to cast interesting shadows.

Shadow of a Tank

But then it seemed the tank had been overtaken; the models could stand alone.

Their first outing was spread on the floor. Separate, dispersed, gray models on a gray floor.

Models on the floor 1

Models on the floor 2

The mouse’s eye view of the models was quite compelling, and not visible to human viewers who merely had to try not to step on the art.

Stenciled prints based on the photos translated the tiny into large.

Spray paint stencil 'print'

Spray paint stencil 'print'

After the shadowphotographing it was obvious that either they or the models had to move. Moving the models seemed easier, thus I ermbarked upon making my machine.

Requiem for a Tank

Having been told there were a lot of military vehicles in a local scrap yard, I went to have a look. There are massed lorries, fire engines some refuelling tankers and a Chieftain tank.

Massed Bedford Lorries

A pair of Green Godesses

Cab view of Godess

The tank is draped in rotting tarpaulins which are all tied up with washing line and weighted down so not movable. The turret is turned facing backwards with the gun resting on a bracket at the back of the hull, this is it’s transport mode.I think it may be an early model as the first ones had a split entry hatch as this one has. The gaffer of the yard says it was the last one they bought and he decided not to break it up, it has been there about ten years and he thinks it may have seen action but would need to look inside for the serial number to find out where.

The Tank

Draped tarpaulins

Looking down on the cupola

Eye to eye

So – what is one to do with a tank? I decided that rubbings of it might be interesting. Clearly a functional tank could not be treated like this, only a decommissioned one could be subjected to this indignity.  So the rubbings are traces of a thing already past. This is an investigation of the iconic visual status of the tank versus its current condition; outdated, immobile, dead. This stranded behemoth has a small, shiny padlock closing its entry hatch. Rubbings of the full length of its 5m gun and some of the many hatches and covers have been done onto calico, which emphasises stitching and woven texture in the canvas lagging on the gun.

The rubbings onto textile have something of the shroud about them; fabric marked with visible traces of what it once covered.They  have translated these tank parts into shadowy, insubstantial and rather vulnerable, feminine things; it is not clear what they might be. The image is of a stilled weapon, but the fabric moves in response to passing people and opening doors. All a contrast to the quite substantial military looking brackets from which the fabric is suspended.

A 5m gun on calico

Installation view

In work such as Nuclear Sail, or the Aircraft-carrier Bird Bath, Ian Hamilton Findlay explores the paradoxes of military machinery; visually gripping hardware but with a function which is so remote to those of us who have never experienced conflict that is easy to discount or ignore.

Stella Brennan in her slow moving, contemplative video South Pacific (2007) gives another perspective on the aftermath of war in looking at how WWII influenced culture, communication and perceptions of that remote part of the world.

Stella Brennan South Pacific 2007

the beauties of Stoke-on-Trent: electircity sub-stations-

Aquinas Street

The fist electricity sub-station I noticed is in Etruria. A massive brick building that seems to be based on the early dynastic Egyptian mastaba tomb. Once you become aware, subs-substations start appearing all over the place. Their unifying charicter is the yellow notice on the front door showing the chap fatally struck by lighening, also on the front door is their name, usually that of the street in which they are situated.

In the way that banks, who’s business is based on trust, have buildings designed to inspire confidence through a look of solidity, of permanence, of dependability, Electricity Sub-stations seem to display a similar sort of self-satisfaction.

These buildings of a prior age have been built to a high specification, they include un-needed flights of decorative fancy, they seem to be ‘built to last’, to express a confidence in the future, there is an optimism and a quaint ‘futuristicness’ about them and, like so many other interesting buildings, they will pass, probably un-mourned. A fine rather Art Deco-Egyptian substation has disappeared since I photographed it. The replacement has no  aesthetic attributes, it is just housing for necessary equipment; an optimum between cost and protection.

I have been making stencils of the substations and with collaged colour; they have a certain look of 1930s tube posters. The interest in stencils started from a wish to convey monotony through repeated images in the second year.  I very much like stencilled images; the contrasting sharpness of cut lines and the softness of sprayed paint. Where spray escapes the stencil’s restrictions it seems almost to suggest the aura of power emanating from these silent buildings.

Belgrave Road

Eagle Street

Keelings Road

Belmont Road

Kingsway, a sub station in the centre of Stoke, having acquired festive decorations, became a Christmas card. There is an interesting air of  misty night around the lamp and the Christmas lights.

Festive Cards

Hotel Malaventura

At last, an explanation for the picture in the header. Its from a small video made last March or so which used animated shadows of stencils 

The stencils of the hotels on an overhead projector were combined with the helicopter cut outs and photographed, then used to make the animation.

Hotel Malaventura, the name of the video animation, is from an essay by Jameson (Jameson. F. 1998.  Postmodernism and consumer society In The cultural turn. London, Verso.). He describes the Hotel Bonaventura, Los Angeles, as an exemplar of a post-modern building, where ingress and exit are discouraged, which seeks to exclude the outside world and provide a complete environment within itself.  This sounds a bit like the ‘Hotel California’ (out of Roach Motel: ‘Roaches check in but they don’t check out’).

The video is about a perception of modern cities as dangerous places where the manufactured luxury of the international hotel contrasts with a fear of insurgency, panic and random death on the streets. It is also a reflection on the isolation and paranoia of the self-obsessed ego. The shadow of a huge, multinational, luxury hotel dominates the space, helicopters fly noisily past.

An uneasy scene; are we inside or outside the hotel? Are the helicopters friend or foe? What is going on? A low voice expresses these thoughts.  Is the action actually occurring or could it be a phantasm of the speaker’s mind? 

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THE LEGEND OF ALICE DOWNHAM

‘The Legend of Alice Downham’ is a video , the result of a proposal for work to be shown under a pseudonym. I wanted to display my ceramic Spitfires (see http://acooperwillis.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/the-end-of-the-year/), so Alice became the putative artist.The video was displayed at the recent Conjunc+ion Show here in Stoke-on-Trent, in a small space, with the planes hung from the ceiling and illuminated only by the light of the projector, it made quite an effective installation. The dramatic story of her life is told in a slideshow of collages made using fine art images, my photographs taken locally and product illustrations from the Argos catalogue.

A formative influence on the Alice video was the 1911, humorous, Dadaist, classic ’What a Life’, a book by E. V. Lucas and George Morrow (http://scruss.com/wal/contents.html). They used the engravings from a Whiteley’s Department Store catalogue collaged with text to tell a dramatic story. The catalogue must have been huge; it seems to have illustrated every variety of product, from horse blankets to silver cutlery, which could be ordered by customers in the colonies and the shires. The Argos catalogue is clearly a modern equivalent.

The inspiration for narratives told through still images is from Chris Marker’s iconic film ‘La Jetee’ (1962), which I find amazingly compelling; the story of a time-traveller told entirely in black and white, still photographs with a detached, monotone narration.

Some Background to the Alice collages.

1 – I discovered a whole genre of war paintings being done by men whose fathers were probably too young to have fought in WW2. There are a myriad limited edition prints at different prices,unsigned, signed by the artist, signed by pilots who flew the sort of plane illustrated and sometimes the original is for sale too. This had a splendid ‘Boy’s Own’ atmosphere.

2 – the background is a photograph of derelict kilns in the old J.D. Weatherby’s Factory. The figures of course are from the Argos catalogue.

3 – A photo from the Guardian of Marc Quinn’s sculpture installed in the grounds at Chatsworth for the Sotheby‘s selling exhibition, Beyond Limits. Amongst the horrified crowd are Damian Hirst, a Francis Bacon figure and the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire.

4 – Poussin’s In Arcadia Ergo; no better background to the   vengeance for a death, with another Qinn; Portrait of the artist as a young man.

5 – Victor Burgin’s 1986 re-stating of Hopper’s The Office at Night, but including Alice’s typewriter.

7 – The Spitfire in the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. A  figure of Reginald Mitchell stands on the viewing platform at the back of the gallery holding a Spitfire aloft. The platform is no longer accessible due to health and safety concerns.

8 – This heroic image, Home is the Hero by Ivan Berryman, was in many ways the starting point for the story. The heroic spirits are photos of the ceramic planes.

9 – The fall of Icarus, Breughel (ca. 1554) As Auden said (roughly); tragedies happen while people go about their daily lives. In this case the event is Alice’s fall; her Spitfire splashes into the sea.

10 – Who’s Who; Alec Downham has been erased from its pages.

11 – Richard Prince, Nurse of Greenmeadow (2003) is the background. The patients are a happy snap of some merry party. The lady playing Alice was labelled ‘Best Mummy’. Archibald McIndoe did amazing pioneering plastic surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. The Guinea Pig Club was stared by his patients, it’s badge is a guinea pig with pilots wings. The Spitfire’s fuel tanks were positioned just in front of the pilot and appalling burns to face and hands were sadly common.

12 – Botticelli (ca 1482). In 2007 Prince designed a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton, these nurses were part of the launch. The patients are all demonstrating mobility aids in the Argos catalogue.

13 – Audrey Hepburn in Dickinson’s 1952 film Secret People; Alec is vanishing as Alice realises she no longer resembles him.

14 – The Burslem Sunday School (http://www.thepotteries.org/church/burslem/hill_top.htm). Only the portico remains of this massive chapel, closed in 1977 and demolished after a fire in 1987.The blue plaque says ‘Stych Chapel’ it was thus named by Arnold Bennett. For a wonderful description of an industral hades see http://www.thepotteries.org/location/districts/sytch2.htm.

Etchings, Aquatints and Exhibitions

One useful thing done over the summer was a trip to Scotland to visit Dundee Contemporary Arts and specifically their wonderful print studio. With expert help and advice from the ‘manager, Anni, I managed to produce an aquatint and a paper lithograph.

The aim of the image was to see how aquatint tones could be combined with stencil with a complete absence of line. This was a view out of my hotel window in Waterbury Connecticut, the very American industrial/ office buildings presented such blankness, an air of being closed in upon themselves.

Waterbury CT

This paper lithograph is a ‘quick and dirty’ interpretation of home-made camouflage outfits displayed in an exhibition at the Imperial War museum. I found them very striking, again they are expressionless and decline to engage with the living.

It seems that Scottish ghillies and game-keepers were recruited to train the army in the arts and uses of camouflage and stalking. There were no regulation outfits for this at the time so troops hand painted their own in shades of kahki, black and greenish. The white suit at the back was for troops in the Arctic.

Camouflage, WW1

Waterspout (etching aquatint) was made during a week of printmaking at Heatherlys in Fulham, and a well spent week it was too, in the summer of 2006. It was printed ‘Chine Colle’: two colours of hand made paper laminated onto the print paper wile it goes through the press.

This little head is in the museum at the Bishop’s Palace at St Lizier in the foot hills of the French Pyrenees. There were two of them together; in their petrified howls.

Waterspout

This is where the ‘exhibitions’ part of the title comes in; This etching aquatint and Waterbury, above, have been accepted for the Stoke Open and will be on view at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery from 27 Septemeber for a wee while.

Berlin 5th biennale, 2008. 4

A major place at the KW Institute was given up to the display of the original artwork for ‘Soft City’ a large and epic graphic novel of 154 pages by the artist currently known as Pushwagner. It seems the work was made around 1969 – 1975. A fantastic work it is the cheery evocation of a dystopia in which individuality is no longer in vogue. Great pen drawings on a large scale, we follow the serried ranks of the middle-management of ‘Nice Corp’ through their day; they only have one day which is repeated continually.

A link to his not sufficiently informative site: http://www.pluto.no/kunst/pushwagner/

The daddies leave the mummies and babies for work.

‘Where are our minds when our bodies are here?’ The daddies get into their cars.

The daddies greet their families on return from the office.

From Underclothing and Beef Tea to Monoclonals and Tcell factors:Help from the Hayward Hospital, 1881 – 2008.

The Hayward Hospital was set up by a bequest from the brothers Hayward, which finally cleared probate early in 1881. As a result of this a trust was set up and governors appointed to administer it. By 1887 they had managed to build a hospital it was for the deserving poor and people of Burslem. At the time of the Grat War, Tunstall was planning to spend money on founding a War Memorial Hospital, and it was decided that the two charities should join together so the current site at High Lane came into being.

Now the Hayward Hospital is having a private finance initiative (PFI) built behind it. Over the next two years the hospital will move into this new building, parts of the old hospital will be demolished and parts incorporated into the new as they become empty. Funing has been received to document this process and to produce resulting artworks. We students at Staffs. U were invited to submit proposals towards this, and as seen above mine was demed to be something worth persuing.

On a tour of the hospital, the ladies at the Day Case Unit talked about the work tbeing done there which is absolutely at the cutting edge of modern treatments for autoimmune, rheumatoid conditions, using biologically active molecules: monoclonal antibodies, T cell and other specific factors. My interest in this stems from having spent about ten years, in a previous lifetime, working as a post-doc in various research labs in Immunology. I find it exciting that work which starts as purely theoretical research does indeed end up resulting in real applications, hugely increasing quality, and length, of life for people with seriously debilitating, chronic conditions. . A Rheumatology department was established in the 1970s in accord with the hospital’s concentration on chronic diseases.

Mulling on the Hayward

The Haywood is interesting for many reasons. From its founding it has been deeply involved in the local community and now, because it specialises in treating chronic conditions the relationships between staff, patients and the building have time to develop and become a meaningful part of people’s lives; quite different from the usual hospital scenario, where patients are just wandering transients, mostly unknown to the staff, in a completely confusing not very welcoming building.

Very readable Victorian Handwriting,1886

The Minutes of the Meetings of the Governors of the Haywood Charity Hospital from 1881 at the County Record office in Stafford are hugely involving to read. The governors seem to have become tied up in the minutiae of organising two nurses and the housekeeper once the Waterloo Road house had been rented late in 1881. There are endless entries about tenders for supply of meat and milk and agreements that bills should be paid. Matters which one would have expected to be delegated are seriously discussed; the buying of a single ‘…suit of flannel underclothing, stamped with the charity’s name, is to be obtained under the directions of the nurses and lent, in the first place, to —– Boulton (sic) of Sneyd Street, Cobridge.’ (minutes for 10 April, 1882).

The entry for purchase of the hospital site, 8 Feb.1886

So now I shall go and spend more time reading the minutes and also spend time at the Day Case Unit; what fun. Please await the next thrilling installment.