TRACK

Oxford and Nottingham

Category: deep mapping

Track: Oxford and Nottingham

June 7, 2018 / / 0 Comments

My recent poems around Track: Nottingham theme come from an original multimedia project from 2010 reborn….only this time poetry led…..

I am working on two books of poems drawing on local history in two locations…

The above Thames based one was called Backwater but probably be Track Part One now.

The second local to Nottingham and started with the three poems about Chaplin, Picasso and Lawrence.

Read James Walker on the project here:
https://thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/track-nottingham-paper-boats-on-private-road/

The projects take individual ‘derives’ as the starting point for poems that literally ‘track’ individuals movement through urban and rural space and their inter-actions with the current technology to analyse how art and technology interact.

I hope in future to illustrate myself or use illustrators in a wider ‘Track: Nottingham’ book proposal.

So far I have written three poems about Picasso, Chaplin and D.H.Lawrence which rather neatly bookend three con-current aspects of modernity in Painting – Film – Literature.

I am interested in the relation between technology and how these individuals were enabled to move and in turn have their works ‘distributed’ by the new channels of literary and film distribution  and their link to networks of travel especially the railway.

From my earliest poetry I have ought to ‘map’ these webs of inter-dependence and am grateful to Patrick Keiller and David Matless for some of the theoretical cultural geographical basis of this approach. This began with a an abandoned M.A. in multimedia in 2010.

No person is an island and no artist is independent of the tentacles of mass distribution and technological change.

My poetry is an attempt to map these hinterlands of change.

They are also stories about people and love and pain played out against 19th, 20th and 21st century backdrops.

 

and the original Multimedia project from 2010

From Track to Backwater

September 5, 2016 / / 0 Comments

trackcover

In 2010 as my mother was in the final stages of Carcinoid cancer I took a walk down a disused railway line in my hometown that used to run from Didcot to Southampton.

I used it as the beginning of a NTU M.A. in Multimedia. A year later it collapsed and I restarted it as a Fine Art Drawing M.A. instead after she passed away in 2012.

As my mother worsened I continued to visit her and that track and walk it and remember the times I walked and drew it in the early 1990s.

Here is an image from a small sketchbook drawn on the 1st August 1990….I dated everything in those days.

sketch15

 

I however had not forgotten that Track project and always thought it would come back.

 

 

Rail and River: The Hitchman Archive explored.

August 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

As a teenager I remember looking through the extensive book collection my friend at school’s father had assembled. Mostly on a natural history and a river Thames theme I wasn’t sure how many of those books were still with my friend Stephe here in Nottingham. Yesterday I looked through the remnants of the ‘Hitchman Archive’ and found a treasure trove of cultural geography material.

Here what I managed to carry home to render into a bibliography for a proposal but there plenty still in the boxes.

hitchmens

Most significant were the accounts of the Victorian Thames and it already apparent that the railway opened up the River Thames as a tourist destination. I also delighted to discover a hither-too unknown to me artist George D. Leslie who was living in Wallingford at the same time Mann in Hagbourne. Indeed there was a group of artists associated with two families there and George D. Leslie even wrote a book about art politics at the R.A!

leslie2

This has put back my writing of the proposal for PhD as I sort through the new material and maybe revise my intended research question and title. The Rail/River juxtaposition seems to sum up the Victorian Golden age ( in Williams sense) problem. The artists used the railway to access the ‘unspoilt’ countryside/riverscapes but hardly (unlike the French Impressionists) painted the Railway…..this at root of my enquiry. Why did the British painters and artists comprehensively ignore the very means by which they were gaining access? This seems to be the essential contradiction at the heart of rural art and art movements here in the U.K.

Having found Leslie I did a quick trawl of other possible artists at work in a radius of just ten miles of Didcot Junction and came up with John Singer Sargent and John Lavery both connected to Lord Asquith estate at Sutton Courtenay. I also uncovered a small art commune known as the Broadway Group in the Cotswolds connected to Henry James and presumably linked to the arts and crafts further upstream. It looking increasingly likely that although the focus has been on Jewson and Morris above Oxford that the railway enabled a whole range of artistic activity all along the newly ‘discovered’ unspoilt Thames. Far from being the ‘Upper Thames’ poor cousin there may be more yet to uncover in ‘The Lower or Middle’ Thames Valley.

I also found this fascinating combination of travelogue, illustration and ‘staged’ photography by Charles George Harper and W.S.Campbell. I have never seen this illustration of the Clumps before and it several decades before Gibbings books were published.

I am very grateful to Mr Hitchman senior for this legacy:-)

TVVBothS TVVillages2vol Wittenham Clumps, by Charles G. Harper from Thames Valley Villages, 1910 (a)

They also published this book which has direct connection to Edwin Smith’s later photography from the look of the cover!

rural nooks

Suit of Lights? The Berkshire Hank Williams…

February 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

marshfield mummers

So Shaun what are you actually doing now……

well..that’s an interesting question.

I currently have two PhD proposals submitted to Nottingham University and Loughborough. They both the same and the gist of the proposal is this.

I want to link two separate areas of art research together. Storicodes is an app developed at Nottingham University MRL ( Mixed Reality lab) which is an artier version of the rather banal QR code. It has been successfully deployed through large scale illustration which I was introduced to by Stefan Rennick Egglestone at Nottingham Writers Studio in 2015.

NWS November 2015

At the same time I became aware of the developments in digital embroidery especially through the work at NTU in textile and product design.

I was assured by Prof. Sarah Kettley (now at Edinburgh College of Art)  that there is no theoretical problem in creating lighting embroidery which could then be scanned by the storicode app.

Which Baldrick is where my cunning plan unfolds…

As a dead country star ( yes there a lot around) and folk performer/reviewer I aware that audiences falling and venues closing so would like to help counter that trend. An app that connected both consumers and artists and enabled connections would be great. So here we have a variation on the ‘added content’ idea. By wearing an embroidered suit whilst performing it may be possible for an audience member to focus the scanning app on a part of the design which lit up in sequence as songs played. This would trigger an illustration appearing (songbook cover/graphic novel page) as I performed. The audience member would only access this information at the performance. Thus re-establishing a live venue experience with added value. I keen on the idea of near-field content which limited and not ubiquitous. I have a plan for a museum tree that beams out archives..but that literally another story…

Finally and still in early stages of development I have friends who work with severe autism and it may be possible to develop child-friendly suits that enable communication. Music and rhythm can be the keys to unlocking those previously ‘blocked’ neural spaces. If I can get funding then that a route I keen to go down.

PhD funding is extremely competitive at present and I still hopeful. If I fail ( update July 2016..I did fail but only because I not keen on being a corporate intern which sad ). Then I may look at alternative ways of creating these projects such as Near Now at Broadway or ACE funding or even Crowdsourcing. Who knows.

But that is where I be at right now.

Here some artist’s suits for information….and of course Elvis Costello wrote a song called ‘Suit of Lights’

 

ANAMNESIA: Art, Technology and Modernism in the Thames Valley 1850-1950

June 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Back to where I started..literally…..first thought best thought?

amanesia

This explains where my ‘art research’ has gone…
It not classic ‘design’ art research any more it lies somewhere along the Iain Sinclair/W.G.Sebald/Patrick Keiller line. i.e. A travelogue based exploration of the historic impact of technology on a specific geographical region. I am now working exclusively on this as my ‘written’ output alongside my poetry.

I no longer consider myself to be exclusively in the fine art ‘drawing research’ area.

I am now seeking full or part-funding or a receptive institution to help develop this project.

And here my first mention of ANAMNESIA in 2010:

 

Revisiting ‘Deep Mapping’

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This post was originally posted on this blog in 2011!

Interesting how much of it now relevant again…

The following passage was taken from
“DEEP MAPPING:” A brief Introduction by Iain Biggs.
Mapping Spectral Traces

The concerns of deep mapping in its visual and performing arts manifestations are best indicated by Clifford McLucas text There are ten things that I can say about these deep maps. For McLucas deep maps appear in the interaction between three basic elements: graphic or freestanding visual work; a time-based component film, video, performance, or music; and a database or archival system that remains open and unfinished. He sees the process of deep mapping as challenging our presupposition that knowledge is the specialist domain of professional experts and wants it to bring together “the amateur and the professional, the artist and the scientist, the official and the unofficial, the national and the local.McLucas also argues that deep maps should be a politicized, passionate, and partisan evocation of a site, involving negotiation and contestation over who and what is represented and how.Deep mappings should give rise to debate about the documentation and portrayal of people and places and be unstable, fragile, and temporaryconversations not statements. Mapping Spectral Traces 2010.

Clifford McLucas

http://cliffordmclucas.info/

 

 

my post from 2010

I am intending to rewrite my initial proposal in light of research I have done.

From a starting point of a ‘portfolio’ piece which showcased work using GPS and some form of app/website I have moved to a much more general approach drawing on the whole Deep Mapping idea. Indeed the closest fit to my initial aspirations of a ‘regional focus’ has been my recent discovery of the whole ‘deep mapping’ area.

I had already seen Patrick Keiller’s work and especially Robinson in Ruins which came out recently chimed with my own concerns. This has linked with the Pearson and McLucas definitions of Deep Mapping as a framework for proceeding. Indeed so much so that I am going to rewrite my initial proposal to acomodate this shift in focus. Although keen on social interaction and the kind of idea expounded in the ‘Context Providers’ book I am putting this on back burner until after M.A. completed and may form part of a larger package to take to Didcot Cornerstone Gallery (at present a gallery exposition is no longer a focus).

Deep Mapping is a complex idea and has complex outputs so the rest of this RPT M.A. is very much concerned with fitting the range of inputs into a manageable ‘online’ outcome as well as producing a range of discipline specific outcomes. I am no longer as focused on a specific app although it may still be produced.

I am also looking at merging google maps and a traditional website (which can be accessed through responsive or purposefully ‘mobilised’ websites).

To me the technology is simply a frame or container for the subject matter which is my main interest. Contemporary developments in hand held devices affords greater on location interaction but this does not now seem as important to me as providing a coherent interface for my wide ranging concerns.

It is a tall order to bring together my work in disparate fields and I am aware that there will be problems and that indeed the whole project may fall over through to many inputs but that is the most interesting aspect of this kind of work for me and also something I can honestly reflect upon as being genuine research in a fairly new area.

As Cliff McLucas stated

  • “To investigate ways of dealing with landscape – in what the concept has come to stand for, in its permutations in various media (painting, photography, poetry, performance … ), in its disciplinary field of landscape studies (incorporating historical and cultural geography, art history, archaeology), in its association with contemporary notions of place and identity, in its implied cultural politics”

 

and I also influenced by Mike Pearson’s definition

  • ” deep mapping……..takes region as its optic, acknowledging the effective ties between people and place”.

To me this social, political and people-centered focus is at the heart of my enquiry.

Leverhulme bid- Proposal

December 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Here is the sadly failed application proposal but plenty of pointers to a future PhD proposal to work with…especially in regard to the mountain of Victorian art and railway literature in my studio….
[scribd id=249245353 key=key-emjYnJ5H6G6eFq1lsuLr mode=scroll]

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