Nothing in one’s art practice is ever really separate is it?
As a sort of detour/tangent I find myself working with Bill and Helen again. Last time the project was called Radio Public, this time Radio Public Library, and with a heritage focus on the library of Brierley Hill in all its guises across a hundred years or so of history. We look at the nearly derelict Carnegie Library and Institute, ripe for redevelopment. We also look at the “modern” 1970s building on the high street currently undergoing refurbishment as part of the programme of investment in the town. While this library is closed, the staff and a few of the most popular shelves and resources have decamped to St Michael’s church on the top of the hill. A strange building to house a library, out of the way of the usual footfall, and burdened with an extra layer of respectful hush. And we work in a room with glass walls, witnessing, but so far not participating until we know the way forward.
In the last project I did find that bits of my practice leaked in, materially, and theoretically, and methodologically… and then it was unexpected. I had thought it would sit separately. This recent iteration, finds me thinking (maybe more appropriately this time?) About words and books and stories. About half way through the session I find myself, slightly tearfully, telling my father’s story/stories. We spoke about the maps of our families’ journeys. I told of how my knowledge of my family tree was short and stubby, and that I couldn’t go back any further than my own grandparents on either side. Both of my parents were immigrants, my mother from Ireland and my father from Serbia. They had very different lives, but were brought together by circumstance, geography and love in post-war Worcestershire. In the group we talked about a sense of home and belonging. In recent times, after decades of feeling of myself as British, deeply English even… I find that the political attitude towards immigrants recently has made me feel vulnerable, and that my roots don’t go nearly deep enough to combat that feeling, even though I am “safe” here. I am white, I have a hybrid midlands accent, I only speak English, and I have a common culture with many of my peers. If I feel unsettled, how awful must those with darker skin, stranger accents, and a more recent traumatic journey feel? I am a generation removed from that, but still feel it. I wonder do my children feel any of that?
The library, as well as being a repository of stories, fulfils a social function that is difficult to quantify. There are shelves here containing books written in Romanian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian… feel at home… feel a little bit more that you belong…
As I wandered around the church yard, looking again at fallen twigs and trees that are hundreds of years old, and family graves of several generations, I think again of the roots and the rootless. This initially “separate” tangent of collaborative work has once again attached itself to me and my wider practice.
Suddenly I can start to see the drawing on the scarily large paper… something rooted, or something rootless? A disembodied twig, crunched underfoot? Or one that is still pliable, attached to its tree, in bud, leaf, flower…?
