corridor arts dot org dot uk

try try again. i can’t remember who first told me that. why is this the best opening for a blog post that i can think of right now? well it’s connected with our belper art trail project. having worked my socks off over the summer to produce the 2012 trail, i decided that if i am indeed to do another, it needs to be fun and enjoyable.

so from the outset with the 2013 trail project, i’m intending to enjoy and have some fun with the project.

so first hurdle: the artist call out. what was the biggest headache with the last one ? having to write all the words for it. so learnig from that, the call out is me speaking about the idea.

already we’ve got the call out flowing and i’m still happy and enjoying it. it’s all good.

will i ever become comfortable with airing my thoughts in the public sphere?

i ask this of myself a few days into the belper art trail. a point in time in which i am feeling the affects of installing the work into the non traditional art venues in belper.

i also ask this at a time when i feel what i’ve done is being ignored. i have no evidence of this and i am aware that my feeling comes from being outside what is considered an art world.

our venture has been to do something of value with visual art to be the bread to the food festival sandwich filling.

after attempting a pilot version in 2011 we realised that adopting something to respond to would make the art trail a sustainable and interesting option. we picked the centenary of the town’s east mill as a basis of the theme this year. the call out asked the artist to submit a work that was based on recontextulisaed work from their practice timeline. i was interested in investigating contemporary history.

as the planning evolved we got several members of the county council cultural service involved, the north mill to dsiplay works and give a discount to trail followers. the library let us help celebrate their 75th anniversary by displaying a work made by the drop inn centre and we’ve hung all the submissions to the murmation project in the oxfam shop in king street. the murmation project includes work by david riley and alex pearl. and we have 7 other venues showing work by 9 other artists.

i’m proud of what we’ve done.

we’re also making a well dressing as a participatory activity and the outcome will be on disply during the second week of the trail, part of the town’s well dressing festival.

and you know what? i think we’ve not shouted enough about what we’ve done.

i’m aware that i am disabled towards a formal language with an art sphere and i’m aware that my writing style has been described as chatty.

i’m also aware that we set out to see if it is possible with willing contributors to mount an exhibition of works around a route of premises in a town.

i will share that i understand why funding is important for a project that one puts ones heart into. it’s important for the reason that one has something to show for the effort. i can understand why there is an outcry about lack of funding, because so few people appreciate effort put into by single minded individuals.

it’s an issue of ownership of a sphere of art and the possibility of there being more than one sphere and each sphere being supportive of the other. it’s about a human spirit of praise for something that isn’t one’s immediate interest.

it’s about the difference between open and closed.

i’m aware today i am feeling mentally drained by the process.

i am however also aware that my effort as part of a group has connected to hundreds of people.

so in answer to my opening question, probably not as i’m always so wiped out upon completing something that my writing is tainted by tiredness and if i wait until i’m not tired, my objectivity has wained.

i conclude i’m not well suited to blogging and as such will continue to do so and accept that that is the way it is.

we’ve been keeping a blog, documenting the development of the 2012 belper art trail. in the absence of a marketing budget we decided that over time we could use social media to promote the trail by doing things in the months leading up to the trail. not sure how well it’s done, however we’ve had fun doing things.

lately in the town we’ve been chatting to individuals who seemed inspired to do things, culturally. it’s really annoyed me that they want to meet with us, yet they’ve spent no time researching what it is we’ve been doing. so when they launch into their big ideas, i point out what we’re doing and invite them to pilot their idea with the next trail.

point is, it takes a lot of effort to organise something. it takes a lot of effort to attend to the details.

in a post to be published at 7:30 tonight, i explore this in a metaphorical kind of way.

title:puddling: metaphor or process.

the post reads:

so the sheet says “collect clay, put into water and a week later puddle it and put it back in the bags”.

wow that sounds easy.

having got past the weight of the dry clay and found enough containers, the fun messy bit was adding the water. enough to cover the clay and leave for a week. the top tip passed on was to add salt to the water and some how magically the clay becomes all soft again.

so far so good. easy peasy.

time past.

the water was the same level.

the clay had been prodded as it was difficult not to return to the containers during the week and not prod the clay, coz it needed prodding.

so the big puddling session arrives.

the directions were to puddle until the clay became like butter. now at this point the difficulties began. what do these words means? they mean whatever they meant at the time of doing the work. my first bucket, the clay was sticky and didn’t release from the container very easily. add water and mash again. slips out of the bucket into the bag. if only there was someone around who’d experienced the final part of the process, someone to talk to, someone to advise as they had been through the complete process already.

in the absence of knowledge, working on what is seen and experienced becomes the process.

the clay requires a lot of work. it’s worth it as at the end there’s a pile of bags with wet clay inside. ignoring the impact on contemporary life, this traditional process is hands on, manual and requires a lot of effort. that effort is worth it as there is a bigger goal being headed to, even though that goal seems as yet to be defined, well other than making a pretty picture hosted in clay. there was me getting carried away in metaphor.

so yes, the puddling of the clay is a little messy, but lets face it, anything worth doing that’s fun gets a little messy at some point.

i made myself a cup of tea and felt it was time to add a post to this blog. we’ve published the artist call out for the art trail today and i’m experiencing some interesting emotions as a result.

when we attempted the trail last year we invited those who we knew to take part. we were finding our feet and testing out how it was to mount an exhibiton of work in retail outlets centric to a food festival. we were critisised for not publicising it very well, which i took as a compliment, as the work displayed was of such a high standard. we had deliberately not done much publisicing of the event as frankly i wanted to find out if it was possible to do, which obviousy it is, however i wanted the space to find out for myself.

now a year on and we’re exploring working with an idea for artists to respond to this year. it was quite difficult to find an idea to base the call out on. in the end it became quite simple. in belper there is the east mill. it’s a 100 years old this year. historically it’s increbilbly important. contemporarily it’s quite awkward as there’s a bit of a dilema about how the building gets used. i found this dilema quite interesting. in conversations with christine, we explored the mill dilema and the notion of contemporary history.

the outcome of the discussions and thinking and talking and eating cake and drinking coffee is a working title or re/relevence. we’ve arrived at a call out where we invite the artist to go back into their legacy of works and either remake or simply recontextulaise a work for exhibition in the trail. for me it’s an opportunity for an artist to explore a subject that might otherwise be too big to think about.

in the process of arriving at the words i’ve been party to conversations in which suggestion have been made that the style of the words is “chatty” and this will not attract artists who are on a national footing. once again my research has taken me to a point where the formal word is king. i considered this king ship for a while and got upset as it presented itself to me in a manner that implied my own practice wouldn;t get very far. i drank more coffee, spoke about it and got beyond it.

the trail is a research journey for me and those involved in it’s creation. we’ve deliberately not applied for funding, so that we can find out for ourselves what the trail is. it would be lovely to think that once we’ve done our research we can acheive some funding that helps to support our efforts.

one other thing i currently feel in touch with is the difference in how this trail has a certain mental manifestation that is different to the work i am making in my own practice. by this i mean that i am aware that my own work will be viewed and interpreted by the person viewing the work and i am happy about that. with the trail, it’s a little more less open to interpretation, we’re going to exhibit works in retail outlets around the time of the food festival and this year we’re exploring contemporary history, recontextualisation and something else that probably will come to me once i’ve had more time to reflect.

http://www.corridor-arts.org.uk/abcd/call-outs/

we did the art trail. legacy here:

http://belperarttrail2011.blogspot.com/

and we enjoyed it, and we said we’d have another go in 2012. we keep a blog of what we’re doing:

http://belperarttrail2012.blogspot.com/

and we’re running a fun participatory activity we call the murmation project as a promotinal tool for the art trail and we’re upfront about that.

details of the project and how to participate can be found here:

http://www.corridor-arts.org.uk/abcd/belperarttrai…

there’s a link at the bottom of the page to the mailout.co blog antry about the project.