Narratives and Spaces

I wanted to try different methods of reworking the ‘lost’ cine frames, and my tutor pointed out that tracing paper might be a good surface, as it is translucent in a similar way to celluloid and you can paint or pastel on to it. She is right – but I find it hard to believe it can hold paint or pastel well when it seems so thin and brittle. Only one way to find out.

I tape sheets of a4 tracing paper to a board. I want to make small versions of the cine frames, and I think it will be good to see how different materials sit on the paper while I’m working. I know I’m likely to scuff images as I work round the board, but having a kind of system seems a good way to force myself to concentrate and stick with this process of making and comparing, while I continue to think about where this project is going.

So I start in soft pastel again. I’m using very soft Unison pastels, which are very dry and crumbly on this brittle paper. The colours might be slightly different, as I left the box I used (for the last big pastel version in my previous post) in my studio space at Uni, and I’m working at home. Smudging them is a clumsy business. I’m hoping that I can get more of the contrast between heavy black pigment, and the translucence of the melted bubbles of celluloid.

I used a good dose of hairspray to try and fix the pastel. I also took off some areas with cotton buds to try and give more transparency where the bubbles are. Here’s a bigger image:

When it’s really dry I’ll peel it off to see whether this has worked. Then I will make the same image using other mediums on the tracing paper. I’m planning watercolour, water-soluble ink blocks, oil pastel. I’m also considering other surfaces to work on.

I’m feeling more focused now. The idea of trying to represent multilayered narratives or lost narratives visually has felt slippery, as if I’m trying to make concrete something that only has magic because it is etherial. But being methodical doesn’t feel wrong. Maybe this is because a methodical process echoes the repetition of the frames that happens when these cine films are shown.

I am working on the cine films again. I thought I would look at images that repeat signifying the narrator/film maker. I made screen shots of the animals and birds that one particular film maker habitually filmed. These would make good wistful paintings, rather like the children paddling scene that heads up this blog.

While I was reviewing the cine films and thinking about the images and perceptions they involved, I also considered the lost images and narratives recorded in the damaged frames, so I took screenshots of a selections of these too.

These damaged frames say more about the nature of the cine film narrative experience than the animals and birds above. I decide to see how I can reflect this by working on these images in other ways. First: engines, burned image with soft pastels:

I enjoyed making this work, but the texture does nothing to communicate any lost narrative. I decide to try a quick version in watercolour:

I think this does more to convey the un-fixed quality of the lost narrative that I’m after. It doesn’t look much like the original frame screenshot, though. Need to try more methods.

I had been very excited and positive about the opportunity to involve multiple people’s perspectives in my work with Moyse’s Hall, and the museum carefully collected used coffee tokens. These proved my work had enticed new visitors to the Museum to see my work and the Museum’s other exhibits, and that my work and the Widow’s Coffee House story had been noticed by a new public. While the coffee pot was installed, I saw many visitors reading its label before posing for photos with it. It was impossible to know how many coffee shops actually gave out tokens to visitors, as the collaboration lasted 7 days, and the shops kept no records.

If I had the chance to re-run the collaboration, I would have been braver and used more publicity. With hindsight, the space available for me to use in the Museum was not large enough for the pieces I made, while the space available in the Great Churchyard was much bigger and visible to many visitors. I should have put more work there.

The grassy area available for my work has bodies buried close beneath its surface. I was forbidden to fix anything to the ground. Anything I put there had to be large and heavy enough to stay put! This meant, with constraints of time and resources I had only made one piece for it, but also had an unexpected outcome for the work.

After the coffee pot had been in place for a couple of days, it vanished. I hunted high and low, but could not find it in the Abbey Gardens, so I reported it lost to the police station nearby (the police said they had been admiring it!) The same day it was found, by the Anglia In Bloom judging party, twisted and scuffed, but intact. Because of the few days left for the installation, I mended it fast, and put it back in place. I could not get hold of the special paint I’d used, or dry plaster fast enough, so silver wire had to do.

I also made a hasty video of it.

This episode really enriched these pieces of work. The Coffee Pot was the victim of some modern day rookery! Its site is still perceived in different ways, like the Widow’s Coffee Shop, and the Rookes women themselves. It is one of the town’s best residential addresses and a site of historical importance for the establishment, and the highlight location for the town’s annual entry to Anglia in Bloom (yes, the Abbey Gardens still won its Anglia In Bloom 2014 Gold award!)

But the site is also a thoroughfare. It is where drunken partygoers take a short cut to a major housing estate, and fool around disreputably. It is also a short cut to the town’s magistrates court and police station, used by criminals awaiting sentence, or answering bail, as well as their victims on their way to give evidence.

Like the women who were tarnished by their association with a coffee house, the installation I made to celebrate them was affected by being on the site of the coffee house today. So I feel it did tap into the layers of narrative I hoped to reach.

The surname, Rookes, of the women who ran The Widow’s Coffee House was an irresistible pun. Rooks are notoriously clever gregarious birds. Rookery isn’t just where rooks nest, it can also mean deception or trickery. Bird is a derogatory word used for a woman that objectifies her as a simple sexual thing. As I went through what documentary evidence survived about The Widow’s Coffee House, it became clear that these women had been successful, well-off, and were cherished by respectable friends. Because they were successful women operating in a business world dominated by men, they inevitably became associated with C18 London coffee house scandals about women who didn’t just work in coffee houses, but were also thieves and prostitutes.

I wanted to make work that included rooks, images of the Rookes women, and a silver coffee pot, which the last of the women had owned and left in her will. The coffee pot was a high value high status object that seemed to me an ideal symbol of their success and respectability.

I also needed to create a free voucher that visitors could use at the museum instead of paying an entrance fee. At the same time, another reason I thought this story would have other layers was that Bury today is celebrated as an attractive town because of its thriving ‘cafe culture’. Coffee shops and the women who work in them today epitomise respectable success. I had recently seen Tania Kovats’ exhibition Oceans at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh. Although her subject matter, oceans and water, had nothing to do with coffee houses, she had collaborated in a way that seemed to me perfect for representing many layers of perception. She had collected samples from seas and oceans worldwide by inviting members of the public via social media to participate.

I made a Coffee Token that visitors could find and collect from coffee shops in Bury to use as admission vouchers. It incorporated my own version of a C18 coffee token, which was an illegal coin created by coffee houses in those times when wars had led to a crippling cash shortage. Rather like the financial crisis in Britain since 2008. I had approached Bury’s coffee shops, and many agreed to offer my tokens as well as collecting used foil coffee bags for me to use in my work. Here is my token:

I used the collected coffee bags to make three rooks for an installation in the museum. They were to represent a worthy Rooke, a business Rooke, and a tarty Rooke. I created a nest for them filled with coffee paraphernalia from as wide a timescale as I could gather.

I also created two ‘portraits’ of Widow Rookes’ daughters, painted in acrylic on broken coffee cups, pots and saucers glued to marine ply. I wanted them to look disrupted or complete depending where the viewer was. I’d been inspired by the plate paintings of Julian Schnabel, but couldn’t use his scale or oil paints because there wasn’t room in the alcove the Museum was letting me use, and no time for oil to dry.

Finally I made a giant ‘silver’ Coffee Pot and Stand as close in style to one the Museum agreed might have been the one left by Letitia Rookes in her will. I installed this as close to the site of The Widow’s Coffee House as I was allowed. This gave me an excuse to contrast the pot with the bright green summer grass of the graveyard. I fixed an information card to the installation directing viewers to the town’s coffee shops and my coffee tokens, so they could easily find the pieces in the Museum itself.