It is the second day of the second week of my residency. I have been online a lot today organising various different workshops and projects to be undertaken over the next few weeks. To my delight I have the full support of the Wilfred Owen Story:
http://www.wilfredowenstory.com/
I will be working with them while I am here in New Ferry. We will be hopefully organising some performance work over the next few weeks. I have been looking to Emma Smith’s works for some pointers as to how she handles collaborative performance based work:
http://www.emma-smith.com
What I like about her work is that it is eloquent in its realisation yet practical and achievable in concept. She uses systems, like me, to remove herself from the work and to involve others.
I am slowly building up a collection of Haikus. I will also get more material from Sunday’s workshop. I hope to use this to make an extended dialogue, breaking up and reorganising words to make something different. I am also going to combine this on video. There is some awareness to the landscape throughout this project that interests me. It is not grounded just in the butterfly park but also in Port Sunlight and the area of Wales I recently visited. Some way we relate to the environment. It is not just ecology, it is also communal, social. Tthis provides a oretext to my work at the moment.
#4
It is Easter Bank holiday and I am in the space using the internet and getting my photos taken over last week organised.
After thursday I decided to have a break and went to visit my great aunt over a couple of days. She lives with her husband in Wales in the depths of the glyn valley. Life is very different from London and north Surrey, very different from New Ferry. Their house is built on great rocks, the windows are small to keep the heat in, they use coal to heat the one of their ovens and they have a cast iron wood burning fireplace in the lounge. Outside of the house is a river which in English translates as ‘raging bull’ and their garden keeps several broods of ducks and chickens.
While here I took a series of photos on slide film which I hope to develop from a walk around the local area. There is no large community of people there as such and the presence of nature is much more keenly felt. I walked up a country path round the corner of ‘house on the rock’ and the trees are so thick they block out the light. Making my way up I wondered who dug out these paths and for what purpose. The greatest sight for me was one of these massive trees had fallen down but was being held horizontal by the many trees standing.
Coming back on the train to Rock Ferry a girl got on dressed head to toe in Adidas: red and orange clothes, blue cap and trainers with long straight blonde hair. It took about an hour’s travelling to go from Welsh valley to Wirral suburb and this creates such a difference in dress, lifestyle, language and leisure.
It’s day four and I’m coming to the end of the first week of the residency. The sun is out today. We’ve had more people coming in and for the first time a volunteer has come by to help promote the space and the park, leaving me some time to get to grips with the wealth of material on the different types of butterfly species.
I also have been given a key to the park and a personal tour with Carol, her kids and volunteer Jean-Pierre who takes photographs of the park. There are little in the way of butterlflies there as of yet but still there are a lot of other signs of life coming through. The soil is laced with lime, tiny stones and pieces of glass here and there. Cats have year round free access.
Otherwise workshops are looking good with a local film maker on board to help out with shooting and editing. Just waiting for group confirmation! A lot of work for me appears to be organisation together with a frantic period of production near the end. I think it will be the case with this residency.
I am also helping to put together a show for my london studio Hatch Space. It is a strong show with a lot of good work being made for the first time. I will put on small snippets of info as I get them confirmed but I hope that the artists will get some well deserved acclaim for their efforts!
In the meantime I am looking forward to making new systems, poems and living a partial hermit-like existance in the Butterfly Park.
Day #3
It’s day 3 of the residency and the space is pretty quite apart from the odd visitor. Over the past few days I have been located at the front of the space playing what seems to be my profession – front of house. While doing this I have been organising my workshops and working on getting people in to use the space and use the New Ferry Butterfly Park.
The workshops are still in the air a bit. We have no dates, no confirmed groups and no confirmed equipment as of yet, but I guess things are going to take shape very quickly. Monday was a day of lists, Teusday was a day of meetings and today I have been talking to a very friendly and enthusiastic local poet for a good hour while adding another sign to the window in a vain attempt to push the urgency of come-in-and-use-this. Problem is people come into the high street to buy things, not to hang out. And the weather has been quite abysmal too.
Yesterday we met the very kind people from The Wifred Owen Story. This is a museum in Birkenhead set up to commemorate and preserve the life and work of the said local Great War poet. We talked about setting up poetry group locally. And using the Butterfly Park as a place to read and perform. This idea came about after a talk at Metal on Monday, I came away with two very useful words:
START SOMETHING
Well, I’ll try. People are already paying more attention to the space, it will just take time for people to sum up some courage and cross the threshold. In the meantime I am trying to get groups in to bypass this.
Ideas thrown around so far include a performance of Bullets and Daffodils in different places in New Ferry, a poetry group and a talk in the care hostel where I am currently residing. Oh and we talked about making ceramic sculptures! I hope some of these bare fruit but I need people to get together, I need collaborators.
Tomorrow will be the start of my first residency!
Hailing from just outside London and residing in Hatch Space, I am curious about the amount of space and empty buildings as my Megabus rolled off the motorway and into Liverpool. Coming from the South where houses are seldom left abandoned but collected by private investors looking to improve their property portfolios, it comes as a bit of surprise to see that amount of space left empty.
New Ferry itself is a small place, the High Street is very small and mostly vacant now. The New Ferry Butterfly Park COMMA space is in this collection of buildings. Most interestingly the shop shows signs of being a house previously, with a bath included in the bathroom. It is a large space, newly carpeted (sigh) and quite a daunting space to fill.
Also nearby is a load of interesting places to visit including Port Sunlight – idealistic Victorian urban planning and The Wilfred Owen Story – dedicated to the life of one of my favourite poets. I hope to get these guys involved with the Butterfly Park while I’m here. Considering the short amount of time in this space, I think that I could make a good work of facilitating different local community groups and working with them. I’m thinking participation, connections and engagement as opposed to a solitary approach to making work.
So today I have been walking around Liverpool scouting out the galleries and interesting spots in as its been my first time in this part of England. I went to shows at Bluecoat (great) FACT (slightly broken) and Arena studios ( massive old tv!). Look forward to more exploring while I’m in the area and making work of course!
But I hope my refurb netbook holds out – the wifi keeps dying, quite alarming! It seems that more and more of my work as an artist is dependent on online facilities and networking, not to mention media editing software!
