This will be my final post on this blog – a brief post-residency account. I have made a small number of clay tiles for a sculpture, a short video and a performance during my residency. Is that a fair amount of work for a month? True, I have had to learn how to wedge clay, use Final Cut Pro when making the video and the tiles.
My role as an artist, or rather as a maker, is slightly different to those with more material ends to their practice. Over the course of the last month, together with the exhibition at Hatch Space where I am exhibiting a collaborative piece too, I found that I have spent a lot of work not on my made pieces but on interacting with people. I have shown my practice to pensioners, not artists. I have taught Brownies how to press different plants into clay tiles and make sentences using the words of local war poet Wilfred Owen. I have talked to local poets, homeless ex prisoners, volunteers, children and all the mix of different people who live in New Ferry.
Bebington Station is twenty minutes away from the cultural hub of Liverpool. Lady Lever Art Gallery is 5 minutes from the Comma project space. Yet life-long local residents have not yet visited New Ferry Butterfly Park. People do not vary from their day to day routine spatially that often. Yet if we take these projects on board and learn more about what is near to us, we could possibly come closer to resolving problems within local communities. New Ferry needs investment; there are no corners to be cut in this area. What I have tried to do in my little time here is to make work with people, connecting them so that they might use the space as a place to pool resources and to interact with something different to what the local area has to offer if only on a very brief basis.
I have not finished with New Ferry yet either: I still have to get my clay tiles fired and hung. I am hoping that I have made a solid set of tiles and that the Brownies will get to see their hard work in the park. I have put up my video on my youtube channel for people to see. Here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgsj7Zqn-aI&feature…
It is not the perfect version – I will put one up closer to that with just a few minor alterations later. Perfection was always my enemy anyway.
