the heart of the city

Almost a month since I last wrote! I simply have had no time. I don’t understand where it goes.

I want to do more research before I start making the garments for my new project so I spent a bit of time looking for collections of working people’s garments, but by a strange fluke – none of them are taking research visits. Platt Hall is reopening in March after a major restoration, Gawthorpe Hall is redoing it’s exhibits and not taking visits until Feb. The Museum of London has no spaces until April, and the Ripon Workhouse museum is reopening at Easter. June Hill has put me onto a project in Chichester so I will contact them next week.

So it looks like I’m not going to be able to get on with this work until the spring. In the meantime I’ve rejoined Hotbed Press, a fantastic resource in Salford, and will concentrate on making prints of the buildings that housed the social projects of the Methodist Central Buildings. I haven’t decided how to do them, but probably collograph or etching.

I’ve also made another installation in the Cafe. I’ve been fascinated by the Women’s Hostel that opened in 1890, so with the help of the Nexus team, have built a cubicle in the cafe, 4 foot by six foot, the size of the cubicles in the hostel, and put in a bed and a little cupboard and am asking people to sit in the cubicle and think about what belongings they would want to keep if this was their only personal space.

I’d really like to collect peoples ideas for use in another exhibition, but no-one had written anything in the first 48 hours, so i don’t know whether they will. I think instead of being in the studio next week, I will have to sit in the cafe and talk to people about the project and encourage them to take part.

Yesterday I had a wonderful photographer called Zara Harrison in to take images of my sheet installation and the cubicle installation. I’m so relieved to get this done. I have a couple of applications to do over Christmas, and need good photos. I’m picking up the images on Tuesday so will put some on the blog.

One of the lovely things about doing the photo’s was being around the sheet installation and seeing what an impression it makes on people. About half the people walking past look in at it, and lots of those who come into the cafe stop and look at it and talk about it. It was very encouraging.

I hope I’ll get time to put a few of the new photos in a presentation I’m doing about my work on Tuesday night. It is for the Creative Practice part time degree at MMU. It is a great opportunity and I’m looking forward to it.

The exhibition opened last Thursday and it was a great party, loads of people and loads of chat. But do people ever actually look at the work at openings??

Also, this exhibition was about getting the work seen in order to generate new opportunities for all of us, and though the opening was very busy, it was young cafe scene rather than art scene people who came, and that doesn’t get us any further forward. Maybe that was a vain hope from the start. And maybe I am wrong. Maybe those young kids are where it is at in the Manchester art community. But if so, I have probably missed my moment, having celebrated my 46th birthday on Saturday!

But the exhibition looks amazing. I will get some photos to put on the blog, but I didn’t have time on Thursday and haven’t been in since. And I need to find a photographer to record my installation, which I am really pleased with. It does look fantastic!

Of course I haven’t had any time to work on my new project and today will be spent tidying up, and then the rest of the week I have to work in my paid job to make up the time from last week, and so another week goes by!

I have been thinking that I need to do more preparation and not rush into making. I thought i would use sheets to make the garments, but I’m not sure that the fabric is right, so probably need to source stuff from an antique textiles fair. And I looked in the MMU library for garment pattern books, but didn’t find anything appropriate, so I have been making my own, but I wonder if I should do some more research before I give up, because authentic patterns would be better.

Ok, back to the studio…

Things have really moved on since I last wrote. I very quickly determined what I am going to do while I’m here. Surprisingly quickly! It is weird how I can go from – eek! no ideas, can’t remember how I get ideas, I will never have another idea in my creative life – and then the next thing is that I have an idea! It never fails to amaze me!

So there are a couple of projects I want to do. I was inspired by these little exercise books from the archive of girls rescue home. One contained inventory’s of the belongings of the girls when they arrived, mostly just the clothes they wore. Another book listed the names of the 105 girls who went through the home between 1893 – 1900 and included their ages, the date they arrived and left, where they went on to – mostly into service, and a couple of sentences describing them. Some of the comments were positive, but most seemed very harsh, things like ‘dishonest and untrustworthy’, ‘lazy and needs careful watching’.

I realised that I didn’t understand much about the clothing of the time especially the petticoats and pinafores. What went under and what went over? So I spent some time researching what working class people wore at that time – not much written about the subject of course, but I got some images of underwear and of working class women and girls.

I’ve decided that I will make 105 garments, one for each of the girls, and embroider their description on their garment. My first attempt was a pair of drawers – which I made out of one of my cotton bed sheets. I had to make up my own pattern based on a picture from a book. It worked ok, but it made me realise that I really want to sew the garments by hand, which is going to make it a very long project! I’ve unpicked a linen surplice that I got from the antique textile fair last year, and started hand stitching an apron from it.

The other thing I want to do is a project based on the cubicles where the women slept in the women’s refuge. They were 4 foot by 6 foot according to the plan of the building that I found in the archives. I constructed a cubicle in my studio to see what it feels like to have that amount of private space and it really is cramped. There is space for a narrow bed and room to walk alongside, and they shared half a window with the cubicle next door.

I want to build one in the cafe and get people to sit in it and think about what possessions they would have to get rid of if they only had that amount of space.

Everything is on hold now until the exhibition which opens next Thursday (12th). It is going well, except the leaflets say it opens on Friday!

Only three weeks into the residency and already behind with my blog! During week 2, I spent my time in the Local Studies Unit looking at archive documents, including the fascinating ‘Girls Clothes Book’ from the girls rescue home. It was an inventory of what the girls brought with them when they arrived and sometimes what they left with. I am quite suspicious when church writes about it’s own social projects. They are all made to sound wonderful, but what were they like for the people who used them? So it was reassuring that there seemed to be at least a material benefit to living in the girls rescue home. Lily Hargreaves arrived in 1914 ‘very poorly clad. Came as she stood. An old black hat. NO coat.’ She also had a frock, a pinafore, 2 petticoats, boots, stockings, a chemise and knickers. When she left in 1916 she took with her 38 items of clothing, her own bible, poetry book and satchel and a purse with 1 shilling and 4d.

I also looked at a ‘pictoral survey of the Manchester and Salford Mission’, from the early 1930’s, with addresses and photos of all the projects except the girls rescue home. It will allow me to identify the locations and see if the buildings still exist.

I began the third week feeling a bit blank. I’m finding it hard to get a momentum when I can only get to the studio two days a week, and not even consecutive days. I did some writing to get my negative thoughts out of the way and then started drawing from the photographs and doing some monoprints. It is very reassuring to get things up on the walls in the studio. It looks like a working space now.

The next day was entirely taken up with moving my bedsheets into the studio, ready to be installed in the cafe’s street-level shop window. Getting the sheets out of the storage unit was not so hard, but getting them into the studio was another thing entirely. Parking in a loading bay, we had to move 1500 sheets and 750 pillowcases, load by load, out of the van and into a disabled lift to get up the entrance stairs, then into another lift to the basement and through double doors across a foyer, manuevering round the cafe tables and customers, through two further doors, both of which involved a 90 degree turn. I borrowed a linen cage from a friendly laundrette, and managed to draft in my boyfriend, the cafe manager and the van driver to help but even so, it was 4 hours of backbreaking work.

It is a big relief to have done the move and to have them here, even though it has halved the size of my studio! I can’t wait to get them out again and install them! Plans for the exhibition are progressing well, and everyone is working hard. We open on 12th November.