Trading Station

Here’s the piece about Watermark that I mentioned a few days ago. Taken from my personal blog:
Watermark, how an idea became a piece of work.

I’m currently out in Istanbul working as part of a residency for POST Liverpool. It’s the second time I’ve been here (the last time was March 2012) and I came with a plan to re work the ‘Watermark’ piece I made. Well, today that happened.

‘Watermark, an intervention in Four directions’ took place on Barbaros park, which is a public square in Besiktas. It’s quite a transport hub with ferries, buses and Taxis galore and as a result there’s lots of people passing across the square; the sort of place that I love to work in response to.

I’ve been looking at pavements for the past 12 months and thinking of them as a canvas for my work, so when I originally found this space it was perfect to make a piece of work on. The courses of paving stones run from corner to corner of the square, and this is the predominant direction that people move across the space. As I had no permission to make work here I needed to find a way of making a drawing on the floor without leaving a mark when I was finished.

I think I was influenced by seeing lots of water traces around, pavements being cleaned, mechanical sweepers leaving a wet trail behind them, so I decided to paint water onto the floor. The basic method was trialled in March, using a small paintbrush, a Jam jar of water and a touch of bravado. At that point I only travelled in one direction, and having worked on some sketches back in my studio in St Helens I decided to make a better version of the work while I am here in Istanbul again.

I’ve had a 30cm paintbrush made (this involved me, a man in the market who makes sieves out of wood and mesh, a verbal language barrier, a diagram and some hand signals), bought a big roasting tin (not your typical souvenir) to hold the water, am probably the only person ever who’s travelled with gel filled knee pads, and arranged for a filmmaker to document the while thing.

So that brings me to today, when I made my work following the paving stones in four directions, using 20 litres of water, avoiding a world peace day celebration with international folk dancing, getting filthy feet, a bit of a suntan, and very sore knees. 9 hours after starting (only 4 of those were performance hours) I painted the final square, and now you’ll have to wait to see the film, which gets edited tomorrow…

This residency is part of TRADING STATION, a POST artists exchange. It is funded by Arts Council England and UK trade & investment. Thanks also to all my assistants today, Dilek, Dilek’s friend, Mandy and Sue.

I’ve returned to this blog after a 5 month gap, as I’ve also returned to Istanbul after a 5 month gap. I’m here for 2 weeks so thought I’d post a quick update.

Since I left Istanbul in March, POST have worked together with our artist partners in Istanbul to produce one newspaper that was distributed through Liverpool. That paper charts the beginnings of our artist exchanges and was featured in Liverpool Art Month, a series of events and exhibitions profiling what artists in the city are up to.

One of our members Cecilia Kinnear came to Istanbul as part of our exchange in July and started working with Nancy Atakan, Gulcin Aksoy and Atilkunst on a second edition of the newspaper. That newspaper has just gone to print in Istanbul yesterday, so will be released at the weekend.

Susan Meyerhoff Sharples and Amanda Oliphant arrived in Istanbul late on Monday night for their short one week residencies, so hopefully further opportunities for us all to work together will happen this week.

And I’ve re-worked my ‘Watermark’ work that I trialled here in March. I’ll post a write up about that in a separate post, as I’ve already written it for my own blog, and there’s no point in doubling the amount of work to do in a short time here. But when you do read it, I’ll just add that the aches and pains from doing that work are phenomenal, I just want to sit still for a while…..