18/08/11 – Consultation Taxi for Great Suffolk Street

Consultation Taxi, under the arch at Surrey Row

Consultation Taxi - side view

I responded to an call-out in placed by Ania Bas in the Artsadmin e-newsletter asking for artists interested in working in an urban context in Bankside. When I discovered that the consultation was about future developments planned for Great Suffolk Street, this was my proposal:

I have an idea that I would like to make a cardboard/found object black cab as a site for a engaging in conversation about Great Suffolk Street. I know Great Suffolk Street well and thought of the black cab because I think it’s something that draws together the length of the street. I’ve met taxi drivers who live on Great Suffolk Street and The Giggling Sausage cafe is very popular with cabbies – there are always taxis parked outside. Then about half way down the street you’ve got Capital Taxis, the taxi repair garage, and the petrol station, again popular with cabs. Then you’ve got the offices and the Tate Modern end of the street, where taxis ferry around office workers and tourists – so the taxi is part of these distinctive identities of the street.

The basic cardboard taxi would be an arrangement of chairs – or possibly we could use one of those ‘tables’ outside the White Hart – with cardboard wheels, a cardboard orange taxi light and a steering wheel. We could add more details as we go along. The taxi driver (me! and anyone else that’s up for it) would invite people to sit down as passengers and talk about where they go on Great Suffolk Street, what they see on the street and where the street is going with it’s proposed new public spaces – when and how would they use these spaces?

Ania Bas had recruited some other artists to take part in a found object/cardboard installation on the day – Khairana Dewi, Kiera Blakey and Rosamund Knight. Fortunately for me, they agreed to collaborate on my Taxi idea. It was due to take place on a pavement on Great Suffolk Street, but due to driving rain, we moved to a nearby railway bridge where Surrey Row meets Great Suffolk Street. Dewi did most of the cardboard construction and Kiera flagged down passers-by to engage in conversation, taping quotes from their conversations to on the wall. We found that people warmed to the theme of Great Suffolk Street and it’s taxis well, I pursued the conversations whilst frantically taking notes to pass on to Ania Bas/Better Bankside/Bankside Urban Forest – who were behind the consultation.

See also http://aniabas.blogspot.com/2011/09/bankside-urban-forest-creative.html

08/05/11 Scones at Elephant & Castle shopping centre

Performing 'Scones' at Studio at The Elephant

I was very pleased to perform at Elephant & Castle shopping centre, as I live locally and go there regularly. Studio at the Elephant, a temporary art studio which had opened on the second floor, was a friendly place to drop in, find out what was going on and get involved.

I set up the table and mini-oven for my performance outside the Studio to catch the eye of passers-by. A small audience gathered and there was a warm atmosphere, which was complemented by the smell of baking scones as the performance progressed.

My ‘Scones’ performance consists of baking and reminiscence and revolves around the two different recipes I have inherited from the two sides of my family – my Dad’s mother and my Mum – and how experiences and values of several generations have got mixed in with the scone recipes.

I had some trouble making myself heard over the background noise of the shopping centre but people moved forward, joining in with conversation about their own baking experiences.

24/01/08 Paper aeroplane for OMSK: A Walk Through at Stephen Lawrence Gallery

Event flyer

The paper aeroplane viewed from above

Paper aeroplane viewed from below

I created a giant paper aeroplane for the OMSK’s exhibition at The Stephen Lawrence Gallery. The exhibition was called ‘A Walk Through’ and we decided to make artworks that would be found dotted around the Greenwich University campus, not just in the gallery room.

I titled my plane ‘Nothing comes close’, the slogan of the Eurofighter Typhoon fighter plane.

The exhibition ran from 25/01/08 to 15/02/08.

26/11/07: South Bank University ‘DIY events’ lecture with Sally

Robin Deacon welcomed Sally and I to South Bank University to give our lecture to his Drama and Performance Studies students. The students responded well, evidently they enjoyed the OMSK showreel and the films we showed and they took an interest in what we had to say. Hopefully I’ll get to see some performances by students on this course over the next year or so.

09/11/07: ‘Climate of Change’ exhibition opening

Paper planes from behind

paper planes from below

The jumbled fleet

Paper planes

Paper planes, suspended by wires

Single plane

Miranda came to the opening of the Climate of Change exhibition at the space on Union Street.  To celebrate I wore a gold and red Tibetan hat that J gave me. It had nice cozy ear flaps too, which was handy as the space was pretty cold.

By the time of the exhibition, the space was absolutely crammed with art. The area I had taped out for myself on the floor when I first started working in the gallery had been gradually shrunk and shrunk, with the wall space disappearing behind a multitude of paintings and sculptures of all sizes filling the floor. I still had a good spot though, as by this time I had a fleet of paper aeroplanes suspended from the ceiling.

A month or so before I had woken up from a dream with an image of a giant paper aeroplane. The plane was huge, sharply folded, made of paper that was crisp and clean on the upper side but thickly coated with dark filthy oil from below, weighing it down and preventing it from flying. I did not remember the dream having a narrative, though it’s easy to put an interpretation of it as an environmental symbol: the polluting, oily side of a plane drags down the beauty, elegance and freedom promised by air travel. The dream came before I did the Heathrow campaigning for Greenpeace though. I woke just struck by the image, and a moment later realised that my dilemma over what to make for the upcoming OMSK exhibition was solved.

My aim from this point was to build the plane from my dream, but at the Climate of Change space I started by making smaller paper aeroplanes to experiment with different designs. From making the planes in a public place I quickly discovered that there is more to paper aeroplane design than I had realised – a lot of people, men in particular, have strong views on paper aeroplanes. Books on different paper plane styles are apparently popular gifts for boys.

I sharpened up my plane designs accordingly and started experimenting with different types of paper. Here I encountered a problem: for the paper to be flexible enough to fold, it couldn’t be very thick, but then oversized (above A4) planes had a tendency to sag in the middle (although give a bit of a run-up, they still flew pretty well). Displaying a giant paper aeroplane with crisp lines and no sagging was going to be tricky. I experimented with suspending the planes with wire in various ways, with mixed success.

The oily underside of the plane was going to be a problem too. In the years since I finished art college, I’d forgotten that you can’t just stick paint on paper and expect the paper to hold its shape.

I discovered these problems but didn’t really get to resolve them in the Climate of Change space. As the week of the exhibition opening approached I decided that I’d better set aside my plans for the giant oily plane formulate my existing flotilla of experimental planes into a display. Another artist who was using the space had given me a large reel of wire and I reckoned that the twisting wires and varied shapes and sizes of the planes made a interesting contribution to the gallery and were a good milestone on the way to my giant paper plane ambition. It could be called ‘Flights suspended’.

I was pleased by the turnout at the exhibition opening. The gallery had a party atmosphere and people seemed to find plenty of interest in the chaotic jumble of artworks on show.

10/09/08: At this point, I realise that my memories are jumbled.

Ah, alas, the metaphor is not intended. It’s just that I hadn’t realised that a) the blog would display posts in the order that they are published, not in the order in which they are saved in drafts and b) there doesn’t seem to be any way of re-ordering the order of the posts.

Never mind, you can figure it out. On with the show…

10/11/07: ‘Stop Heathrow Expansion’ campaign at Elephant & Castle

After months of meaning to getting round to doing something with my local branch of Greenpeace, I heard that they were going to be doing some sort of campaigning activity at Elephant and Castle. I had nothing on, so no excuse for ignoring yet another call to action email. It was a cold grey morning but I hauled myself down the road the Elephant and met up with R, our local area organiser, plus another volunteer – K.

Our mission was to capture mobile phone footage of people speaking against the expansion of Heathrow airport. This would be uploaded to Greenpeace’s website.

R decided to start by approaching the stall holders around Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre to get them to record their statements. To me, this felt bizarre in quite a deep way – alongside the campaigning objective, it was shaking up my relationship with people in my neighbourhood, many of whom I pass by every working day on the way to the station or the shops but never talk to. To approach them uninvited and start talking about an issue I felt strongly about would destroy my normal, comfortable anonymity.

The stall holders responded better than I expected they would. No one responded with obvious irritation or told us to take a hike, though a number of people politely declined to have anything to do with what we were doing. A few people were happy to make a campaign statement for us with very little persuasion (No Heathrow Expansion!). A number of others were up for discussing the issues with us – this was more tricky.

We had skimmed through a campaign briefing when we had first met up and I was confident that I understood and was committed to Greenpeace’s stance on the basic issue – that planes create a lot of CO2 and other climate changing pollution, and that when we desperately need to be be cutting emissions to combat climate change, a huge expansion of Heathrow (and other airports) is a very bad idea. As a previous Ealing resident, I’m also aware that the noise created by planes can be a real problem for those in the flight path. However, when people started challenging us to quote precise statistics and economic data we were left scrabbling through the leaflets and briefing notes, while facing gloating comments that we didn’t really understand the issue. It was difficult not to get riled by this.

The main arguments against what we were saying were that stopping the expansion would be bad for the economy, and that it was pointless to protest as what we were doing would make no difference.

There was something among the briefing notes about the economic impact and how the economic benefits would not outweigh the damage done by the airport expansion – I couldn’t quote the detail without digging out the notes but I was able to argue persuasively enough on this point that those conversations mostly ended with along the lines of ‘I won’t join your campaign now, but I’ll give it some thought’. (in case you’re interested, the arguments are online here – http://www.stopheathrowexpansion.com/economics).

The argument that it’s pointless to protest was something I thought would be fairly easy to combat – ‘but what if the Civil Rights movement had made that decision? What about the suffragettes? Even if we don’t win this time, in the bigger picture it’s worth making a stand’. The problem was that we then got into deeper water, with counter-arguements about ‘God’s will’ and ‘the coming apocalypse’ and ‘destiny’. At this point, my view was that we were wasting our time. R got stuck into the arguments for a while, but then we decided to change our tactics and move across the other side of Elephant & Castle roundabout to try our luck with the people queuing for the bus.

We strung up our ‘Stop Heathrow Expansion’ banner close between two trees, close to the bus stop. We then started approaching passers by and people standing about waiting for buses (the notion of actually queuing is sadly quaint). I soon realised that people were assuming that we were ‘chuggers’ and giving us a wide berth, so I started working on a brisk banter of ‘I’m here on behalf on Greenpeace but I don’t want your money, if you’ve got a moment I’ll explain about the campaign…’ – even this was only moderately convincing, as lots of chuggers also spin vaguely similar lines before asking for your direct debit details. I wished we were asking people to sign a petition instead of make a statement to be recorded by mobile phone , trying to explain something slightly complicated made it much more difficult to get people to hear us out – but a fair few did, and agreed to make a statement. A few, though not many, had heard of Greenpeace or needed little persuasion to join an environmental campaign. A fair number needed the issue explained from scratch but were then quite interested and favourable to what we were doing. Our score of videos for the phone went up into double figures, but it as cold, draining and labour-intensive work. It was good to feel that I was doing my bit to raise awareness as well as recruit people for the campaign though.

Afterwards I went home and, with a bit of a stuggle, figured out how to upload my phone videos to the Greenpeace video wall.

http://stopheathrow.org/

I can still recognise some of our recruits in there, and the ‘alt’ text says ‘Elephant and Castle’ when you roll over. The quality of our footage is disappointingly low, considering the huge effort that went in to obtaining it. After the struggle to get someone to spare a minute to make their statement, it seemed too much to say ‘wait a minute, can you say that again, I think the wind was blowing so we couldn’t hear you clearly’ or ‘I’m afraid you got cut off there, can you say something more briefly?’.

Overall I felt quite affected by the experience. I don’t know if more people round Elephant and Castle now recognise me, but I recognise more of them and know something about their views on politics and life. I also felt more connected with the issue, and had an experience to talk about which lead to conversations about the issues with friends, conversations I would otherwise have felt shy about initiating.

It also fed into my ideas about paper aeroplanes, of which more later.

13/10/07: Moved into ‘Climate of Change’ exhibition/studio space on Union Street

On the 12/10/07 I was walking home from somewhere in the evening (an OMSK meeting maybe) when I passed an office building on Union Street and saw the doors open and a party going on. It clearly wasn’t an office party as such, it looked as if the place had been taken over by squatters. I decided to go in and investigate.

I found that the building had been taken over as a ‘Climate of Change’ gallery. Apparently, the building had been due to be converted into artists studios, but the property owners had made a late decision to make it into flats instead. To make amends to the artists studio company that would have had the building, the developers had said that the artists studio people could use the place free for whatever they chose to do for a few months before the development work started.

I was told that the people who had been put in charge of the space had decided to let artists use it as they wished, free of charge, taking space on a first-come-first-served basis. I had a walk around the building – there were three floors and a basement, all open plan with bare concrete walls. A number of artists had already installed their artworks, but a good amount of space was still unused.

This was very interesting to me – very convenient. Since I started working four days a week I had been longing for a studio space where I could work on stuff, make things, make a mess and not worry about it – but I couldn’t afford a studio.

The next morning I came back with a trolley full of stuff. I was determined to grab some of that space. I wasn’t sure exactly how I was going to use it but the opportunity was far too good to miss. I laid some curtains out on a patch of space on the third floor and taped them down with gaffer tape, then scattered some vaguely interesting looking things about (I’ve got no shortage of vaguely interesting looking things). Now I had a studio space, walking distance from home. Cool!

I knew from the start that the space wasn’t secure, in any respect. The place looked like a squat and even though I was told its use was secured until at least the new year, I had a hunch it might close as abruptly as it opened. It was being run as a sort of free, unstructured collective, in theory no-one was in charge – but in my experience that’s never really true, unless some sort of democratic system is rigidly enforced, and rarely even then. In this case I was told there was no structure at all, but there was someone living there who had the keys to the place, and a few other people who were there more-or-less full time. Then there were the people from the studio, who had made the deal to use the building. They weren’t around much but clearly must have some responsibility for what was going on.

Most of the artists using the space were using it as a gallery to display finished artworks. The theme of the gallery was climate change, so there were paintings of mournful looking polar bears and quite a lot of stuff on a hippyish ‘back to nature’ tree-hugging tip, along with apocalyptic/post apocalyptic references.

I knew that the OMSK exhibition at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery on Greenwich University campus was coming up, so my main aim was to work towards that. It was around this time I had a dream which left me waking with the image of a giant paper aeroplane. I decided to work towards that.

06/10/07: OMSK ‘film theme’ at Collision, Area 10. Movie star tattoos.

For the past few years Area 10 (big warehouse art place in Peckham) has put on an event in September called ‘Collision’, in which they invite art groups to show work alongside each other and artists from Area 10. OMSK had taken part in Collision twice before.

This time we were on the film night, doing a film theme event but not showing any films (Area 10 didn’t know that). We had music from Arthur and Martha, Quartet Electronishe and Tim Goldie. I did movie star fountain pen tattoos, which means tattoos based on tattoos which films stars have either in real life, like Angelina Jolie’s or Drew Barrymore’s, or for a film, like Brad Pitt’s tats in Fight Club.

The space looked good. Area 10 is so big it’s easy to feel a bit lost in the scale of it, but they’d divided up the space with huge curtains. We managed to achieve a kind of ricketty DIY cabaret feel, with chairs and tables and flickering candlelight. I did my tattoos by the light of a flickering fuzzy broken TV – a screen of cathode ray snowstorm. I liked the effect. I expect that cathode ray snowstorm nostalgia is not far away as everyone replaces their TV’s with flatscreens.

25/08/07: DJ’d at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes

Alex ‘Beatgirl’ of Sweet But Deady offered me this gig. It was close to my birthday so I invited friends to make it a ‘birthday do’. S brought be a box of gorgeous looking donuts (they tasted pretty good too).

There were some surf rock bands programmed by Alex and Phil playing alongside the bowling lanes. The Big Lebowski was playing on a cinema screen by the entrance – all pretty cool.

As for the crowd, here were quite a lot of stag and hen parties there, plus quite a few sixties music trainspotters. An odd mix.

www.myspace.com/sweetbutdeadlyclub