“If the arts cannot reflect a diverse range of backgrounds, they simply will not represent who we are as a country.” Bob Dickinson explores the region’s embedded arts organisations…

If there’s one clear message that has emerged from the current pandemic crisis, it’s that the people protecting us, and risking their lives doing it, are as diverse and international in their backgrounds as they are committed to working together for our survival.

For the arts, I’d like to think that diversity is as important as it is for the NHS. If the arts cannot reflect a diverse range of backgrounds, ethnicities, sexualities and class backgrounds, they simply will not represent who we are as a country. It’s emphasised by Arts Council England in their belief that museums, galleries and libraries should “ensure their work draws on and reflects the full range of backgrounds and perspectives to be found in our society,” a range that should also be reflected in the staffing and leadership of those institutions.

But what about places that have never had museums or galleries – and maybe the library has closed? Or, to put it another way, with a region-wide, northwest focus: what does diversity look like in relation to the arts, outside Manchester and Liverpool?

I’ve been investigating this, focusing in particular on contemporary art, by talking to representatives from four organisations whose relationship with the people who live around them is governed by a commonly-labelled approach: they see themselves as “embedded” within their communities. By which, I mean that all of these organisations exist within, and interact with, an existing, local population, with its own social networks, and ethnic and class differences, which are together experiencing and enduring economic and cultural change. What I discovered is that this embeddedness is as varied as the locations in which those organisations are based. And that’s important, because if we are going to celebrate diversity, and make it a creative force, we have to understand its complexities.

Two of the organisations I’ve spoken to are rural – Green Close, based in the village of Melling, near Carnforth, and Grizedale Arts, based near Coniston, Cumbria. The other two, by contrast, have urban settings – these are In-Situ, based in the former mill town of Nelson, just north of Burnley, and In Certain Places, a curatorial partnership operating in and around the city of Preston.

Sue Flowers co-founded Green Close with her partner Pete Flowers, in 1996. Summarising their commitment to an embedded approach, and the hard task of making it work, she told me, “I’m used to working with people who’ve perhaps never set foot in a gallery before. We wanted to make contemporary art relevant to the communities around us, and we’ve spent the majority of the last 24 years opening that door, I think.” Grizedale Arts’ director since 2000, Adam Sutherland, started to answer similarly: “We see ourselves as part of the community. As arts organisations go, we are quite significantly embedded.” But then he added, “My proviso on that would be that with the arts, you’re never really embedded. There’s always a certain sense from the community, talking generally, that they see us as outsiders.”

In Nelson, where In-Situ’s mission-statement is “Embedding Art into Everyday Life,” Paul Hartley feels less of an outsider. “In essence it was one of the main reasons why we started the organisation,” he says, referring back to its beginnings in 2012: “Myself, Willian Titley and Kerry Morrison. Both me and William live in Pendle and it was kind of a real, active decision to make a commitment to a place that we are from and still live, and try and take a longer-term approach.”  Preston’s In Certain Places sees itself as “part of the DNA of the city.” The partnership, begun by Charles Quick in 2003, and joined soon after by Elaine Speight, is based at UCLAN, in the heart of widespread urban redevelopment, relating to which In Certain Places has introduced a series of artistic responses and interventions.

In embedding artistic work into spaces shared by all, we can think about another version of diversity. For example, Speight mentions ICP’s Expanded City Project which began in 2016, after they were invited by Preston City Council to bring in artists to “critique and contribute to” a redevelopment scheme involving 17,000 new houses on the city’s formerly-rural fringes. Here, she told me, “It is predominantly white communities. So, I guess what I’m interested in in terms of diversity is diversity of experience, the different ways people interact with places, in bodily ways, so I think gender, and issues with disability and age come into that.”

Each of the four organisations have invited an ethnically diverse range of artists to visit, work, hold workshops, and interact with local populations. But what if, as Speight mentions, the local population is not itself multi-ethnic? Addressing the Lake District’s “largely, almost exclusively white, non-diverse population” Sutherland observes that as a consequence, “Everything we do that embraces diversity has quite an impact here. We try to make the argument that diversification, diversity, is crucial to community evolution, change, and development. And then we argue of course that change is an essential part of the community, it has to always be happening. It’s not something to be feared, it’s part of how life progresses.”

This need for change was reflected too in what Sue Flowers told me about some of the challenges she experienced before founding Green Close. Recalling a visit to the local school, and a conversation with the head teacher, Flowers said: “We asked what the diversity policy was and she said ‘Well that’s not needed in this area.’ And [Pete and I] looked at her in disbelief. And then, she said, ‘Well we’ve got our little gypsy family but there’s nobody else really like that here,’ and this was 1990. I was thinking I cannot believe this is still going on. So we thought, we’re gonna do something about this, because racism comes from places of ignorance, and if these little pockets of society are ignorant, then this is its breeding ground. So we wanted to work with schools and young people to help them understand the wider world they lived in.”

But there are other kinds of change forced on rural communities, involving increasing volumes of road traffic and population growth, which have, according to Flowers, caused an “erosion of the social fabric” of Melling, and made the village into “more of a commuter space” where locals and newcomers don’t mix much. Further afield, in the South Lakes, Adam Sutherland notes how “Two hundred years of tourism [have] totally changed communities here and changed the demographic of communities,” and yet, “There’s no kind of vehicle for participation, for interaction, for exchange, and that’s one of the things we’ve also been trying to address in terms of local communities, that tourism can be viewed in a very different way, as a cultural asset.”

What Sutherland has also noticed, as a result of the government’s confusing policy announcements on lifting lockdown and travel restrictions, is “This anti-tourism thing that’s going on at the moment, almost vigilante groups, blocking car parks and all the rest of it. It allows for pent-up feeling that can’t be expressed, you can’t express a negative view about tourism, because everybody thinks they’re dependent on it, economically.” Questioning this dependency in some ways underlies Grizedale’s next ten-year programme, which Sutherland describes as being “Dedicated to, in effect, bringing together the resources of the whole valley. But also bringing together the resources of Grizedale.”

But developing and expanding artistic engagement is just as challenging in urban settings with multi-ethnic populations. The work of In-Situ, for instance, addresses large, local communities of South Asian heritage. “It’s not that they’re hard to reach,” Paul Hartley told me, “It’s about where the work can connect with them.” This began to happen after an exchange programme was arranged with a university in Lahore, Pakistan, resulting in some of the scheme’s graduates applying for residencies at In-Situ. One of these was Zoya Siddiqui. “She made her own ways into the local community, and that changed the game a little bit, really,” Hartley recalls. “She managed to reach 98 families, just literally going from door to door. She wanted to find out how the families had come to live in Brierfield, and obviously the mill was the centre of that, and the cotton industry.”

The resulting project, Geology of a Home (2015), presented at the abandoned Brierfield Mill, consisted of a live video feed of these families, seated on a settee, looking at a photo of themselves similarly seated at home. He added: “That residency really opened the door for us to start to meet more people from the community, the Asian community, because they started coming back to events. They’d built up this connection.” As a result, Brierfield Mill became the location for a subsequent project by the US artist Suzanne Lacy, The Circle and the Square, 2015-2017, which also contained important contributions from the local Pakistani community.

As all arts organisations try to recover from the current crisis, Elaine Speight is relatively optimistic about In Certain Places. “We’re in the good position of just having started a programme of work, so we’ve got the funding for it,” she says, going on to describe a project ICP have been working on with Preston artist and cyclist, Gavin Renshaw. “For the past four years he’s been looking at cycling infrastructure in Preston, particularly in relation to commuting. Even though Preston’s great for leisure cycling, it’s not very well catered for getting in and out of the city if you’re working there.”

Perhaps more of us will be exploring sustainable ways of travelling in the post-pandemic world we’re moving towards. And more of us will certainly be trying to recover, and rebuild wellbeing. Sue Flowers has recently worked in mental health research, resulting in an increasing interest in what art can offer. “There’s quite a lot of male suicides in rural communities,” she told me, “And some of the farming communities that I know think they’re not entitled to anything. They just kind of suffer quietly.” Flowers’ concluding words summarise, for me, the close bonds that embedded arts can create with all kinds of people, in all their diverse conditions. “We’ve got this lovely resource with studios that we want to share with other people. And recently I’ve been doing some one-to-one work with a woman who’s been struggling. And it’s really worked, and I just thought, I really want to do this.”

Bob Dickinson

Images, from top: In Certain Places: Keith Harrison, audience watching Conductor performance, photo courtesy Ashley Hardman; Green Close: Confluence of Rivers; ICP: Emily Speed, Model Village, photo courtesy Garry Cook; In-Situ: Zoya Siddique, Geology of a Home, 2015 Photo: Zoya Siddique, courtesy In-Situ

This article is part of the series, ‘New Critical Writing North West: Voices on Lancashire & Cumbria’: new pieces of critical writing which will review and examine issues relating to the contemporary visual arts in Lancashire and Cumbria. The series has been commissioned by Contemporary Visual Arts Network North-by-NorthWest (CVAN NbyNW), and a new feature will be profiled on The Double Negative each month until October 2020.

What might a dating agency for artists and researchers look like? Sara Jaspan on a new book that brings together different people with the same interests in art and ideas…

In his co-authored contributing chapter to Practising Place (2019), a new book published by Art Editions North, researcher, typographer and writer Paul Wilson remarks: “It’s no surprise that the words ‘community’ and ‘communication’ share a root and that their linguistic histories begin in the same place: with the Latin word ‘communis’ which translates as ‘to share’ or – when used as a verb – to make something common.” It is this egalitarian impulse that lies at the heart of the publication and the wider six-year programme of activity out of which it grew, conceived and coordinated by curator Elaine Speight from the art-led research project In Certain Places in Preston. Some of the earlier essays – on demolition, sound and urban decay, amongst other themes – have been published online here with The Double Negative, and lay the ground for the chapters in the book.

Beautifully designed by Textbook Studio at Islington Mill and with a foreword by Turner Prize winner Lubaina Himid, Practising Place consists of nine free-form experiments in collaborative writing. Each developed out of a series of conversations between paired members of two often siloed communities – academics from the field of humanities and social sciences, and artists – matched by Speight, who provided something of “a research dating agency” service, as described by one participant.

While the overarching focus of the book pivots around our relationship with place, it is inevitably shaped by the northern locality of its production, and the unexpected pockets of niche interest that each set of authors has been afforded the time and space to stumble upon and explore, thanks to the unusually non-goal orientated nature of the project.

These niches include the extensive image collection of “weird rural things” that artist Rebecca Chesney and art historian Rosemary Shirley discovered they share, and which forms the basis of Dry as a Badger and Other Rural Mythologies. Framed around an earlier piece by Chesney that parodies homeware colour sampling charts, the visual essay humorously satirises our romanticised perception of the countryside as an inherently ‘natural’ space – a myth largely “made up by people who want to sell us things” and propagated by political agenda.

Similarly, artist Jenny Steele and tourism researcher David Jarratt coalesce around the notion of ‘seasideness’ – a term developed by Jarratt to refer to the unique ‘genus loci’ of many northern coastal towns, and which perfectly captures the specific blend of salty air and bittersweet nostalgia that has gripped Steele’s work over the last few years. Meanwhile, artist Emily Speed and human geographer Duncan Light found themselves equally fascinated by the desire lines, or desire paths, that run through a city – representing traces of civic disorder and subversion in the face of urban authority (contraventions visually echoed by Speed’s textual trespasses across the body of Light’s words).

Other chapters are devoted to subjects including Stanlow Oil Refinery in Ellesmere Port, the community noticeboards of northern working-men’s clubs, and the ancient practice of ‘beating the bounds’ (marking the perimeter of a ward, parish or city “by perambulating around its extent”) which originated during the pre-Conquest period in England and still continues in some areas today. Yet, amidst the book’s appealingly broad array of narrowed subjects, overlapping themes do emerge. Most notably, perhaps; the unspoken yet apparent need to reconnect with our physical surroundings and regain a sense of ‘hereness’. To “re-sensitise ourselves to the dynamic presence of place,” in the words of Mike Collier from Art Editions North, who spoke at the book launch of Practising Place earlier in March at the Whitworth, Manchester.

This comes across strongest in artist Amelia Crouch and literary geographer David Cooper’s short-story style contribution – The Supermodernity of Center Parcs – which playfully critiques the heterotopian ‘placelessness’ of the chain holiday resort; “where all roads lead you back to where you came from” and which is pretty much the same across any of its four UK sites. Centred around a ‘Subtropical Swimming Paradise’, numerous (reassuringly familiar) global eatery brands, and a plethora of hyper-bucolic nature-inspired simulacra, Center Parcs allows visitors to effortlessly slip from one non-place to the next.

As with several of the book’s other authors, Crouch and Cooper also touch upon the disconnecting impact of the screens and mobile devices which now afford individuals the ability to “live rather oddly in an intellectual, musical or visual environment that is wholly independent of his [or her] immediate physical surroundings” (Marc Augé). Artist Victoria Lucas and sociologist Emma Fraser likewise venture into the intangibility of the digital realm in their experimental feminist text, Place Pixilation, where Lucas’s poetic interventions appear to describe the outer-body experience of virtual reality: “I fall, but don’t feel the full sensation of falling. I have complete control of gravity, I move forward and back at will. Even if I hit the ground, I can reverse the action or just stand, unscathed by my volatile movements.”

Rather than rooting our increasing separation from place solely in the present, however, artist and field recorder Magda Stawarska-Beavan and historian Dr James G Mansell take a slightly longer view. Their chapter considers the ongoing historic characterisation of everyday noise as a destructive force from which refuge must be sort; ignoring the role that the sonic ‘infraordinary’ (as described by the French writer Georges Perec) has to play in producing and connecting us to place and a sense of tactile reality. Sound can interrupt the intellectual at work, or simply the busy and fragmented mind in its attempt to focus, but, as Mansell writes: Stawarska-Beavan “shows us that to hear is to belong.”

Her contribution to the chapter relates to her own experiences of deep listening, and of recording the acoustic environment of Manchester Central Library using binaural equipment for a new artwork, Resonating Silence (2018). Following Stawarska-Beavan’s sonic journey across St. Peter’s Square, through the library entrance hall, and into the domed Reading Room, has a grounding impact even as we read about it from elsewhere.

She recounts “the voice of the Big Issue seller calling the same words like a mantra, punctuated by a tram bell […] The woosh of the doors followed by the hum of the overhead heater […] the sound of my heels muffled by the soft, grey carpet […] a pencil against paper, shuffles of a chair.” A fold-out map showing the architectural plans of the building overlaid with artist Heather Ross’s textural interpretation of Stawarska-Beavan’s recordings further highlights the importance of sound as one of the key, yet often overlooked factors in how we experience space.

The overall highlight of Practising Place is the experiment it constitutes in the more democratic art of conversation-based writing, and the range of perspectives that each of the contributors offer. As was discussed during the speeches at the launch, one of the main barriers to producing an independently-published book of this kind is the pressure placed on academics by universities (in response to government demands), to focus their publishing efforts primarily on appearing in peer-reviewed journals in order to boost their annual REF (Research Excellence Framework) score.

Such outlets rarely allow for the more meandering, open-ended, explorative approach taken in this book, which has acted as a generative force in itself. As Speight concludes in her introduction, hopefully Practising Place will inspire “more polyvocal projects by demonstrating the vast creative potential of simply having a chat.”

Sara Jaspan

Practising Place is available to buy from Cornerhouse Publications for £15 + P&P

Read the selected Practising Place essays published online by The Double Negative, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative from 2015 to the present. Additional essays will be published over the coming months

Our pick of this week’s arts, design, film and music events from around the North of England and the rest of the UK – and loads of it’s free!

Monday – Annihilation (2018) @ Netflix UK

Based on the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s best-selling Southern Reach Trilogy, Alex Garland’s new sci-fi thriller (he of Ex Machina and 28 Days Later) has the superb Natalie Portman investigating a terrifying alien presence here on earth: one which consumes (and changes) all in its wake and is growing larger.

Tuesday – KINOTEKA: Butterfly Kisses (2017) & Director Q&A 8.30pm @ ICA, London — £11/7

A good day to enjoy the 16th KINOTEKA Polish Film Festival, tonight’s screening features a live interview with one of new Polish cinema’s rising stars. Rafael Kapeliński’s award-winning first feature is a monochrome coming-of-age drama, following three teenagers as they navigate their London housing estate, peer pressure and some dark secrets to boot.

Wednesday – Wednesday Talks: Alistair Hudson 12.30-2pm @ The Whitworth, Manchester – FREE (Booking Required)

Having had to navigate criticism around his exhibition Idea Home Show earlier this year, as the director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, it will be fascinating to hear Alistair Hudson talk more about the idea of “useful art” and what it means for artists and institutions alike. Now the new director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery, expect Hudson to discuss his ideas for “projects that have real impact in people’s lives” and what “useful museums” could look like.

Thursday – In Certain Places And Making Histories Visible: New Research Base Launch 1pm @ Victoria Building, UCLAN, Preston — FREE

Our friends In Certain Places have a new home! A creative organisation researching art, culture and urban development – which have included specially commissioned writing by and about fantastic contemporary artists Rebecca Chesney and David Jacques, published on these very pages – you can find out more this afternoon about their valued work across the edgelands of Preston. They’ll be joined in their new base by the Making Histories Visible visual art research project – led by Turner Prize winner, Professor Lubaina Himid.

Talk: Rethinking Landscape 7-8.30pm @ Whitechapel Gallery, London — SOLD OUT (Waiting List Opens 11am On Day Of Event)

Speaking of edgelands, how do contemporary artists challenge representations of the rural? The aforementioned artist Rebecca Chesney is joined tonight by art historian Rosemary Shirley, who wrote about her work for us in 2015, courtesy of In Certain Places. Expect the pair to discuss how artists think about remote places and spaces beyond an idea of the sublime.

Friday – Noor Afshan Mirza & Brad Butler: Film Programme Artist Q&A 6.20pm @ HOME Manchester — £9/7/5

Screening three of their short films tonight – Deep State (2012, 44mins), Everything for Everyone and Nothing for Us (2014, 9mins), and Hold your Ground (2012, 8mins) – and delivering an in convo event with HOME’s senior producer Bren O’Callaghan, expect artists Noor Afshan Mirza and Brad Butler to talk about their fascinating work and references to dystopian fiction, real political violence and protest.

PICK OF THE WEEK: Saturday – Exhibition Opening: On Paper: Arts Council Collection Touring 10am-5pm @ Gallery Oldham — FREE

If you love drawing, print and collage, this one’s for you… Some of the finest British artists of the 20^th century are showcased today in an exciting new touring show, selected from the Arts Council Collection. Expect John Stezaker’s photo-collage portraits, Karla Black’s sugar paper and hair gel sculptures, Brian Griffiths’ corrugated cardboard computer, destroyed works by Cornelia Parker, and many more. See it here until 13 May before it goes to Inverness, Wrexham, Swansea, Bath, and Honiton.

Room To Breathe: Four Walks In Four Seasons 9.30am-4pm @ Yorkshire Sculpture Park — £38/Four Walks £114

Fancy a bit of fresh air? YSP’s new initiative promotes using the open air as a catalyst for thinking, and focusing on things that matter to you. Get your comfy shoes on and join group analyst Chris Powell and GP Andrew Wilson for the first in a series of four days of walking and talking amongst some fantastic outdoor sculpture – starting with a visit to James Turrell’s Deer Shelter Skyspace, and ending with tea, coffee, and cake.

Sunday – Vintage Sunday Studio Ghibli Season: Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) 6pm @ FACT Liverpool — £12.20/11.20/10.20/9.20/7.70

This Studio Ghibli classic won four awards upon its release, including Best Japanese Film Director for
Hayao Miyazaki. An adaptation of Eiko Kadono’s 1985 novel of the same name, it’s a charming animated fantasy about 13 year old trainee witch Kiki, who runs a delivery service via broomstick – helped by her talking cat, Jiji.

Laura Robertson, Editor

Images, from top: Annihilation (2018) Netflix, still. Rebecca Chesney, Death by Denim (2015). Noor Afshan Mirza & Brad Butler: The Scar (2018). Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989), still

Start listening again: Dr James G. Mansell investigates the “deeply personal” sonic artworks of Magda Stawarska-Beavan…

Listen. What can you hear? All quiet? Or is there a noise?

Most of us rarely pause to consider the sounds around us. Barricaded by headphones, cocooned in car stereos, or huddled behind double-glazing, everyday sounds have become little more than auditory clutter to be shut out or ignored. Sociologist Georg Simmel observed in the early 20th century that urbanites had to put up their perceptual shutters or risk the prospect of mental overload. Simmel’s reflections on the newly booming cities of his time remind us that our relationship with sound evolves along with our changing ways of living with each other. In my new book The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity (2017), I trace the historical processes that went into producing our distant and hostile attitude to everyday sounds. Noise abatement campaigns from the 1920s onwards convinced us to retreat from urban sound, to treasure auditory isolation and to defend our right to quiet. The move from slum to suburb was a shift from hubbub to hush and we became ever-more isolated in our individual sound worlds. But what do we miss when we choose to stop hearing? Examining this question historically is one way to appreciate that how we hear is part of who we are, but it isn’t the only way.

Artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan takes a different approach. Evolving a critical ear by listening directly to the sounds around her, Stawarska-Beavan’s sound works invite us to step out of our auditory isolation and to start listening again. In his pioneering book Rhythmanalysis (2013), Henri Lefebvre suggested that in order to understand the social patterns that structure our everyday lives, we might be better to listen up than take a closer look. Rather than thinking-it-through, he suggested that rhythmanalysts should use their bodies to feel the shape of social life. Arguing that power and control operate as much through time as through space, Lefebvre invited us to hear our communal rhythms once more. Stawarska-Beavan is a kind of rhythmanalyst. She is a wanderer, a modern day flâneuse, drifting through the city while paying attention to its sonic undercurrents. She invites us to join her in these wanderings: the binaural microphones and digital cameras that she attaches to her body capture a kaleidoscope of sensations as she goes. Moving through urban spaces, she documents the everyday sounds that envelop us. While most of us rarely stop to consider these fleeting sensations, Stawarska-Beavan asks us to confront them, editing them into rich collages of urban experience in her art works. She enters deep into the vibrations and reverberations of place that we rarely notice.

She is an outsider, deliberately targeting unfamiliar places to hear them afresh. In preparation for Kraków to Venice in 12 Hours (pictured, below), Stawarska-Beavan travelled through Kraków, Katowice, Bielsko-Biala, Ostrava, Brno, Bratislava, Vienna, Graz, Maribor, Ljubljana, Trieste and Venice, recording as she went. The resulting 12 hour, 8-channel audio piece offers us an auditory snapshot of each city, capturing the “unique sonic identities” of each place, through the sounds of its bells, public transport systems and other local sounds, as well as the harder-to-identify ambiences, atmospheres, and echoes of voices, footsteps and daily goings on. In Kraków to Venice, these sounds are overlaid with whispering voices which count in Polish, Czech, Slovak, German, Slovenian and Italian, as well as Romany, drawing our attention to the passing of time and to the linguistic barriers which exist around and across nations.

The effect is to draw us in and to alienate us from place, to offer us a glimpse of what it is to belong to a soundscape as well as what it is to be an auditory outsider. A resident of Kraków or Venice might warmly recognise the sounds of their own cities, but they must also confront the alienating impact of the juxtaposition with other places’ sounds, as well as the unsettling insistence of the whispered beat. A defamiliarisation of sonic place is achieved which causes us to reflect on our own relationship to daily sound and on what it means to traverse sonic boundaries. These boundaries are an explicit theme of the work; sonic borders between nations, communities, bodies and spaces are elucidated as we listen with Stawarska-Beavan. As we move from one place to the next she draws our attention to the different layers of place: not only do we move around and through physical spaces and divisions, we also encounter the sonic boundaries of language, auditory communication and atmosphere. The work comes with accompanying maps, a website and a blog, but on its own the sound is an exercise in deep and concentrated listening that is both entrancing and alienating. Sounds can make us feel at home and give us a sense of belonging. They can also make us feel unsure, out of place, and far from home.

Stawarska-Beavan is, above all, interested in the sonic border-crossings that give us our sense of ourselves. Remembering the experience that first inspired her to work with sound, she recalls staying in a hotel room in Barcelona which looked out on to a major city square. The square reverberated with city sounds day and night and she felt these sounds “vibrating within me, piercing my sleep.”

“I was in the city,” she explains, “but I also felt like part of it”.

Sound does not respect the traditional spatial logic of insides and outsides. It moves through places, but it also moves in and out of us. We feel it and remember it.  To explore sound is to explore who we are and who we might become. Stawarska-Beavan points to  a favourite quote from Frances Stoner Saunders: “…the self is an act of cartography and every life a study of borders… We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become.”

Stawarska-Beavan does exactly this in East {hyphen} West: Sound Impressions of Istanbul, a double limited-edition vinyl recording with artist’s book. The six sound collages which constitute the work capture the sounds of Istanbul at a particular moment in time from the uniquely personal point of view of the binaural microphones which she attaches to her ears. Again, Stawarska-Beavan focuses on sonic borders, this time on the meeting of East and West in Turkey. Through the technique of juxtaposition Stawarska-Beavan draws our attention to the combination of voices and musics which unmistakably position us between continents. The Bosphorus river also features prominently as a sonic border: Stawarska-Beavan captured its sounds both above and below water, using hydrophones, drawing us away from the familiarity of human-made sounds into the ambience of nature. She explains that while she was “conscious of exploring geographical, cultural and continental borders, I became aware that the peripheral border of my outer self had become the collection point for the data”.

As with Kraków to Venice, then, East {Hyphen} West is very much an exercise in listening with Stawarska-Beavan. This is not a soundscape captured for the historical record; it is an exploration of what it is to hear and to experience sound, narrated necessarily from the point of view of the artist-hearer, remembering, feeling, and moving through sound in an unfamiliar place.

As an historian, limited necessarily to what is available to me in the historical record, I envy the direct relationship which Stawarska-Beavan develops with everyday sound in her work. But I can learn from her too. She reminds me that our everyday relationship with sound is deeply personal, intermingling with other sensations, with feelings and in turn with memory. As a historian I try to listen with my historical subjects rather than listen to their sound worlds. By this I mean that when we hear, we do so as particular kinds of subjects living in particular times and places. How we hear is shaped socially as well as biologically. I pay close attention to people’s recollections of sound in order to try to make sense of historical ways of hearing. Stawarska-Beavan does this instinctively as she traverses the sonic borders that hold us in place. She shows us that to hear is to belong. She shows us, too, that listening carefully to others opens new possibilities for who we might become.

James G. Mansell

This text forms part of a series of essays, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative, which has been developed through Practising Place – an ongoing programme of conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different across the country and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with other researchers who share a common area of interest.

This essay was written by Dr James Mansell in response to his conversations with artist Magda Stawarska-Beavan, which began at a Practising Place event in Nottingham in 2015 and can be viewed online here.

Practising Place is part of In Certain Places – a programme of artistic interventions and events based in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. For more information visit www.incertainplaces.org. 

Magda Stawarska-Beavan’s practice is primarily concerned with the evocative and immersive qualities of sound. She is interested in how soundscape orients us and subconsciously embeds itself in our memories of place, enabling us to construct personal recollections and, moreover, it offers the possibility of conveying narrative to listeners who have never experienced a location. She works predominantly with sound, moving image and print, often connecting traditional printmaking processes with new technologies such as digital audio.

Dr. James Mansell is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham, where he also co-directs the Nottingham Sensory Studies Network, a research cluster supporting sensory work across the disciplines. His research has focused on the cultural history of sound and hearing, sound media, and on histories of sonic modernity and modernism. His forthcoming book The Age of Noise in Britain: Hearing Modernity will be published in the autumn by the University of Illinois Press.

Writer and artist Lauren Velvick has recently been commissioned to work on The Expanded City project within her hometown of Preston. But what has it taught her about the forgotten edgelands at the borders of rural and urban spaces?

The conversation around how we, as artists and cultural workers, can respond pragmatically and fruitfully to the continuing austerity visited on our towns and cities — and the increasing privatisation of vital services and industries — is becoming more urgent by the day. In introducing The Expanded City project, based in my hometown of Preston, Lancashire, it is impossible not to consider the latest spate of regional museum closures and threats of closure.

Within this climate, it seems even more surprising that Preston City Council would be scrupulous in seeking to ensure cultural provision with the City Deal scheme, which aims to construct and implement improved infrastructure, as well as new housing and “employment areas”. Yet, this is exactly what has happened, with the Preston-based arts organisation In Certain Places having been invited to respond to the scheme, in turn commissioning five artists, along with myself in the role of writer.

In Certain Places have previously focussed on “the city” in terms of the central, urban experience, and have had to reorient towards the hinterlands for The Expanded City. Preston as an urban centre is hedged by the rural, and envelops estates and suburbs that have cultivated individual identities through a combination of class, cultural and environmental delineations. As a one-time industrial hub and administrative centre, the architecture of central Preston combines the grand civic styles favoured by 19th century philanthropists, alongside the swooping concrete of 1960s utopian brutalism, and 1990s utilitarian breeze-block shop units; each in their own way designed for the use and/or edification of the people.

From this central point, it is not particularly easy to reach the edgelands without a car, and this basic infrastructural need is a significant concern for three of the commissioned artists, Gavin Renshaw, and artist duo Ian Nesbitt and Ruth Levene. Renshaw has photographed Preston from various points around the periphery of the city, sometimes following the route of the Guild Wheel, a 21 mile cycle path that serves as a legacy for the 2012 Guild celebrations – Preston being the only place that continues to celebrate this civic occasion dating from the rule of Henry VIII – producing images that constitute a decontextualised portrait of the city, often appearing to be ahistorical and timeless. In one image, primeval forests encroach upon the Deepdale Stadium, in an illusion created by Moor Park, which was once a moor on the edge of the growing town.

To Renshaw, the mode by which he conducts this research is incidental, but by recording his routes and discovering first-hand the need for better pathways out of the city centre, this project lends itself to advocacy for improved cycling infrastructure.

Nesbitt and Levene have also traversed the circumference of Preston, but by other means than cycling. Prior to their involvement with The Expanded City, the two artists had completed a walk around the official boundary of their home-city of Sheffield, and had proposed to recreate this work in Preston. In previous artwork, Nesbitt has explored the pilgrimage as a vernacular route or “rogue network”, and the boundary walks can also be considered in these terms, with both artists sharing an interest in the differences and relationships between systems built in the service of human industry, and those that are formed by social interaction or the natural world.

The continual redevelopment of city centres is familiar to anybody that lives in or near to one, but redevelopment on the edges of cities is less examined and rarely questioned. An important part of The Expanded City project is to develop an understanding of the experience of city-dwellers at the limits of what can be considered as city. Towards this end, commissioned artist Olivia Keith (pictured) has been conducting active research in the areas earmarked for development, focussing on the cultural importance of naming.

For Keith, the motif of the bridge is an important point of reference, appropriated due to their proximity to the waterways and thoroughfares of a place, and as such often pointing to earlier configurations of inhabitance and movement. In order to facilitate her conversations with passers-by, Keith has developed a framework, whereby each of her days spent on site results in a large-scale multimedia landscape drawing, which in turn acts as a point of conversation, making Keith conspicuous within her chosen environment. She has described how it is important to communicate openness, but not to actually initiate conversation, and this self-imposed constraint is one of the ways in which Keith’s ongoing project differs from familiar forms of socially engaged memory collecting. Any knowledge that is gained during these days spent drawing outdoors is offered consciously and deliberately, constituting a gathering of the information that people choose to go out of their way to share with strangers, or that is too precious to keep to oneself.

The City Deal is a long-term project, and there are, as yet, few visible signs of it, meaning that our responses have necessarily taken the form of conjecture. In a symposium organised by In Certain Places earlier in 2016, this sense of flux and in-between-ness was centred, with presentations from urban designer Carolina Caicedo and economist Paul Swinney, both of whom make work about the constantly changing nature of cities, and how this can be directed or understood.

Caicedo’s work within her organisation The Decorators relies on an understanding of the constitution of individual communities, whereas Swinney’s work as an economist uses quantitative measurement of demographics, representing two modes of knowledge that are often placed in opposition with one another, but that are equally necessary.

And yet, even with careful research, design that collaborates with the community, and comprehensive data any structure can be misused and any plan subverted, and it is this potential for the unexpected that interests the final commissioned artist, Emily Speed. The criteria insisted upon by Preston City Council, that alongside housing and employment, spaces for leisure, culture and play should be provided within the City Deal, is perhaps the most difficult to design and implement.

This disparity between intention and function has also emerged as a central concern in my own research, having observed the half-developed wastelands to the North East of Preston being utilised by adolescents, presumably in search of the kind of privacy that a small city centre can’t provide, but the edgelands can. It is difficult at the moment to imagine how places like Preston will look in a decade or so into the future, when our political and social landscape is so precarious and volatile in the present. However, it is our current situation that makes the kind of scrutiny afforded by The Expanded City project so important.

Lauren Velvick

Learn more at The Expanded City Publication Launch at Ham and Jam cafe, between 12 and 3pm (drop-in) on Friday 18 November 2016 (FREE entry) — an informal afternoon of tea, cake, artwork and conversations about The Expanded City, as well as a chance to collect a free publication which documents the first 12 months of the project.

The Expanded City is a three-year programme of artworks and events designed to generate debate about the City Deal – a national scheme, which aims to address strategic transport, environmental, community and cultural infrastructure challenges. In Certain Places have been working with artists Olivia Keith, Gavin Renshaw, Ian Nesbitt and Ruth Levene, Emily Speed and writer Lauren Velvick to examine the existing characteristics and future plans for places within the City Deal areas. There will be an exhibition of artwork and the artists will available throughout the day to talk about their research and discuss aspects of the City Deal scheme.

Image: drawing by Olivia Keith (detail), courtesy the artist

A collection of door knobs. Unclaimed mail. An ironing board. Through recording the evacuation of one Lancashire community, finds Steve Millington, the artist William Titley has made permanent a series of internal displacements, and the exposed the true meaning of “placelessness”…

Yi Fun Tuan established the term “topophilia” in the 1970s. An awkward word, but it describes an emotion we all share, a deep attachment to place. We might express this through love for one’s country or perhaps through civic pride, but our strongest bonds are to ordinary places connecting our everyday habits and routines, what we might call home.

Home is perhaps the most important place in our lives. Beyond basic human needs of shelter and security, home is ideally a place where we can escape, be ourselves, find comfort, rest, experiment, create, laugh, dance, without too much concern about what others might think. Here we build and maintain the social relations necessary to support a sense of belonging considered essential for well-being and happiness. We only have to imagine the plight of millions of refugees who have had to leave their homes, neighbourhoods, the places where they were born, schooled, worked, ate, played, to realise how our lives might quickly untangle into a precarious state. Feeling ‘out of place’, feeling that you don’t belong can be soul destroying.

Moving home, we know is highly stressful, but the prospect of losing your home provokes great fear, anxiety, and loss. Artist William Titley’s ongoing project Demolition Street explores and documents the lives of ordinary people in Colne, Lancashire, where an entire street of private houses, specifically Bright Street, was demolished in anticipation of an urban regeneration scheme that never happened. To a casual observer, Bright Street was nothing special, part of a familiar Lancashire landscape of rising terraced streets. But, through photographs, video, interviews and artefacts collected from vacated properties since 2005, Demolition Street provides a poignant exploration of a place that has been lost.

The work captures the worn patina of emptied houses, the shifting patterns of shadow as the sun sweeps across the fading paint on a wall, or shimmers through a now dirtied and forgotten window. There are absent walls, windows, absent roofs, interiors rendered exterior. Boarded up windows which no longer offer sunlight or external views. Demolition Street reveals a landscape littered with found objects, material glimpses into past lives, offering a contemporary archaeology of a former working class community, unveiling the sediments of a lost landscape.

Despite the hillside location of Bright Street, views from even the upper floors offered little perspective on the town or the Pennines. Often what is only visible from the windows of one house are the houses on the opposite side of the street. One might find this claustrophobic, but Titley provides smaller scale perspectives, views from eye holes or forgotten window frames to reveal how the physical properties of the terraced street fostered intimacy and security. Having eyes on the street creates informal surveillance, a facet celebrated by the influential activist Jane Jacobs, whose ideas continue to resonate in city planning. The many doors on the street provide multiple entrances and exits, people coming and going, as neighbours perform a daily street ballet right outside the front door.

By accident, Victorian terraces generated communities that looked on, but also out for each other, clocking suspicious characters, children playing out secure under a neighbourhood gaze, a community that co-produces neighbourly behaviour. Some might find this environment, where everybody knows each other’s business, suffocating, but residents of Bright Street clearly lament their lost neighbours. Titley’s video installations, for example, separate the resident’s voices from the pauses between their sentences, presenting a set of talking heads juxtaposed against silences and breaths capturing “rhythms of breathing and facial expressions” as they reflect on the past and the anticipated future post-demolition.

The themes of abandonment, dislocation and power resonate strongly with ideas in geography about how communities are made and transformed through ordinary place making strategies, but also alerts us to the institutional challenges faced by people subject to seemingly arbitrary planning decisions. John, a former resident for instance, talks about how he bought his house, and together with a neighbour applied to the local authority for a grant of £13,000 to improve their properties, electrics, damp proofing etc., only for a few years later to discover their properties, along with the rest of the street, were earmarked for demolition by the same authority. Beyond the wasted time, effort and public resource, most importantly, John’s home was blighted.

Demolition Street chimes with the broader anxiety about the loss of this particular form of working class housing, the two-up two-down terrace. Much of this housing stock from 19th and early 20th century was subject to mass clearance in the 1950s and 60s, where whole neighbourhoods were redlined by planners, subject to Compulsory Purchase Orders and demolished, and families relocated to new modernist estates and blocks of flats often without consultation or sufficient compensation. Clearly much of this housing was well below modern standards, but the terraced housing that remained was often good quality and today provides a step onto the housing market for many families in a climate where affordable homes are in short supply.

Latterly, however, the government’s Housing Market Renewal (HMR) scheme has led to further demolition of what, for many, are solid homes in sustainable communities. Nevertheless, under the auspices of urban “regeneration”, vast swathes of terraced streets have become subject to “renewal” in places like Liverpool, Salford, and Sunderland, including Colne.

When communities are forced to relocate, they lose an embedded connection to the familiar. At first, their new neighbourhoods will seem strange and it takes time to overcome what geographers call “displacement anxiety”. Well-worn paths between home and work have to be rediscovered. We eventually work this out through the reiteration of everyday practices. It is a journey involving mistakes, exploration until we establish patterns and routines where we feel comfortable, or feel at home.

Along these routes and pathways, ordinary objects, such as a park bench or a bus shelter, which might appear banal to a stranger, become infused with meaning. To you, these are the places where you might have carved the name of your first lover or smoked your first cigarette. When the landscape changes suddenly, our connection to that place is fundamentally altered. Perhaps we have learnt little from the experiences of mass redevelopment in the 1960s, although at least then there was a utopian desire to improve the lives of ordinary folk. However, top-down approaches to planning continue to fail to acknowledge the community bonds and social networks that arise in established neighbourhoods. It is a well-worn cliché that you can destroy a community overnight, but it takes decades to build one.

Dislocation not only affects our external geographies, it also causes an internal dislocation as we have to pack, unpack and rearrange the stuff in our homes. Other than functional items, we decorate our houses with stuff that means something to us, photos, artefacts and mementoes, just things we collect, store or put on display. We use these material items of everyday life to structure both time and space. They are hooks upon which we hang fond memories, childhood, and moments marking out key life stages; births, graduations, marriages, which flow into our sense of self and identity. We bundle this life clutter into homes, on walls, in drawers, cupboards, attics, cellars, sheds. But when moving home it becomes necessary to sort and sift out all this matter, to have a clearout and perhaps re-evaluate our clutter, before facing a myriad of dilemmas in our new home, to find new spaces to put stuff in.

The ordering of stuff also generates a sense of character, representing a unique customisation of domestic space, which on first glance might appear ordinary if not banal. On Bright Street, however, an expedition into Tony’s cellar unexpectedly reveals a carcass of a 1970s Ford Capri. The remnants and artefacts of this cluttered past re-emerge within Demolition Street and are put on display. A colourful ashtray hosting the remains of the last cigarette smoked in the house (above). A collection of door knobs through the ages marking shifting eras of style, design and taste. Unclaimed mail. An ironing board, a washing up bowl, a salvaged loft hatch replete with attached smoke alarm, together with other found objects including stuff from the artist’s own past.

Another geographer from the 1970s, Ted Relph, introduced the term “placelessness”, to refer to the eradication of vernacular style and design, or what we might term in Britain as clone towns: the homogenisation of places through the overlaying of same corporate brands on every high street or swathes of identikit housing, together with a proliferation of blandscapes, motorway services, shopping malls or airport departure lounges — what Marc Augé calls “non-places”. The eradication of a terraced street like Bright Street perhaps symbolises an eradication of a unique Northern working class identity; of communities that no longer fit into a neoliberal market obsessed society.

This essay was written by Dr Steve Millington in response to his conversations with artist William Titley, which began at a Practising Place event in Manchester in 2015 and can be viewed online here.

This text forms part of a series of essays, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative, which has been developed through Practising Place – an ongoing programme of conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different across the country and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with other researchers who share a common area of interest.

Practising Place is part of In Certain Places – a programme of artistic interventions and events based in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. For more information visit incertainplaces.org. 

William Titley is an artist and Co-Director/Founder of In-Situ: a non-profit arts organisation based in East Lancashire. His work plays on ideas around spatial ownership, including notions of home, borders, and socio-cultural spaces; identifying and inhabiting a position in-between spaces from which he can engage with communities, the environment and place. From local histories, digital media and hybrid landscapes to political boundaries, social situations and local cultures, his work uncovers aspects of environments, cultures and a sense of place. Projects have included curating an artistic exchange between Lancashire and Lahore, capturing feral pigeons in Coney Island NYC, and an all-night Northern Soul event in Manchester’s Victoria Baths. William is also a lecturer in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire.

Dr Steve Millington is a Senior Fellow of the Institute of Place Management and a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is co-author of two edited collections, Cosmopolitan Urbanism and Spaces of Vernacular Creativity: Rethinking the Cultural Economy, both published by Routledge. His recent research explores the relationship between illumination and place, focusing on household Christmas light displays and Blackpool Illuminations, work that formed the subject of an episode of BBC Radio Four’s Thinking Allowed. Previous research has examined football fan culture, but more recently he has been working on an ESRC project examining the vitality and vibrancy of UK High Streets. Steve is a Trustee of the Manchester Geographical Society, and a Director of Institute of Place Management’s Special Interest Group for Geography and Planning.

Demolition Street is a collection of audio-visual artworks from William Titley’s personal archives, informed by a real life situation on Bright Street, Colne, Lancashire. In 2005 the artist worked with residents to document the effects of a local government regeneration strategy to demolish their homes and make way for gardens for the remaining residents. The work, which includes photography, video and found objects, explores notions of home and has developed around ideas of location, the self and spatial ownership. From domestic interviews about life on the street, to atmospheric shots of the vacated properties, the project contributes to discourse surrounding issues of displacement in the face of adversity and legislation of regeneration and the renewal of place. The work was exhibited at Preston Archives in May 2015, and will be on shown for the first time in the town where it was conceived in 2017.

All images courtesy William Titley

Artist Victoria Lucas charts the abandonment of obsolete buildings through film and photography, finds Emma Fraser; and in doing so, salvages material relics of the modern world…

In his 1874 epic poem, The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson wrote of the ruins of the city of London:

“The city is not ruinous, although

Great ruins of an unremembered past,

With others of a few short years ago

More sad, are found within its precincts vast.”

For Thomson and others in this period, the ruins of a recent past were often more poignant than the historical relics for which London was increasingly known in the Victorian era. The city was in transition, beset by both decay and development – a place of slums, demolitions, and grand imperial architecture – and modern, not ancient, ruins were very much a part of this change.

Following the Second World War, the city was again cast as a site of modern ruination – in fact, the whole European experience of the early 20th century could be seen in terms of disintegration:

“A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body” (Walter Benjamin (1936)).

Galerie Vivienne, Paris (1905)

Walter Benjamin –influenced by Baudelaire, and the Surrealist writer Louis Aragon – saw the ruins of the recent past as sites in which the destructive nature of eternal progress could be detected, and potentially opposed. Living in exile from Germany during the 1930s, Benjamin spent his time wandering the old shopping arcades of Paris: 19th century precursors to the shopping mall, once frequented by wealthy Parisians, they were, by then, falling into disrepair. It was in these arcades that Benjamin found signs of the power of obsolescence – objects and spaces falling out of fashion, rendered strange and out-dated to a contemporary eye.

In a more modern context, it is this process of obsolescence – among other factors – which produces vast swathes of ruin in American rust belt cities, whose days of manufacturing have long passed, and whose factories and family homes stand open and decaying.

Today, the urban obsolete most often takes the form of abandoned strip malls, empty skyscrapers, industrial ruins, and derelict hospitals frequented by urban explorers. In the 1930s, Benjamin was essentially undertaking an early form of urban exploration in buildings that were abandoned, on the brink of ruin.  The recent interest in urban decay is simply one more manifestation of the persistent sense that the city is not only as a place of growth and life, but also as a place of modern ruin. However, Benjamin’s conscious practice of cataloguing relics and remnants is a more complex model for inhabiting and working with places on the edge of society – locations in the process of unbecoming, disappearing from the world forever.

Factory, Detroit (2009)

Such work is foregrounded in the earliest responses to the modern city – the poems of Thomson, Baudelaire and others who produced art or literature that reflected the real and abstract decay that has permeated cities particularly since the industrial revolution. The speed of change in the urban world matches the speed of decline, demolition, redevelopment – obsolescence – of the built environment. In a contemporary context, this now means that buildings become obsolete in a generation, often less.

As the product of a wider force of change, the urban obsolete holds the potential to provide artists, poets, academics, and others with valuable materials. Louis Aragon found the declining arcades to be places which embodied transience itself. As Louis Aragon put it:“It is only today, when the pickaxe menaces them, that they have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that yesterday were incomprehensible, and that tomorrow will never know” (Le Paysan de Paris (1926)).

Passage de l’Opéra (1909)

Castle Market in Sheffield is one such example of “[p]laces that yesterday were incomprehensible, and that tomorrow will never know”. This market was condemned to obsolescence very early in its life – although the most contemporary section of the site, designed by  J. L. Womersley and Andrew Darbyshire, was finished in 1965, the building was flagged for major reconstruction by the 1980s. As demolition loomed, the market characterised a particular period of development and way of living, common to English cities of the post-war period, with its multilevel walkways, open stalls, and original signage and tenants – no less iconic (if less attractive to some) than the Parisian arcades.

In November 2013, Castle Market was finally closed and boarded up, after decades of neglect and uncertainty. In late 2014, the market sat empty, increasingly derelict amongst the crowds of people moving between bus stops, Park Hill, and the more central shopping districts of the city. By February 2015, the market had been reduced to chunks of warped steel, piles of teal blue fittings, and matchstick-like slivers of wooden trimmings scattered next to a growing void where the market once stood.

 Before and After, Castle Market, Victoria Lucas (2013)

In the period leading up to the closure of the market, artist Victoria Lucas undertook a residency, spending Mondays and weekends for over a month exploring the markets, taking photographs, talking to people, hosting a photography workshop, talk, and closing event for the market. Lucas also produced a film during the final two weeks of the residency, tracking the process of the closure.

This kind of art practice, which is physically and temporally located in the moment of final decline, is profoundly significant to the consideration of urban dereliction and ruin, particularly when most contributions to the discussion around modern ruins emphasise trite tropes of “haunting” and “chilling” decay, long after people have left.

Lucas’ work After Castle Market (2013) illustrates the process of unbecoming, in which the almost magic shift from function to “surplus-to-requirements” occurs – from one day to the next. Castle Market moved from a locally inhabited and active (if somewhat run-down) shopping centre to a desolate abandoned building, overnight.

Tracking the process of abandonment from active inhabitation, to emptiness and almost immediate dereliction, offers something more than touristic snapshots of someone else’s ruins. This inhabited and material experience, over time, is very different from a voyeuristic and distant gaze that fetishises shocking decay out of context. It is an approach that – whether through the use of film, stills, sound recordings, or other forms of archival and creative practice – can effectively evoke both a sense of place and the complexity of the processes of decay.

Castle Market (2013)

After Castle Market evokes a sense of place and abandonment that is at once transformative, and in which emptiness, though melancholic, also provides the possibility for a kind of salvage of the material relics of the modern world. The urban obsolete, as that part of the built environment which is surplus to need, can be put to use, even where it is – by its very definition – useless.

In cities with mixed development – particularly the ubiquitous pattern of decaying public housing accompanied by booming gentrification – the urban obsolete is often bound up in complex circuits of value construction. Post-industrial England, for example – once the sad symbol of Thatcherism – becomes valuable real-estate in booming city-centres, where repurposed eye-sores are big-money makers for regeneration architects and developers. Valued in terms of contemporary fashion, old mills and factories become trendy “loft” spaces; their worthlessness (as spaces of production which are no longer required), is reversed in the demand for spacious yet grungy urban spaces, as dense city living becomes more attractive, and industrial history less shameful.

Undesirable buildings, in this value-attributing framework, then meet their fate as the gaze of planners and developers fails to account for their possible significance beyond the dominant vision of “city living”. Castle Market is one such building – despite its use-value to local communities, it was replaced – geographically and in terms of purpose – by a more desirable market vision on the other side of town, the Moor Market.

After the closure, demolitions teams immediately began to tear out fixtures and interiors, taking concrete samples to test for explosive loads, likely rendering the building structurally unsound, and practically useless, immediately. Once stripped of function, Castle Market was materially unsalvageable. No decision, no shift in a value framework in favour of modernist concrete shopping markets, could save this place. An entire building, thrown onto the trash heap.

Castle Market (2013)

But what of a material practice – like Lucas’s – situated in the moment of demise? A practice of salvage that understands such sites in their moment of disappearance, as Benjamin and Aragon understood the threatened arcades on the brink of oblivion?

Such a practice, consciously curating remnants with attention to the process of their unravelling, is evident in the way in which After Castle Market lingers on the architectural details, the fading signage, the old-fashioned furniture of Castle Market, immediately following its closure.

The act of valuing the obsolete on the brink of disappearance salvages something – not the building itself, but some sense of the experience, as an encounter with remnants of a former life. To do so in-situ, where decay takes hold as the transformation from functional to purposeless takes place, renders the usually unknowable details of abandonment – and therefore, the illogical operation of value attribution – quite transparent.

To take this one step further, to see the city in ruin – as it has appeared to many artists, writers, and intellectuals since the emergence of its modern form – is not to condemn, but rather to rescue from the oblivion guaranteed by the pace of change and redevelopment since the industrial revolution. That such change is inevitable seems obvious – but to let once valued and occupied places disappear, unconsidered, is to miss an opportunity to rescue the condemned – if only as a fragment of the rich life such sites once led.

This essay was written by Emma Fraser in response to her conversations with artist Victoria Lucas, which began at a Practising Place event in Sheffield in 2015 and can be viewed online here.

This text forms part of a series of essays, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative, which has been developed through Practising Place – an ongoing programme of conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different across the country and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with other researchers who share a common area of interest.

Practising Place is part of In Certain Places – a programme of artistic interventions and events based in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at the University of Central Lancashire. 

Victoria Lucas is a Sheffield-based artist whose practice can be described as a series of considered and poetic interactions with objects and places. Focusing on urban public spaces that frame the everyday, her artworks punctuate the ordinary so that relatively minor happenings are revealed as monumental events. Lucas has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, including a solo show at Grizzly Grizzly in Philadelphia, and group shows at Casa Maauad in Mexico City and Bolsky Gallery in Los Angeles. She co-ordinates Hanover Project, a contemporary art gallery in Preston, where she also lectures in Fine Art at the University of Central Lancashire.

Emma Fraser is a cultural geographer, sociologist and PhD candidate at Manchester University whose research interests focus on decay and decline in urban spaces. Her PhD project “Self and Ruin: Imagining the end of the city” considers urban ruins (both real and imagined), in relation to the way we imagine the end of cities and consume versions of the past, with a particular emphasis on video games and digital and 3D representation. Fraser, who has undertaken research in Berlin, Paris, Sydney, Detroit and Chernobyl, has also written about the work of Walter Benjamin in connection to urban renewal, dereliction and memory.

After is a 20 minute film by Victoria Lucas, which captured Sheffield’s Castle Market before its doors were closed to the public. The film studies the condemned brutalist building as if the lens were dutifully studying a photograph. The empty modernist shell that was once Sheffield’s vibrant market hall is the subject of failed utopia. The film was created as part of a six week residency at the site, during which Lucas occupied an empty unit in the lower level of the market. A publication documenting the project and the closure of the building can be found here.

See The Expanded City Symposium – a day of presentations, conversations and site visits within the City Deal areas of Preston. Thursday 16 June 2016, 10am-4pm (bus pick up from Preston railway station at 9am) at Woodplumpton and District Club, Preston – £10 (a number of free tickets are also available)

An unassuming Southport beach in the hands of artist David Jacques becomes the battleground for a social and cultural negotiation, finds Les Roberts…

Edges can be many things. They can be sharp (in that they incise or, if blunted, at the very least leave an impression). They can be dangerous (inciting a precipitous gaze or delineating a boundary that is there to be crossed or transgressed). They can be extreme (in that they mark an extremity, be it geographical, experiential or emotional). They can be edgy (a nervous disposition or pushing at the edge of something new). They can, as I said, be many things. What they can’t be, or rather what they shouldn’t be, is centric. That is, they should define a terrain that resists the imposition of a centrist mode of being, thinking or acting. Oxymoronic claims of a ‘radical centre’ – an ‘edgy’ neoliberalism that has not so much eliminated edges as papered over them with territorial panache (a greenback revolution where geometry, like money, is increasingly virtual) – have fallen as flat as the smooth plane of capital that now substitutes for social and public space. If, politically, edges tell us anything (and surely they do) it is that, whether sharp, dangerous, extreme, or edgy, edges need to be valued for what they can enact or perform in the social world. Edges, in other words, matter.

But for all that bluster we should not labour under the misapprehension that edges are necessarily concrete or unambiguously lineal. Edges can also be more contingently drawn, defining an altogether less certain geometry or geography. In this respect they may represent not so much a line as a process: an induction, perhaps? an absorption into a new or reconstituted state of selfhood or consciousness? a transitional moment? a liminal space? All of these have currency in terms of what we might describe as the ‘performativity’ of edges. But what they all speak to more generally is an idea of the edge defined less by what it is than by what those who traverse (or inhabit) it make of it (and from it). An anthropology of edges is thus an enquiry into what they yield and provoke: the social and cultural negotiation of edges as a performative, political, and poetical act.

David Jacques’s short essay film The Dionysians of West Lancs is a work that very much skirts and plays with edges as material and symbolic forms. The physical edge of the land – a beach in Southport on the West Lancashire coast – plays host to the titular Dionysians: early 1990s ravers carving out (having sharpened their edge) a space of reclamation. As an edgeland, the beach no less functions as a space of refusal when set alongside the territorialising centrism of the Tory-drafted Criminal Justice Bill that passed into law in 1994.

A keenly felt sense of enclosure suffuses the film: a long, meditative tracking shot scans an unsettlingly lateral hinterland. Edged suddenly into frame runs the perimeter fence of an installation which, for those trafficking up and down the A565 Southport coast road, remains out of bounds, a thematic refrain that links these latter day geographies to those mapped out historically (the inscription and contestation of edges has a deep and pervasive legacy in these parts). Listen more acutely as you drive down this road and the rhythmic thwack of the fracking drill (the most recent territorial incursion and focus of organised resistance) reawakens, by way of counterpoint, the tribal earth sounds of the Dionysian sand dwellers. Edges beget not just spaces but a deeply-resonant timbre by which we attune and calibrate our positionality, both geographic and political.

Edges also, of course, beget a boast of foot soldiers. These may be baton-wielding agents of the state policing the territorial interests of those for whom the edge ascribes power and legitimacy. They may equally be those who are tactically oriented towards re-drawing or even erasing the edge. The guerrilla assembly of the Southport beach ravers fall into this category. As do those whose resistance to the drainage and enclosure of marsh and common land in late fifteenth-century Sefton precipitated the appointment of so-called ‘Starr watchers’. These were agents of wealthy landowners tasked with preventing the pulling up of Starr and Bent: grasses which had been planted for the express purpose of offsetting the erosion of the sand dunes along the West Lancashire coast, and thus of sustaining legible property boundaries and edges.

Valued by peasants for its use in the manufacture of mats and besoms, in Jacques’s hands the grass acquires totemic, even talismanic significance. In the same way that it served to cohere and sustain a sense of topographic form, in The Dionysians of West Lancs the grass gives shape to a narrative history that threads together, across time, subjectivities of the marginal and dispossessed: groups, bound by geography if not history, that have found themselves in circumstances where they have been habitually ‘edged out’. Harnessing the alchemical power of Pieter Apian’s Cosmographia (published around the time of the Ince Marsh enclosure), the dissolve between a microscopic image of Marram grass (replete with ‘smiley face’-like cellular features) and the dancers and ravers on the beach conjures the efficacious properties of sympathetic magic.

But insofar as the edge may be looked upon not as a line but a space or zone, it is its constitutive liminality that is of import. It speaks to a space that is on the edge, and hence transacts difference and singularity. It is ‘betwixt and between’ to use the phrase favoured by the anthropologist Victor Turner, whose many writings on liminality made much of the importance of ritual, performance and the potentially transformative properties of liminal spaces. If we can describe those who might populate spaces-in-between as ‘foot soldiers’ (a military metaphor that, while not always apposite, nevertheless heightens the sense of a combative and contentious intent), then it is also worth considering those individuals whose command or intuitive understanding of these spaces is such as to determine their very nature, topography and affectivity.

The performative role of the master of ceremonies can be that of a guide or divinatory tactician (think Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, or a peyote shaman, psychotherapist, Tarkovskyan stalker, or perhaps even rave DJ). Typically imbued with deep local knowledge he or she acts as a kind of ‘ritual elder’, guiding and shepherding the initiates safely through the liminal zone to the ‘other side’. The trickster, on the other hand, is a figure who more purposefully exploits the chaos and ambiguity of liminal spaces and as such embodies potential or actual political power (think Toshiro Mifune’s character in the Kurosawa classic Yojimbo). Like the coyote – the archetypal trickster-beast – the trickster-performer likes to break away from the pack and lay claim to his or her own space (whither others might follow).

By way of illustration, the video footage that bookends The Dionysians of West Lancs documents what is but the flowering of an incipient liminality already set in train by those trickster-tacticians who created the circumstances – the spaces – that made the beach party possible. As with other rave gatherings in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the event itself grew out of a more diffuse network of liminal spaces such as motorway services which the trickster-cum-organiser tactically exploited to keep one step ahead of the police and to evade the territorialising gaze of the state.

Dancing across, beneath or around the liminal edge, the trickster is also made manifest in the intentionality of the artist. In the case of The Dionysians of West Lancs, Jacques deftly flits between representational spaces (online – textual – archival – performative – automotive – sonic), dragging any carelessly laid edge along with him (confounding, in the process, the rational ordering of a world that in all other respects he has made his own). In the guise of trickster, the artist makes us his complicitous subjects: we follow along pathways that map out a dissonant sense of a territory we can just about discern but no longer truly inhabit. These are lines (not edges) that, yes, tell a story of displacement and dislocation, but also prefigure processes whereby spaces are wrested back or are reconfigured as part of new cartographies of the socio-political body.

To these ends, it is the interpolated voice of Ariadne – a restless web flâneur – to which we need give the final word. Having retreated to the online precincts of a rave chat forum (a rebooted, if incorporeal place of assembly), Ariadne is feeling the need for communitas: for something to take the edge off. “Anybody got any stories?” she asks, “I’m going to have a drive around tonight with my head out of the window listening for some bass”. A moment later, no doubt already cognisant of the prospective lay of the land, she adds: “Anybody got any details or knows of any websites, you know where I am?” By extending the interrogative to the locational clause – “[do] you know where I am?” – the post conveys the ambiguous suggestion that perhaps Adriane herself might not even be sure where she is, as if a narrow circumscription of edges has shrunk and transformed the very fabric of social space.

If Ariadne and her predicament are testament to an anthropology of edges that is predicated on enclosure, then the role of the trickster is to re-animate and re-populate these edgeland spaces, finding within them the powers to enchant and transform. To remain, defiantly, on the edge.

Les Roberts

Watch Les Roberts and David Jacques in conversation

This text forms part of a series of essays, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative, which has been developed through Practising Place – an ongoing programme of conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different across the country and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with other researchers who share a common area of interest.

This essay was written by Les Roberts in response to his conversations with artist David Jacques, which began at a Practising Place event in Preston in 2014 and can be viewed online here.

The next event Forms of Inscription: surfaces, patterns and the typography of place is a conversation between artist Joanne Lee and typographer and researcher Paul Wilson, which will take place in Sheffield on Wednesday 17 February 2016. Click here for details.

Practising Place is part of In Certain Places – a programme of artistic interventions and events based in the School of Art, Design and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire. For more information visit www.incertainplaces.org.

David Jacques is a multi-media artist primarily involved with film. His practice engages with the subject of History, its narrative interpretations and the interplay between factual and fictional strategies of representation. His interest in deconstructing and re-apportioning the subject often results in the exploration of forgotten, marginalised and socially / politically disruptive sources. In 2010 he won the Liverpool Art Prize and was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize. Recent screenings of his work include; Tate Liverpool Art Turning Left, 17th International Video Festival VIDEOMEDEJA, Novi Sad Serbia, WNDX Film Festival, Winnipeg Canada 
and Sheffield Fringe at BLOC Projects Sheffield. He lives and works in Liverpool.

Les Roberts is Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies at the University of Liverpool. His research interests and practice fall within the areas of urban cultural studies, cultural memory, and digital spatial humanities. His work explores the intersection between space, place, mobility, and memory with a particular focus on film and popular music cultures. He is author of Film, Mobility and Urban Space: a Cinematic Geography of Liverpool (2012), editor of Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice and Performance (2012) and co-editor of Locating the Moving Image: New Approaches to Film and Place (2013), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (2012), and The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections (2010).

The Dionysians of West Lancs (2013) is an essay film that weaves through age-old tensions associated with acts of Enclosure and the defence of the Commons. The visual elements of the film include youtube footage of a rave on Southport beach in 1991, animated volvelles (moveable wheel charts or ‘search engines’) from Pieter Apian’s ‘Cosmographia’ published in 1524, and a ‘Phantom ride’ along the Southport Coast Road shot on GoPro from a car dashboard. The narrative is geographically played out around tracts of land running up the coastline of West Lancashire, which have, in recent years, become the proposed sites of ‘Fracking’ and a 42 acre shipping terminus developed by a private consortium. The film engages with the issues of control, ownership, reconfiguration & exploitation of resources associated with this landscape.

How do we understand our relationship with our rural peripheries? Sue Flowers considers a mix of creative responses to the British countryside at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, and finds stereotype and complexity hung side-by-side…

On a recent walk, I was suddenly greeted face-on by a rural reality: a plastic bag billowing in the wind. Dodging it, I thought: ‘Oops, there goes a pair of witches knickers!’ — an unlikely Irish term I learned from Joanne Lee’s artwork in A Green and Pleasant Land? Rural Life in Art, currently on display at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in Preston.

Lee’s series of digital photographs Witches Knickers (2015) — the term meaning carelessly disregarded plastic bags caught on trees and fences — depict collected but discarded dog waste found adorning countryside lanes, and are just one of the more unusual and contemporary responses to the idea of ‘rural’. And there are a lot. Upon entering the show, visitors are confronted with a confusion of Victorian canvases, digital imagery and an interactive drawing space: a visually awkward beginning resulting from the inclusion of too many artworks. Nonetheless, there are some really great works to uncover here that explore the rural context.

Specifically, Georgina Barney’s GB Farming (2007); a series of photographs set in glowing light boxes and depicting farms from around the UK. The light passing through Barney’s images, as it does so freely in the natural landscape, enables the viewer to really read into the soul of the land. The photographs, taken over a period of eight months when the artist visited 14 farms, are honest, earthy and beautifully perceived; from the multicoloured repetitive squares of Lambing Shed at Langshaw Farm on the Scottish Borders, to the homogenised industry of Seedlings at G Marketing East Anglia, where it seems the manmade seed crates have even influenced the linear cloud formations above them to create a new industrial countryside.

Just around the corner is a delicate painted drawing by David Jones entitled Hill Stooks, Matterdale (1946): in contrast to Barney’s works, Jones utilises sensitive and poetic wind-like movements in watercolour and pencil to make the landscape come alive. Here, a writhing mass of haystacks, dry-stone walls and mountainsides rise up out of the paper, literally drawn from his sensitivity to place.

Each gallery, unfortunately, has a predictable large green wall — it’s rural so it, preseumably, must be green — accompanied by exhibition text that irritatingly seems to skip across imaginary hillsides. The challenge of this exhibition becomes a question of how we ascertain rural reality, when it is not one simple truth.

Artist Rebecca Chesney addresses some of these issues in her installation Death by Denim (2015); she showcases purportedly archival material from the Scoglio family archives, an outdoor clothing manufacturers from Bolton. Chesney meticulously presents, with museum-style accuracy, advertising, photographs, news reports and clothing samples demonstrating the use of denim for mountaineering. Ultimately, this presents a tragic slice of history: the death of the factory owner’s son Dino, found dead on Lakeland Fells due to the unsuitability of the ‘Summat’ denim designs he was wearing.

Through lovingly creating each piece of denim memorabilia herself, Chesney deliberately confronts the viewer with their own understanding of myth and reality head-on. Her installation cleverly blurs the boundaries between perception and a lived reality, and so creates a very pertinent response to our understanding of the rural context.

Our relationships to places and their cultural heritage are evolutionary and complex. This exhibition goes a long way in beginning to understand Preston’s relationship with its rural peripheries, but there is need for a longer and much harder look into rural issues to even begin to uncover such a wide range of lived realities.

Sue Flowers

The exhibition A Green and Pleasant Land? Rural Life in Art is on display at the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, until 26 September 2015

Read more about Preston-based In Certain Places new commission for the exhibition here

Images: top: Joanne Lee, Witches Knickers (2015), detail. Centre: Rebecca Chesney, Death by Denim (2015)

This article has been commissioned by the Contemporary Visual Arts Network North West (CVAN NW), as part of a regional critical writing development programme, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England — see more here #writecritical

As part of our new publishing collaboration with In Certain Places, here art historian Rosemary Shirley discusses the concept of nature and ‘wildness’ — an interest she shares with artist Rebecca Chesney…

According to a formulation by the eminent anthropologist Mary Douglas, dirt can be defined as “matter out of place”. The material properties of that “matter” are in some ways inconsequential, it’s the location which is key. Certain things belong in certain places: crumbs are fine on the plate, but on the floor they become a mess; soil is acceptable in the garden, but in the kitchen it is a health hazard; blood is useful stuff, as long as it stays inside our bodies. Sensitivity to things being in or out of place is a strategy that we use in order to make sense of the world in which we live.

Places and their boundaries, be they bodies, homes, streets or nations, make up our personal geographies and form an often unnoticed background for everyday life. However, it is when things appear in places they should not be — when they transgress these boundaries and become out of place — we notice that we have constructed these apparently strict categories about what belongs where.

Taking a Sunday walk in a nearby wood, I happen upon a pile of rubbish, broken breezeblocks, old carpet, plastic bottles, and a solitary stiletto shoe. I feel unsettled, a little anxious, a little angry. Who dumped this stuff here? At best, they were environmentally irresponsible; at worst criminal, are they still here? And what happened to the other shoe and its wearer…?

While these kinds of objects might not arouse such anxiety in certain urban locations, litter in the countryside feels out of place. It has the power to inflame a set of deeply ingrained binary relationships that define the countryside: litter is man-made in comparison to the landscape, which is seen as ‘natural’; rubbish is dirty, whereas nature is pure; litter is a product of modernity, whereas the rural is timeless; litter is human and the countryside is wild. Suddenly unexamined notions of the countryside are highlighted in neon pink. The countryside is: natural, pure, timeless, empty, and wild.

It may be possible to call this set of ideas an ideology of landscape; they are certainly very powerful in shaping the actions of governments, funding bodies, heritage organisations, discourses around health and well-being, the tourist industry, and — let’s not forget — artists and poets. These last entries on this list, the cultural producers, particularly of the late 18th and early 19th century, were certainly influential in reflecting and consolidating romantic landscape ideals. In the UK, the Lake District was a favourite location for the Romantic poets who explored themes of solitude and wildness, inspired by the dramatic scenery and weather conditions.

Nowadays, the Lake District is in many ways a very different place. In 2013, 15.5 million tourists visited the national park, and it is also home to 41,000 people. However, the park works hard to maintain its image as a place where the wilderness can be explored and experienced, branding itself as one of ‘Britain’s breathing spaces’.

While working with Grizedale Arts in Cumbria, artist Rebecca Chesney set out to interrogate the narrative we are told — and that we tell ourselves — about the wildness of nature, particularly the nature that resides within the boundaries of a national park. After researching over 45 organisations, associations and authorities, all of whom have a stake or interest in the Coniston region of the Lake District, Chesney was able to map out the various ways in which this ‘wild’ location was controlled. These included lines of ownership, local and national governmental regions, areas of special scientific significance, and arts council funding. When all 22 layers of this map are superimposed, the resulting drawing is a web of lines, denoting the invisible boundaries which populate this seemingly empty space.

Much of Chesney’s work investigates our cultural conceptions of landscape and nature, often making us think about plants, animals and people being in and out of place. While in her Lake District mapping project she demonstrated how allegedly wild places were subject to structure, bureaucracy and layers of ownership, she also reverses this process by investigating how our highly-regulated towns and cities might also have their wild sides. The Unofficial Countryside was an idea developed by Richard Mabey in his 1973 book of the same name. The title conveys our tendency to designate certain things, woods, fields, moors, mountains, babbling brooks as belonging to the ‘proper’ countryside; however, when these elements appear elsewhere (for example playing fields, wooded motorway embankments, urban rivers and canals) their potential for wildness and connection to nature can be overlooked.

Exploring decidedly un-picturesque locations such sewage works, rubbish tips and car parks, Mabey mapped the ways in which plants and animals survive and thrive in parallel urban worlds, presenting different a way of experiencing urban environments.   Occupying similar territory, Chesney’s projects work to highlight and complicate this perspective.

For the project Unwanted (2006), Chesney conducted detailed plant surveys with the aim of discovering all the weed species growing in Preston’s city centre. Weeds are, of course, defined by their out of placeness, any plant can be a weed if it is in the wrong place. Astonishingly, over 50 different species were recorded growing unnoticed in the inbetween spaces of the city. Bristling out of cracks in the pavement, pushing through guttering and sprouting from chimneys, were unloved botanical delights such as Creeping Buttercup, Nettle, Daisy, Greater Plantain, Creeping Thistle, Herb Robert, Broad-leaved Willowherb, Annual Meadow Grass, Broad-leaved Dock and Dandelion. Chesney recounts that one lovely surprise was discovering a Broad Bean growing in the pavement on Birley Street near the old Post Office building. The resulting exhibition featured specially cultivated examples of 10 of these species, providing an unexpected lushness in the clinical, white cube gallery space.

During a residency in Mumbai, Chesney was inspired by the very specific context of Sanjay Gandhi National Park and extended her investigations to look at the idea, and the disturbing reality, of humans being designated as out of place. This national park is home to many unusual species of plants and animals, but it is also surrounded by extremely densely populated urban settlements. This tension resulted in a ruling by the high court in the 1990s evicting all humans from the park. The ruling applied equally to both temporary residents, who set up in slum villages, and tribal members, who had occupied the area for generations. The total number of human inhabitants of the park was estimated at around 460,000.

The implications of this ruling still resonate today, and Chesney’s project tracks some of the complex results. One piece, a documented conversation, shows how easy it is to illegally purchase and build on plots of land within the national park boundary. Another conversation piece illuminates an unexpected and alarming result of the tension between humans and wild places: a woman from a forest tribe situated with the Sanjay Gandhi National Park recounts how members of her family have been attacked and killed by leopards. The leopards are attracted to human settlements by the abundance of wild dogs that scavenge for food there, and Chesney notes that these dogs are themselves unofficial wildlife — although clearly living in the Park, they are not recorded on any wildlife surveys.

Most recently Chesney has embarked upon an on-going project with In Certain Places called the Invaders Archive. This collection will contain information about invasive plant species and will cover subjects ranging from science and ecology to culture and folklore, human influence and climate change to art and design. Documentation of this project shows the artist wearing a head-to-toe protective suit, face mask and gloves, in order to collect samples from a Giant Hogweed specimen in ‘the wild’. This plant grows to around 20ft tall, embraces impressive cow parsley like blooms, and was once grown in large elegant gardens; however, it has escaped these confines and successfully established itself along the banks of rivers and canals, on wasteland, embankments, parks and cemeteries.

A government website for the management of ‘invasive non-native species’ categorises Giant Hogweed as extremely invasive and warns of burns suffered by people who have come into contact with its sap. These invaders are everywhere: American Signal Crayfish, Japanese Knotweed, American Mink, and certain forms of rhododendron, often occupying the most unassuming locations.

It is both the scientific and cultural process of designating these species as out of place (non-native) and dangerous (invasive) which is so fascinating, pointing as it does, to the otherwise invisible boundaries and their transgressions which texture our understandings of concepts like nature and wildness.

Rosemary Shirley

This text forms part of a series of essays, commissioned jointly by In Certain Places and The Double Negative, which has been developed through Practising Place – a programme of conversations, designed to examine the relationship between art practice and place. Each event is hosted at a different venue in the North of England and explores a specific aspect of place by bringing artists together with other researchers who share a common area of interest.

This essay is part of an ongoing conversation between Rebecca Chesney and Rosemary Shirley, which began at a Practising Place event in Liverpool in October 2013 and can be viewed online here.

The next event In-Between Places: Class, Creativity and Contemporary Art is a conversation between artist William Titley and geographer Steve Millington, which will take place in Manchester on Wednesday 15 April 2015. Click here for details.

Practising Place is part of In Certain Places – a programme of artistic interventions and events, led by Professor Charles Quick and Elaine Speight in the School of Art, Design and Performance at the University of Central Lancashire. For more information visit www.incertainplaces.org. 

Rosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. She is author of the book Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Ashgate: July 2015) and she has contributed chapters to the edited collections: Affective Landscapes in Art, Literature and Everyday Life (2015) and Transforming the Countryside (2016). Her research centres on everyday life and visual cultures in historical and contemporary rural contexts. Shirley’s book, Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture, is out now.

Rebecca Chesney is interested in how we perceive land: how we romanticise, translate and define urban and rural spaces. She looks at how politics, ownership, management and commercial value all influence our surroundings, and has made extensive investigations into the impact of human activities on nature and the environment. Exploring the blurred boundaries between science and folklore, her work is also concerned with how our understanding of species is fed by this confused mix of truth and fiction.

Images from top: The Stray Dogs of Mumbai (2013); Map. Volume 1, Coniston, Grizedale Arts, Cumbria (2005/6); Unwanted (2006); The Urban Wilds (2013); The Invaders Archive (2014) — all images courtesy Rebecca Chesney