Location for creative text

This is an image from Lulu Quinn's work, which both makes me laugh, and I think asks an important question about what text in the environment does, or can do.

Permanent or Temporary?

I’ve spent the last few weeks developing proposals for an arts programme to complement a regeneration scheme (hence the blog silence!). It was an intense and very interesting piece of work which threw up some key issues for me about public art and the idea of permanence.
The area I was working in is a mix of marshland/nature reserve and industrial estate. The funding for an extensive scheme of infrastructure and public realm improvements comes from central government and from Europe, and is, very specifically, for capital spend; in other words, for ‘stuff’.
Yet working in this area, walking, talking, reading, and walking some more, it became evident that a lot of the reasons why the natural resources are underused are psychological and emotional as well as physical. In addition, thinking about physical art work in this context is difficult. The area’s ‘charm’ is in its emptiness, it view, its industrial nature; some of the area’s problems are to do with having too much clutter – too many signs, bollards, fences etc. Would putting ‘pieces’ of art there not just mean adding more clutter to a cluttered landscape?
For me, a programme of temporary interventions, temporary signage projects, and text pieces that would generate interest and intrigue, but would eventually disappear, make sense in this context. For me, creating a role for art to engage local residents and employees in rethinking their area, and developing new relationships with a place on their doorstep, through participatory projects that build relationships and lasting partnerships, has a stronger resonance and potential than a series of permanent art commissions.
And yet the funding that exists is for ‘things’, and so the only option if you insist on taking the ‘participatory, temporary approach’ is to look elsewhere for additional funds. The other tension here is whether you end up arguing ‘against art’; whether you end up saying it is better not to spend this funding on permanent pieces of art because it isn’t the right place for them. In doing so are you failing to fight the ‘art’ fight? Or are you trying to be genuine in your response to a specific place? Linda France said something interesting to me the other week: artists need to be humble, she said, and advised writers with public art commissions to “ask yourself would a tree be better here?” But isn’t that complicated when the artist has been commissioned by someone whose funding and agenda insists that there should be something there, even if a tree might be a preferable option?

City of Stories

I am working for the British Council in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on a project called City of Stories. I will be back in the UK in early March, doubtless with tales to tell about writing, cities, orangutans and Laksa...

Poetry on Hoardings on Greenwich Peninsula

A poem created by myself and year 3 students at Millennium Primary School as part of Almost an Island? has been used as part of a commission by artist Faisal Abdu'Allah - the piece is called In The Same Place and consists of a temporary lightbox attached to the hoardings on John Harrison Way, opposite Greenwich Millennium Village.

Spatial Writing?

Speaking to Donna Daley-Clarke recently about the residency she did at Cabot Circus shopping centre in Bristol last year, I was struck by a comment she made: about her interest in the processes of construction, and that had she had more time for the residency she would have liked to explore whether she could find her writing process in these construction processes. I am really interested in this – in whether writing in the context of regeneration requires us to think differently about the way we write, and the form we write in. Can there be a spatial writing? Jane Rendell at the Bartlett is doing interesting work in this area, with her project Site-Writing. At a recent lecture she asked “can writing be architecture, rather than just talk about architecture?” There is something here, that I can’t quite get to grips with, something about writing creating rather than just reflecting space and place…

Glocal Imaginaries

I recently put together a conference abstract for Glocal Imaginaries, a really interesting looking conference which marks the end of the research project Moving Manchester. I’ve been continuing the thinking I started when I wrote a paper for Playing in Urban Spaces at Leeds Metropolitan University in October 2008 (available to download from A Place For Words). Through discussing the idea of writing as an active process that can engender change, I keep returning to the question of how this model – of a powerful writer – intersects with democratic ideas of place and aspirations towards conversation and participation. I keep tying myself up with questions about readers and writers and texts. I think a lot of the work I’m interested in is about how people’s relationship with place can change positively when they engage with it creatively through writing. So where does that leave the text? And who is the reader?

Conversation, collaboration - a network?

I interviewed the poet Linda France about her work with poetry and public art last week. Discussing teaching a module on text and public art at Newcastle University, she talked about how she found the module a valuable forum for discussion and creative debate. She said: “There is no canon, no critique for this work – we are creating it ourselves, and so we have to keep talking. This is a collaborative process which will only move on and grow through conversation.”
Her thoughts echoed my own about the need for collaboration and conversation to realise the potential of working in this field. I am currently thinking about the best way to create a network of interested people from across different disciplines, which can facilitate debate as well as partnerships that will result in specific projects.
I am thinking about programming a ‘trial’ programme of networking events in London, which will be mirrored and supported with some kind of online life/networking/forum opportunity. Any thoughts or suggestions would be gratefully received.