Tuesday 23 May 2017

Making a sign






This week I didn't really get much done.  After buying some wood with Patrick I started to re-deck the platform on the old Castle structure.  Then on Thursday some volunteers came from 'Children in Need' and helped dig out an old tree stump and screw some decking boards down.

It was one of those days like many days making things that you only really get to see what you have done in a cumulative way.  It's like clearing a big garden or renovating a house, a full days work hardly touches it.

I am also struggling to be poetic today I think there is a story about every animal having a certain number of heartbeats.  A mouse for example has a fast heart beat and lives a relatively short lifespan.  A tortoises heart beats really slow, like six times a minute and it lives forever. Darwin apparently collected a Tortoise called Harriot in the Galapagos islands in 1835 and it lived until 2006.  It appeared on Blue Peter when I was a kid I remember thinking at the time that it must have a really slow heart beat to live that long but the heart beat thing isn't true it's a made up fact.  The thing about poetry is true though because normally I could say something now with words that would make me feel connected to time and heartbeats but today I have run out of poetic writing. I am like an ancient tortoise and my heart is barely beating but I will live for a long time like Harriot - perhaps to much poetic nonsense can speed things up and kill you.

I am almost tempted to get practical now and think about the artists role in social cohesion, perhaps it is all this talk of Darwin and evolutionary theory.  Historically I always preferred Erasmus to his grandson Charles; Erasmus leading figure in the lunar society, poet scientist poly-math Lunatic  but some days the scientific drive in me to find some glimmer of truth  within a given situation makes me want to take my killing jar and pin something down like a dead butterfly or an idea.

For the record I bought some wood and we had to cut it to fit in the car.  Then I helped to build a big sign that read 'Thank you children in need from Pitsmoor adventure playground' then I took my best camera and took a photo of our volunteers from all over the north holding it up in-front of our dinosaur  aerial slide. I did this because I thought the image would get used and it would promote us nationally.  I took a step away from mending things and did something to look after our funders and raise our profile.  This is one of the things I think I have learned from working in communities but perhaps it's like the speed of an animals heartbeat and doesn't have that much to do with anything.

Monday 15 May 2017

On Death


I have struggled to write about last week at the adventure playground.  I walked the dog in the cemetery before I went to work and bumped into two armed police officers.   They were looking for someone, there had been a shooting the night before.  As I walked around a company were renovating a grave.  Among the headstones that had tumbled in to the spaces left by decaying coffins, fresh cleaned white marble and new flowers, the fresh stone chippings raked like a small zen garden in a world of old decay.

When I saw the grave it reminded me of  Steve Mcqueen artwork 'Ashes' which I saw in 2015.
Macqueen says-

" The only doctrine as an artist is not to allow the dust of the past to settle."

 The work is a screen with two sides on the first is a short film with audio interviews documenting the death and re-burial of the Ashes a beautiful young Grenadian man. The other side shows Ashes sat in the front of a fishing boat, captured on flickering super eight footage in 2002.  Ashes is ultimately himself, individual, vital and alive he is also every young man who dies in violence.

We meet at the playground with Kate and John Diamond and each of us tells our story of the nature of where we are.  The person shot in 96 and taken to hospital.  The death of Venom at the Nottingham cliff park, the armed police sweeping across the bank and all our children bunkered inside the adventure playground castle.  This is our narrative and our counter narrative but when I think about it now I just see dead boys and grieving parents and waste.  I have heard and told these stories many times but I'm not sure what purpose it serves, certainly not a humanising cautionary tale for the victims and the perpetrators of these crimes seem to occupying a parallel world that like a river on a chalk down can vanish for years and flow underground emerging occasionally to remind us that the dust of the past never really gets washed away. 


"I know Ashes as a friend. All of us were young, man. We grew up in one neighborhood. So, it's like we used to live in a ghetto. You understand. All of us dive together. Going fishing, diving, you know, everything. But you know, Ashes is a good guy, a brilliant guy in the ocean. You understand. But with this thing with the drugs thing there, I don't know where he found the drugs. I didn't know. He come out from the island, I just came from school in the evening, cleaning the house. And he came and he walk into the house with all the wet clothes on him, all the sand on his feet, and I ask him 'Ashes, I say what kind of thing is that? Don't you see I am cleaning and you just walk in like that?' He say 'right now, I am rich, I can do anything'. So I turn to him and my next friend turns to him and asks him 'well what?'. He turns and says, 'we found something on the island and we can't spend the money now'. So Kevin turned to him and says 'well just give it back'. We never knew he had found the drugs. You understand. But we go out as normal. And until we, till we hear other talk that they were camping in Isle de Ronde, you understand so they were going below the land, to behind, for the fish and they saw some drugs on the beach, so they saw it and nobody was there so they took it. And then things, some guys came investigating, finding out who is Ashes, who is this, who is that, you understand, who are the other guys. Then they kidnap one guy, I think the one guy say they beat him. So he had to talk for his life. So he talk and he sell out them others. And then they keep one guy, go with him in the van, they drive him around and they ask him to show them who is Ashes. So then the guy shows them who is Ashes. The night we sat down by the bus terminal and somebody came in and say 'Ashes, I just pass some guys in a car asking for you, you know' and Kevin says 'well if so, Ashes you better come out on the road now'. He says 'Man I don't really care you know'. When they came for him they said 'come let's go.' He says, 'I'm not going anywhere with all of you if you have to kill me, kill me here in me people's presence for them to see, I'm not going anywhere' and then they shoot him in the hand for him to let go of what he was holding. And when they shoot him in the hand, he let go but he tried to run and then they shoot him in the back and when he fell one of them guys went over to him and shoot him up around his belly and his legs and thing. And that was about it."

Sunday 7 May 2017

In order to keep on top of things


Friday .  I am reluctant to write today, it is sunny outside and Patrick and Pete have just gone down the pub for a pint.  I have had a day of writing and staring at a screen.  I don't feel like I have got very far. I will leave it here.

Sunday - picking up the thread. On Tuesday spent the day at the adventure playground.  In the morning I mended the aerial runway which was flexing in the ground as young people slid along the zip wire.  Patrick went down it to test it for safety but I wasn't sure if this type of stress test was effective as I suspect it just weakens everything and one day it will just go TWANG and fall to bits regardless of the size of person in transit.

I dug a large trench across the front and braced the structure with some scrap timber. At about 18 inches deep I hit a seam of coal.  Black flaky stuff not suitable to burn but very near the surface. As I got a little deeper I hit ganister.  I remember my friend David Walker Barker  explaining that it was the material that people made crucibles from, I had forgotten what it was called so I emailed him - here is his response,

'It was most likely ‘ganister’ Steve, a deposit rich in silica that made it suitable for making crucibles. It lay directly beneath coal and is sometimes referred to as ‘seat earth’ being the sedimentary deposit formed of remnants of the roots and sediment that the trees that formed the coal were originally rooted in.'

The history under our feet was so easily exposed and provided a poetic and literal link to the city's history yet as I dug and talked I felt my own history unearth itself and this was not such a neat and symbolic metaphor.  It felt like the things that are hidden below the surface of living in a place that has witnessed a history of violence requires both a denial, in order to continue living here, and an acceptance that things will be repeated.  The coal and the ganister are poetic and beautiful reminders of a history that is falling from living memory.  The other reminders of young men's bodies, broken childhoods, the struggle to be seen, the wars people have escaped from and the wars they have created are not as easy to cope with.

I am left today with a inner recognition that this place is not straightforward and by defintion parallel lives are lines that never meet. The playground is a point of parallax a good place to look, like the pirates of our pirate ship with one eye, keep the other over your shoulder and sleep with it open.  Like the coal and the ganister, history is close to the surface.  

No time like the present



I am working with Patrick at the adventure playground every Tuesday. We have decided to talk, do and then work with the kids when they arrive at half three.  This week we got talking about building a pirate ship.  Pirates are in many ways utopian  as they live in the sea and don't obey the normal rules.  Pirates represent freedom.  I remember being shocked to discover that pirates wear an eye patch as they have to give one eye to the sea.  This is due to damage through siting a sextant on the sun at noon everyday to work out the angle of latitude. Pirates literally burn their eyes out trying to find where they are. Like Oedipus they eventually have to pay for the things they have seen with their sight.  I think proper pirates like Blackbeard or Captain Pugwash don't care where they are and are happy to float with full vision in an ocean of doubt.

So the plan that emerged mainly out of my head is to make a pirate ship.  We hope to launch the finished thing on September 19th which just happens to be International Talk Like A Pirate Day, ah ha me ship mates. From the perspective of the Taking yourself seriously project, its made me think of the  idea of having an idea and how that makes you want to realise it. This is one of those things we talk about a lot and say that it is something artists do - like looking really hard at something really normal like an olive or a door stop.  The fact is that everybody or most people or a certain type of person that likes a mission will work in this way.  It may be building, a shed, growing cactus or restoring a car - artists are not the only people to have a mission.  What I am now thinking through for this project is the possibility that in certain contexts the specific type of mission artists have and their ability through experience, training and cultural capitol to realise them can be specific and of value. The mission could be writing a book, performing a play, capturing a scene in paint, film or pixel or, if I push things further than is necessary, building a giant pirate ship.

I feel like I now need to credit Tim Neal as many years ago he would talk of how by asking certain questions we create rather than question the problems that the question defines.  Not to put Tim down Ernst Bloch says a similar thing in his treatise on wisdom.  Not to go to around the houses, Bloch suggests that philosophy as invented by the Greeks is a bit shit and as soon as someone asked the question 'Why are we here?' we were fucked because it's impossible to answer this great big ontological mystery of life and worse than this the only thing that can help us live with the great unknowing of why, is the inadequate development of the very philosophy that messed us up in the first place.  So here it is 'Is a giant pirate ship for kids to play on for the next ten years art?' to which I need to reply by drawing from my close reading of some of the greatest French philosophers of the last 50 years from Deleurs  to Foucault from Bouriard to Rancier, 'who gives a shit?'

After about an hour of talking I got a 'no time like the present feeling' -and went off to buy wood to patch up the castle I had made in 2001 - I worked hard all day even during a hail storm.  I was really pleased I was able to do something practical.  My friend Lucy walked past and waved and I shouted back about our hangovers from Sunday night drinking.  Her kids play on the castle and I was pleased she had witnessed me doing something useful.

History


I took this image in 2001, I was building the wooden castle in the background.  My friend Steve Edwards was a great play-worker and I have a memory of sitting on the platforms we built together sharing saltfish and ackee that his Gran would deliver and drinking loads of full sugar pop to give us energy.   I don't think this was the first time I got involved with the adventure playground, I had walked past it a lot since moving into our house in 1992 but playgrounds do not seem important when you don't have kids.  As my own children got bigger we would go down there a bit, but not really that often.  My kids were not really adventure playground children, it was a more occasional sunny day thing, I think they never felt one hundred percent comfortable there.

My first encounter with Patrick was probably 1998 when he came to the playground as a new play leader.  To be honest I don't remember much about this time other than his very blond hair and the fact we drank tea together in long grass that smelt damp but the sun was out, perhaps it was spring or it had just rained.  I remember not really understanding what the playground did or why it was there.  It felt like a very urban thing, I grew up in the countryside where the farm or the greenhouse became the playground, it's not quite the same in a city where the rules on waste-ground seem more prescriptive.  In the country space is more up for grabs.

As my children got bigger and I moved further away from doing anything other than looking after them, the adventure playground became a place where I had a chance to do practical things, to build and to make and for the things I built and made to have a value.  After graduating in fine art I had a phase of making sculptures that had no connection to the outside world.  This period of life is well illustrated by the construction of an air brick tester which consisted of a set of bellows and an device to hold an air brick.  When you pumped the bellows, air would flow through the brick.  Air would always flow through the brick, the pointless nature of the air brick tester was the point but the point in the end felt pretty pointless.  I kept the contraption in my cellar for a year or so then took it to the tip and reused the bellows to make something else and then took that to the tip.

Making play equipment ticked lots of the same boxes as making sculpture, it used the same bit of my brain.  The cogs that trundle around as the problem at hand is logically worked through, the making and shaping of materials, the bending them to your will, the irony and absurdity of what is constructed and the things that are unexpected that emerge from materialising something out of nothing.  These were and are important things for me, they ground me and distract me, they are not something I'm naturally good at, I have to work at it. I say this not from modesty more from working with people who are very talented with their hands. I value the space of calm, dirty hands, an aching body, being reliant on the help of others, realising something that only lives in your head.  The building of play equipment is worthwhile because of the future life, The thousands of imaginings and memories, the landscape of childhood, the creation of a shared place of play.

Patrick did a great job at the adventure playground then.  There were a few other people; a man called Ralph then a space where there was trouble, or talk of trouble, two women workers threatened with a knife.  Then Steve came along and sorted out any trouble.  He had been head doorman at The Unit, a tough old club  in town. He put his success in keeping on top of things down to his network of African Caribbean Grandmas who would police their grandchildren and demand respect.  At this time things got complex as our area was successful in bidding for New deal for communities funding.  This happened in 2000 Alice was 2, Tom was 4, and Holly was 6 .  I had been at home with them for six years and although not ready for work I was ready for something else.  I sat on the advisory board and flung myself into the mix of toxic local and national politics, I can't remember how long this lasted but I did get in to deep, became to frustrated and probably from the accounts of others, a little overbearing.  Again the adventure playground presented itself as a place where I could do something constructive.  Me and my friend Lisa, who was an artist that had given up on art, set up a group called the Pitsmoor Adventure playground Users Group.  We managed by hook and by crook to raise £80,000, we did lots of work, paid for far too much time planning new buildings that would never get built but essentially pushed to make sure the Council kept the funding in place to staff it.

The reason for this was a feeling we both had about our area's capacity to run things, the population is transitory, waves of migration move through, peoples' day to day needs conflict with the future.   Understandably, the long term strategic planning needed to support a playground didn't and doesn't  get prioritised.  When I look at the adventure playground I'm reminded of  Ruskin's quote about his inability to feel angry when looking at a penguin.  There are things that are difficult and hard to deal with yet the purpose of the playground and it's ability to bind community together, to provide a place for people from all backgrounds and cultures to rub up against each other, in many ways a place my community can feel proud of - it is almost impossible to feel negative about the work we do there. Essentially this is why I return, this is why I take myself seriously there.  Much of the other work I find myself doing reminds me of the air brick tester that lived in my cellar and ended up at the tip.