Notes from meeting 16 November 2011 (UWE Bristol)

Schedule

AM: Individual Petra Kucha style presentations (3 slides/5 minutes per member): images/presentations focused on the Box Project - members introduced 'their' place and shared their current thoughts around the project and how they might re-present their place via the reconfigured museum box

PM: Open discussion on themes emerging from presentations. Updates - website; box project review - other venues/options for display, events and seminars including exhibition at Bath Spa University (Corsham Court); funding; membership and expansion; any other business

Summary of presentations (in alphabetical order)

Suze Adams:

S’Airde Beinn, Mull – and the box came too
People and place (absence and presence of ...)
Edward S Casey: ‘bodies [people] make places’
The elements; ephemeral, transitory
Bodily exposure to place/space
Memories/history
(ancestral) ‘home’ (land) – home?

Linda Ashe:

Castle Cary
Absence and presence
Memory ... childhood
Carrying the past with her in the box
Co-existence of different time-scales
Hiroshi Sugimoto: on time


Jane Bailey:

Delphy Bridge, Bodmin
Deep mapping: engaging with/evoking ‘place’
Interdisciplinary
Inter-connectivity; multiplicity of voices, information, perspectives
Intends to take her box with her to explore its role in new contexts

Iain Biggs:

St Johns Chapel, Weardale
Deep mapping
Family and place; place as vital part of family life
‘Meshings’
Exploration of four valleys around StJC as means to express personal concerns
Imagines the box serving as an equivalent for a card catalogue (photos + other material)

Sarah Eagle:

Her parent’s land (and their ‘relentless activity’ with this land)
Thinking and acting with tools/artefacts (tools ranging from words to technology, from traditional tools to space organisers/signs)
How these tools transform us and how we transform them
Tentative title for her research/box: ‘painting things green’

Sheila Farrell:

The place where she grew up ...
Text and image; language/narrative/meaning
Difficulty with ‘specificitiy’ of place
Placelessness
The Unheimlich
Doris Salcedo: ‘unland’

Lydia Halcros:

Around her house in Bath
Walking; knowing a place on foot/contact with the ground
JG Ballard: ‘walking within personal horizon’
Repetition; cumulative, layering and memory of walks
Traces of the everyday; marks of past activity (stains and spills)
Michel de Certeau, Iain Sinclair

Liz Harding:

Her regular walk in north Gloucestershire
Making; fabric, paint and stitch
Tim Ingold: walking/stitching a ‘line’
A walk stitched; but where should she start and stop, in stages and if so, how to indicate?
Rhythm – of footsteps, of stitch
Box as archive of line taken for a walk

Rob Irving:

Silbury Hill and West Kennet long barrow
Palimpsest
Ancient and modern human activity
Christopher Tilley: ‘ritual’ landscape and Rob: ‘legend’ landscape
Ancestral reverence and human behaviour
Secular and sacred
Authorship and anonymity
Role playing, game playing, performing

Richard Keating:

Stroudwater Canal
Landscape and aesthetics
Inside/outside
Experiential knowing
Action research; walking with other people/other voices included
Drawing as process
How does drawing work to express a ‘relational aesthetic’?

Linda Khatir:

The Tudor House, Dartmouth
History/memory
Fire, smoke and clouds
Remains; absence/presence
Mourning
Original and replica
The archive
Jacques Derrida; deconstructionist approach (Truth in Painting and Archive Fever)
Hubert Damisch (The Real Robinson and A Theory of Cloud)
Duchampian and Fluxus approaches

Davina Kirkpatrick:

Troon, Cornwall
‘Home’
Loss, passing; death and mourning ...

Diana Pilcher:

Near Lynmouth, North Devon
Body and perception (as embodied event)
Barbara Hepworth: ‘moving physically over contours ... through mind, hand, eye’
Dance and movement
Ana Mendieta: body/woman
Resistance/forgiving, vulnerability/mutability
Profane intuition, proximity ...

Hilary Ramsden:

Collaboration/participation (location unknown)
The Situationists
Debord: Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography
Interruption/intervention and conversation
Urban landscape
Documentation and re-telling/re-membering

Penny Somerville:

Cill Rialaig, Ireland
Rootless – nomad and ‘resident’
(from) one place to another
Earlier inhabitants – remains of past activity
Drawing
Presence and absence
Inside/outside

Jacki Storey:

Cape Cornwall
Subverting spaces/objects
Time (and time spent getting to know a place)
Mobility of light to reveal/conceal (light/dark and visual perception)
Freud: the uncanny
Certainty and chance (re pinhole photography)
Movement (actual and implied); mystery, uncertainty
Repetition/multiplication
Absence/presence
Layers; transparency and obscuration

Michele Whiting:

Madeira
The shifting of place; sticky and slippery
Space/place/site and flux
The interval between viewer and installation (self-referential/connection to audience)
The role of writing
Dis-placement
Place internal: connections/associations, ‘the place of psychological interiority’
Shadows: from the corner of the eye, half remembered ...
Time and memory
Assemblages/an archiving of artefacts, a little museum within a museum box
A unity of paradoxes



In conversation: Museum box as a place of becoming ...



A discussion around the concept of ‘Place’ (with emergent themes):

The intangible, the immaterial ...
The slipperyness (and stickiness) of place
The uncanny, the Heimlich/Unheimlich; the ‘estranged familiar’

Common themes that emerged from presentations:
Walking
Time and memory/history
Absence and presence
Inside/outside (physical and psychological)

‘Less of me/more of place’ in final object (reconfigured box)
How to present the work, how to engage audience?
Badiou: the ‘event’ of artist/artwork/viewer – the experience of encounter

A collection of places; the centrality of place to research/project
The tangible and the intangible ... (back where we started)

After the meeting, Richard said that he thought some of the most valuable research happened during the group discussion and that it would be good to have a record of our collective explorations. If everyone is in agreement, I would like to record the next meeting/discussion session so that we can put up an audio file on the blog for future reference.


Venues for exposition of research project

1 Trial show of work at Bath Spa gallery, Corsham Court – July 2012
2 Exposition of work at F Block gallery, UWE Bristol - autumn 2012/spring 2013

(research seminar/event to be held whilst work is on show at Bath Spa and UWE – open up the project to engagement/debate)

3 Bristol City Museum & Art Gallery – Autumn 2012 (Suze in negotiation with museum)
4 Sheila in contact with Birmingham and Manchester museums
5 Diana and Penny to make contact with Exeter Museum & Art Gallery

We did discuss the possibility of taking the project to other venues but decided that the above was plenty to be going on with (the museum connection being obvious/appropriate)

Date for ‘finished’ boxes to be delivered to Bath/UWE: end May 2012

Next meeting to be held at Bath Spa, Corsham Court in early March so that we can collectively assess the space/discuss the project and the use of space/exposition of work next May. Professor Ron George has invited the group to ‘tea’ – Michele and Liz to follow up/book room for meeting etc.


Website

Suze and Michele have already got a holding page and are working to complete the website as soon as possible so that it can go live and be linked to PLaCE/UWE and Bath Spa.

The site will be kept simple. There will be a ‘news’ link to the blog (so everyone can access/easily up-date), an archive (previous projects and publications) and a members page (everyone in the group to be represented by one image and short text with links to email address/individual website).


Funding

We decided to keep the group small and simple so that no-one ends up as a full-time administrator. We also agreed that projects be practical and costs kept to a minimum as we have no on-going funding (again, so that no-one becomes fund-raiser for the group on a regular basis).


Future Members

In order to retain the criticality and focus of the group as a research nexus working on live place-based projects, it was suggested that anyone interested in becoming a member in future be asked to submit three images and a 500 word text for review by members of the group.