Phoenix and all that...The Wall-less Mural and The a-n Re:view Bursary

This is a weird one as I’m writing with two platforms of readers in mind, my ‘regulars’ who’ve come with me so far and any new readers via a-n magazine’s blog. I’m not able to work out how to begin at the very beginning, that’s just not fair for any of us! So, I’ll take it from here and continue as normal and see how we go. OK?

The reason for the second blog strand is that I recently received an a-n re:view bursary and part of the requirements on receiving it is to talk about it via the a-n blog. Fair enough. I got all bamboozled at the thought of writing two blogs, as if I had to split it and talk to one (like an old mate) and the other (a-n) like a newcomer. Then I thought, flippeneck stop thinking about it and just write! Sometimes honestly the things you spend time on...

I’ll just get straight to it.

I received the a-n re:view bursary to help me to lift one of my projects off a dead end street (by crane) and give it another go, it’s third go.

The Mural Project came to a grinding halt and I was stuck. In concrete. Fixed. It was scary. And in my head, everyone was looking. Waiting...TICK TOCK, TICK TOCK. Waiting for my next move, I didn’t have one. Panic.  What do I do?

shadow drawings - planning the mural

Then it started to dawn on me, nobody else is looking, nobody else is even thinking about it, they’re thinking about their own concrete, or cornflakes or whatever. I don’t enter their heads, of course I don’t! They just think that I’ve hit another obstacle to navigate, they think I will navigate it and actually weren’t panicking at all. I don’t know who ‘they’ are but find myself thinking way too much about what they think. In my head all the people I’d worked with on this project, The L5 Mural, were sitting there with nothing else to do but wonder what I was doing and getting more and more disappointed in me the longer I took to figure out how to reach the right tool to start chipping me out of that concrete. They were getting impatient; surely? I thought I’d failed them. Them and me.

There’s an argument for walking away, but there’s a bigger argument to stay.

After many months of anger, resentment, and blank landscapes where creative thought used to be I finally started to look at what I’d amassed, collected, recorded along the way, there was so much interesting, beautiful raw material, particularly film footage taken by Stephen, thank God he thought of it. I would've been gutted now without footage of Granton Road coming down. Other stuff is from my phone. Raw is the word. This was the turning point. I’d met people involved in the ‘film world’ along the way whilst trying to make the mural, I’d always planned to have the actual 'mural making' onsite filmed by professional film makers who I also trusted to respond to the project as a whole within thier production. 

I thought I had something. 

It was vague but made my belly flutter like it hadn’t done since the project took a fatal blow and it’s knees buckled last September.

shadow drawings - planning the mural

The new idea.

A film plus another work – the two will go hand in hand but at this stage I’ll keep the other idea under wraps. Too much too soon can sometimes become overwhelming. For me!

A film though!!?? I’ve never made a film. Anyone who knows my work will have heard this before. “I’ve never made a (pick a work).” It annoys me; my own ideas annoy me! A film about the process of trying to make a mural in an area that couldn’t be more complex if it tried, during a major regeneration project that has stop-started since 2002.  The mural was something I’d hoped would flag us up, add something, bring people too, share issues with, educate via, brighten, enlighten, demonstrate pride, defiance maybe? Ultimately show we were worth it. 

With the film I have an opportunity to look at this journey and the story that underpins it all. At this stage I know who to approach and have already had a couple of initial chats with the chosen ‘mentors’ – it’s the preparation for the preparation stage. The pre, pre, pre, pre-production. I’ve no idea what’s going to happen but I know receiving the bursary in the first place gave me a timely boost that the work I’d been doing for the past two years may not have been in vein.

combining ideas from Arch Bishop Beck workshops