Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Artinliverpool on Coming Home



Patrick from Artinliverpool.com came to visit us and discuss Coming Home Liverpool...


Feature: Coming Home, working on Liverpool


Come Home's new banner? artwork by Ronnie Hughes' granddaughter, Ellie
Coming Home, working on LiverpoolInterview with Ronnie Hughes & Jayne Lawless
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
I would struggle to name a local crisis that hasn’t been picked up on by artists, but one that made headlines when it was, was the Turner Prize winning Granby4Streets; the redevelopment of a community with art at the heart of the project. Then travel to the other side of the city, and find Homebaked, a project from a former Biennial, creating local opportunities and voices to people affected by Housing Market Renewal.
I met with two of the most influential members of those projects last week, to talk about their new collaboration, Coming Home.
It’s not an art project, in fact it’s really quite far from it, but it has been enabled by creative voices, and creative thinking. Jayne Lawless, one of the two directors (though formerly Artist in Residence), has developed an influential arts practice throughout her career. Ronnie Hughes, Jayne’s partner in crime, might not be an artist, but there is no denying the creativity and passion spilling out of his head into everything he touches.
This article might read as quite surreal in the scale of some of the comparisons I’m about to make, but that is the result of genuine excitement about the scope of what is currently happening in our city.
Look back to a recent exhibition of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood at Walker Art Gallery though, and you might begin to understand what I mean. For over a century, perhaps as a result of DaDa and the ideas surrounding that movement, art has been a visual thing, something bound to galleries, separate from court and academia, at least in a public perception. But at the time when the work in that exhibition was being produced, artists were people of influence.
Not simply the influence of fashion, or of culture, but of politics and social change. Upward mobility was hugely achievable by those who chose a career in the arts. But then something happened, perhaps Art Deco, perhaps the availability of design, or of mass production. Art became a commodity rather than a comment, and over many years it has clawed its way back, and now it is plain to see, in local communities that are building voices and making change happen. Not just in whether or not we do something, but in how we do it.

Ronnie and Jayne in one of the Granby4Streets houses
Ronnie and Jayne in one of the Granby4Streets houses

I wanted to know more about these two though, and more about why they were doing what they were doing. The biggest influence on them seems to be community space, or, as Ronnie said “We’ll drive into an area in a van that says Coming Home”:
So what is Coming Home?
Ronnie: Well, Coming Home is a way of getting all of the empty homes in Liverpool, potentially in the country back, into use. We’re an open source project and we’ll help you set one up if you like.
We’ve got 260,000 empty homes in the country, we’ve got 9000 in Liverpool. It’s just too many. Especially as we have a housing crisis where people are either living in decently priced very poor accommodation, or decent quality accommodation that they’re paying through the nose for. Neither of them are right so there’s loads of people in housing need right across the spectrum.
We’ve got investment in Coming Home and we reckon we can attract more as we go along to be able to bring money into the empty homes. The way we see it, some empty homes are empty because people are sitting on the property until the property value goes up, but most people would probably bring homes back into use if they just had the relatively small amount of money it would take to do it. But who’s got £5-6,000 hanging around doing nothing? Hardly anyone. We can bring the money in to help them to get the home back into use.
We want to know what’s going on in each street, what’s the story? Generally, empty homes occur in ones and twos in streets, so we want to get them before the street starts growing the kind of blight that you see in Welsh Streets, or that you saw in Granby. Because once there’s a few empty homes in a place, everybody who can leave does.
So we’re trying to deal as early as we can with the empty homes before they fall in to serious disrepair. The longer houses are empty the more its costs to fix even the smallest faults. Y’know, the small leak becomes the serious structural damage. We ought to get in as early as we can to stop that happening. It’s quite a simple idea.
Jayne: So basically, say for arguments sake, you inherited a house, but the house is in a worse state than the one you’re living in but you haven’t got the £10,000 it might take to get it back up to speed. Well Ronnie and I have got a loan from the Beautiful Ideas Company.
We had to pitch Ronnie’s model on how to get around that. We’ll get everyone in, we’ll organise the builders, and the legal side of it. You just have to say, “Look, we’ve got no money”. We put in the 5 or 6 grand (at the moment up to £10,000). And when you rent it out, we’ll take the rent until we’re paid back.
That’s it. That’s quite simply how it works. And, like Ronnie said, we want to take care of Liverpool, but its open source. So say, a group from Newcastle wanted to do the same thing. Well we just give them the model.
It’s not just about the money though, it’s about having the will. There are a lot of people who could do it that don’t.
You’re an artist Jayne, and Ronnie, your background’s in housing and social enterprise, but also as a filmmaker working within creative projects as well. How does art fit into all of this, what role does it play?
Ronnie: Well it was a conscious decision. If regeneration in the standard way was going to work it would’ve worked years ago. But I think regeneration’s too mechanistic. It continually fails to involve the people who are going to live in the houses.
Jayne: I learned so much from Jeanne van Heeswijk, the Biennial artist, brought in to produce Homebaked in Anfield. When she was brought in, she was the one who insisted that if it was to be in an area like ours she had to be there for a minimum of four years. I work the same way, I’ve done loads of residencies. I always think of myself as an artist in residence in whatever I’m doing. Because I’m me.
So Coming Home isn’t something I separate. And watching what Jeanne did, and watching what she did all over Europe really inspired me, seeing first-hand the power of art. You don’t have to go around giving it a name and calling it art. It just is, because, I am. It just is because Jeanne is. It’s how people live, and artists tend to be autobiographical. You’re not separating your life. You don’t stop. You don’t go over to the corner and say, I’m going to go and be an artist. It’s all the time.
It’s all about the creative mind, and how you think. Like Ronnie says, he knows everybody in housing, but they tick boxes, and have to stay within guidelines. We know that we don’t need a list, you can make it up as you go.
Ronnie: Since we kicked into operation three weeks ago, it’s been an intense dialogue between us two about how we’re doing this.
How are we doing this? What would work? And we are deepening the original idea by exploring it. By going out and exploring places, seeing places, engaging people, talking to them. Y’know.
Jayne: And every scenario that’s happened so far, we just didn’t think would happen. I always say to Ronnie, it’s like I’m doing a degree, and he’s my mentor. And as I say, through Granby and through Homebaked and talking all over Europe about CLTs, we know that there’s this room to get it out of just the housing question.
And we know from doing the Heseltine lecture that people are genuinely interested in what artists think for a change.
Ronnie: I think one of the most interesting things is our dialogue. We’ll sit and talk it through with other people. This is the fourth time we’ve done this in the last week, sat in front of a Dictaphone (second time today). This is the art of coming home; Conversation.
Jayne: What’ll happen is, whoever we’re sitting with, having this debate, this discourse. They’ll go off and get back to you, and tell you what they’re thinking.
The people who tell us what we should – we’ve banned the word should – be doing… We just have to look and say, “Well yeah, we’ll go solve world hunger while we’re at it.”
Ronnie: We’re not even about empty shops, we’re about homes. That’s enough. That’s complex enough in itself.
Jayne: We got really fed up in the Bakery with people saying, “Here’s what you should do.” But all you can think is, “Why don’t you?”
I remember at Heseltine, one guy in particular who said “Well it’s all well and good highlighting it, but what are you going to do next?”
Ronnie: Well this. This is the answer to what we’re doing next. Jayne’s film was the background, and Coming Home is the response.
Jayne: Ronnie came up with the name, Coming Home. Because we wanted this to be about Homes, not houses. It had to have that poetics of space.
Ronnie: Housing in the old sense is about coming into an area to ‘save’ it. How dare they? How dare they call this street or that street something that needs revitalising? That street’s perfectly fine, but up the other end is an empty house. It’s about working out what the people on that street most need, and who most needs this house. And that’s not done by badmouthing an area. Is not done by driving into the area in a van that says those things on the side. We’ll drive into an area in a van that says ‘Coming Home’.
Jayne: From the arts perspective it’s trying to cancel out the cold or clinical. When you see the word Housing, people just repel! What I tried to do with the film (Ghost Mural, with Janet Brandon) was to try and make it beautiful. An example though: The love I get from the film by Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, I’ve never since been so moved by a piece of art. I stumbled across it in the Tate, and I’ve still not gotten over it. So you’ve got gritty work like that that blew me away, but then I’ll stand and stare at Autumn in Murnau by Kandinsky. Well how do they marry up? That’s what I see here. You can still tell a political story, whether its art or housing, and make it poetic.
You can still make that something, stunning.
Ronnie: We learned from how we did the Granby Houses too. There’d been a few problems on the first few houses, but once we got the right contractor we settled into them. We worked on them with great care and loads of ideas. Some of the best ideas were had by the tradespeople working on the houses.
Jayne: You’ve got spend time in a space. Even the office here. How many times have I changed my mind about what colour these walls are going to be? I’ll make my mind up when I’ve settled.
Ronnie: And in Granby we all skit at the Turner – even the builders. One day, one of the plasterers had gone off for a driving lesson, and the builders called me into the house. They said “we’ve done a sculpture”. He’d taken all his plastering clothes off in the house and put his real-world clothes back on. The others had laid his plastering clothes out on the floor, and his tools, and his helmet, and they were joking “look, it’s the Turner Prize sculptor”.
In Granby, the prize gave everybody working on the houses permission to enter the dialogue, and those last three houses so peaceful in the way they feel. The way they were made.
So now, we want to do beautiful peaceful houses that feel like that, and know who’s coming into them.
Jayne: Unless we’ve got, y’know, some people who are really into the Prodigy, and they don’t want a peaceful house. They want to go wild.
Ronnie: Space for them to be themselves.
  •  Find out more about Coming Home here

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Coming Home.



What happened to the girl who's dreams fell out? Did you ever finish that story? I wondered what happened to her...” Janet, one of my best friends, asked me the other night.

The question launched a conversation that saw us bounding from subject to subject into the night, unaware of the people changing around us in the pub as we unpicked, dissected, unravelled and untangled our own stories of the past few years. Those conversations you have that make the world right and make you feel good and clear and loved and understood. One of them ones.

We've been friends since we met about 20 years ago at The Empire Theatre, we were both dressers and worked on Phantom of the Opera together so our friendship started in a surreal bubble and I think when we're together we re-enter that bubble to try to fix things. Doesn't always work, but I'd say 8 times out of 10 you feel better than were you started. She recently moved back home after living away for some years. I am so glad she's come home. A common thread that's weaved it's way through my life for so long, coming home, what is home? A thread that is becoming more than thread, it's becoming rope, so strong and so obvious and linking all my work and life for the last 10 years.




Home? 2005 - installation using found objects and joined by dogs. Bucowiec, Poland




So this question at the start, 'what happened to the girl who's dreams fell out?' In answering – led to another question, “so, tell me who Ronnie is again?”

These two questioned kind of book end my last three years. I've promised as part of my new role as Artist in Residence of Coming Home that I'll begin to write my blog again. Pick up what I started as a requirment of my last residency, The Bridge Guard, in Slovakia at the end of 2012 start of 2013.

http://www.bridgeguard.org/en/


There's been blogs since about my film project. But the last on that was so long ago too.

In order to start again I need to clear my head of all the blog posts that I didn't write. I want to let them go. I didn't write them and the moment is gone.

A huge hole. A gap in time. I fell into it along with, 'the girl who's dreams fell out', a short story I started writing whilst artist in residence in Slovakia.

I lost my Mum last summer. It makes me cry to type it but I'm going to carry on and not stop even though the keyboard's becoming blurred. If I stop I will never get through this first blog post and I promised Ronnie.

I want to ask my Mum something, something she was famed for, something every family member and friend of hers will recognise that would arrive on your phone like clockwork as soon as you arrived on holiday,

Where are you now? What are you doing? X”

Mum?





I want to move forward, sideways, something, somewhere. I want to tell people about what's happening again. I want to share that we, as in me, Janet (a different Janet) and Gaz made a beautiful film. I'm so proud of it and it's already had it's first screening with more to follow. 
I want to start sharing this kind of stuff again.

I want to share the new project I'm starting to work on with Ronnie and Jen, Coming Home. But I couldn't until I said what I did up there. My keyboard is wet from tears. It's raining outside, I have a slight hangover after last nights final, but I'm OK.

A break...





A brief reintroduction of things happening.

The film, Without These Walls, accompanied with Ghost Mural. Seeing as the film grew out of the mural project (well documented in past blog posts) I had to have a mural in one form or another, Ghost Mural, a projection is now able to travel and can't ever be bulldozed.


Ghost Mural 2016, projection on a gable end on Oakfield Rd. Photo by Andrea Ku.


I worked with Janet Brandon and Gary O'donnel on the film. Here's two links to reviews from the night that made us all feel proud.

Please read them and think about possible screenings too. I'm open to ideas as the whole point was to get what happened to my parents and many others 'out there.' It's so easy to overlook things that aren't directly effecting you. We do it all the time. I can't bring my Mum or our house back but when it comes to big decisions being made in the future that effect peoples lives we can change the way policy makers work or include accountability clauses and new models that forces engagement with the communities they intend on 'fixing.' They should consider the model of 'residencies,' used widely in the creative industries before even being allowed to submit a proposal to implement such schemes as HMRI.






model of Granton Rd made by Janet Brandon, original photographs Jessica Doyle


So the last question from Janet, '...who's Ronnie again?”

For those of you who know me will also know my 'job job,' the one that pays the bills (well one of them) is as a painter, of peoples houses, not canvases (although I'd like to try that one day soon) and no, not murals, decorate, pure and simple. 
It was while I was working on Ronnie and Sarah's house last year that we really became friends. I'd painted their house inside and out and we shared the worst moment of my life, they've been nothing but golden since. We'd met before through the bakery, (Homebaked) that I've spoken of many times in this blog, but it was whilst working at Ronnie's house we'd talked about ideas and homes and houses and everything that could possibly link to having a roof over your head and a base. So when he told me just recently about 'Coming Home' and wanted to know if I was happy to get involved I just knew this was it, on a personal level something positive for me to dive into, but on a societal level we could really really change things.

In his own words,

https://asenseofplace.com/2016/04/24/introducing-coming-home/


So, as well as all the practical stuff of doing up an empty house, learning all the aspects to how we'll actually do it from start to finish, there's the freedom to work collaboratively and on individual projects too. Something both Jen and I are excited about, Jen is a writer. The possibilities and openness of this project is the most interesting part. Can you imagine someone hiring a writer and an artist to start this kind of project? Well Ronnie has. One step to showing those that 'do and say' from behind desks that there's a more organic and people centred way of doing things.

I think I am most looking forward to learning from scratch from a person who's been involved in housing since the 70's. Looking forward to housing people and making those individual connections and ultimately making homes beautiful again, offering a family a safe haven.



I hope, no...scrap that, I know you're still reading Mum.