Dead Pigeon Gallery and beyond...

Stranger Things made me write 'and beyond...' after the title of this blog and I probably need stop ending things with divvy 'spooky' sayings - but it's a temporary wonder and will fade! 

It's a cracking bit of telly though and did ultimately get me thinking about our recent show and the creation of Dead Pigeon Gallery in the then semi derelict warehouse on Kempston St, around the back of TJ's, Liverpool.

Why? Well, it's stupidly simple, they both made me really happy. There's some connect between enjoying the process and the camaraderie of making DPG happen, and the joy of having your nostalgia button pinged by a show that openly nods to all your faves from growing up in the 80's. I think it's technically known as glee. Glee and feeling fulfilled. We honestly felt like kids at times during the gallery open days, something we all commented on but nobody really talks about as being something really important to a project, the behind the scenes stuff and the ability to laugh. I think laughing is very underestimated, we tend to take things a little too seriously at times and I was determined to keep the group open and friendly (another overlooked word) and have laughter and piss taking as standard fair.

post show catch-up at The Cally minus Patrick, Erika and Col

This experience is a shared history now, and that's a solid thing to have with a group of people you like working with, a good platform, just like the communal glow of remembering scenes from Stand By Me or E.T and The Goonies. (Or insert your 'go to' film) I think there's still a lot of snobbery around Fine Art, people feeling they can't compare or reference popular culture or use words such as 'friendly' or 'nice' or 'Goonies' - but I've never bought into that. In fact I'm fed up of people generally judging other people as to what they may or may not watch on TV or choose to read. 

Erika Rushton, Plasterers Pigeon Lady 1, 2017

This issue of language and acceptance of certain styles and approaches was highlighted of late in having to write an artist statement, I could never do 'art speak' and always maintain that the art work should speak for itself, but I know there's got to be an intro to what you do and accept that. It's the specific art language, the uniform style I find tedious and disconnected. I know some reading this from the art world may think it's just standard practice so get over it, but does anyone anywhere honestly find artist statements interesting? Unless you come across one that isn't 'artist statementy'!? 
To everyone else reading this who doesn't know what I'm talking about you're missing absolutely nothing!

I still haven't written one.

Anyway, I digressed.

In between the show and now there was a trip to the States with Pa to en*joy*dure, an epic tale if ever there was, 'training it' as in, on a train, from NY to Boston to Chicago to Kansas to Phoenix. The trips were long, the trains where tired, the passengers were noisy when you wouldn't expect them to be, the views incredible. My Dad lost a hearing aid on day two.

Josie Jenkins, Willow Pattern Stories, 2017 acrylic on canvas

Jane MacNeil, Workers at Coming Home's First House, 2017 digital c-type prints

The show had just come down when we set off for America so it was really fresh in my mind. I got to share and talk about it with some of my friends dotted across the States, it was like having a new fresh audience, the feeling was positive and one of the most noted things was the acceptance of the name, and the fact that everyone seems to warm to it. I'd felt it had legs months ago but this was a good nod that there was something to build on here.

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Jason Hollis, Coalescense, 2017 spray paint and plaster on plaster board

I've talked about how the name and project came about but for anyone who doesn't know the outline is...

Whilst working on Coming Home Liverpool, (set up to look at why houses where empty and what could be done about it), photographer Jane McNeil came along on site visits with us documenting the people working on site doing up a house. I was particularly taken with four shots she'd taken of plasterers, I felt they had a beautiful poetic quality and equally felt the subject matter was something intrinsic to the project and the amount of time, people and work it takes to do up a house and therefor a compelling aspect to hone in on. The lads from Penny Lane Builders where really good letting us take their photos and I'll come back to them in a bit.

Clementine Simon, Joe's Pigeon, 2017

Joe Farrag

my work, The Plasterers, patiently being put up by Frank Moore

I took the photos and ran with it a while, eventually having the idea to invite other artists and writers to respond too, in the end there were ten of us plus two works by Adrian Henry. This was a surprising and totally unexpected addition coming after chatting to Polly Mossley who said she thought of Adrian's work, specifically his dead city birds paintings, after reading about Dead Pigeon Gallery in my previous blog post.. This led to meeting Catherine Marcangeli and selecting two works of his to be in the show. I was thrilled about this.

Catherine Marcangeli - picking up in Adrian's work in Marie Gray's car (who would ever see that coming, Marie is my former maths teacher from Notre Dame that became an honorary DPG member)

The space, a former printers plus many other uses over the years owned by Jason Abbot, had been empty a good while when we first showed up and, as now I think everyone knows, was literally full of dead pigeons so was referred to as the 'bit with dead pigeons in', 'the gallery space with the light on the top floor', the 'Dead Pigeon Gallery'.

'yanno...the bit with the dead pigeons, the gallery space with the light, the 'dead pigeon gallery'

The artists and writers responded to themes connected to Coming Home Liverpool in general, plasterers or some took the dead pigeon route. 

What resulted was a show, the first I'd curated on my own, in a series of works made specifically for the exhibition that also all shared the exact same timeline. The works resonated with each other and the space. There was a solid relationship as everything had developed from the exact same starting point. 

The space itself had become a building site, cleared of dead birds and filled with noise and workmen with their radio station tuned to 80's classics. That was perfect as the whole story of the exhibition was inspired by building work. We worked alongside the lads from DROSINOS who accommodated us being there and went out of their way to help us get the space fit enough for public entry (after signing a disclaimer obviously!) 

OK, to the work. Marie Gray (my former Notre Dame maths teacher) and I went for a drive the other day to The Lakes and she started asking me questions about what kind of influences had gone into the work I'd done from the show. 

We were standing in John Ruskin's house at the time and looking at wallpaper he'd designed, Marie had remarked on how he'd taken one symbol from one place and incorporated it into his design. This led to telling her how my final piece for the show had been heavily influenced by a trip to Chester Cathedral and specifically the tiles on the floor, which in turn reminded me of the tiles I'd photographed and drawn in domestic settings in Portugal. This was all incorporated into the final piece after waking up one night with this doodle in my head involving one of the plasterers surrounded by elaborate and brightly coloured tiles.

a middle of the night sketch - plasterer and tiles

She asked if anyone else knew this and that it should documented, I told her only famous artists get their work documented! But I did see her point, that I hadn't really spoken about the making of the work itself.

I had four works, each work made up of four sheets of A1 laid out on the studio floor, the photo of a plasterer taped up near to the ground so I could see it. I used sticks about a meter long, with either charcoal/pencil/acrylic pen or an oil based paint pen taped to the end to draw with. 

big pencil taped to the end of a stick to draw with

This was for two main reasons. I liked the scrappy style of drawings I'd been making with an edding pen (water soluble pen) in my smaller sketch books and was trying to get that same 'feel' to that quality of line but on a much larger scale. Catherine (Dalton) had suggested using the 'stick and ink' technique, as that would give me less control of the marks, I liked this idea and remembered I'd tried it before while at the Bridge Guard Residency in Slovakia. It also meant I could stand up and see the whole drawing while working on it rather than be close to one particular area at a time. 

It was also very reminisce of painting and decorating and constantly having to fashion brushes on the end of sticks or poles with masking tape to reach difficult bits of ceilings...This of course then tied into the subject of the artwork too and it made sense to me that the actual making of the piece itself was very active, standing in it like when you're painting a room or a plasterer is plastering a wall.

original photo's by Jane MacNiel of Penny Lane Builders working on a house in Walton - a Coming Home house

Attaching various things to the end of sticks and drawing - standing in the drawing! This one is a fat charcoal stick

charcoal smudger

process

drawing made with an oil based pen on a stick then areas painted over with emulsion house paint

hanging the drawings out on the line

Then came the trip to Chester Cathedral to see a show called ARK - it was an incredible sculpture show, the work and the relationship with the space was an joy to behold. It's finished now but there's a link here showing the some of the work and artists involved:

https://chestercathedral.com/ark-exhibition/

I started looking in more detail at the floors in the cathedral when I got home, it reminded me of being in Portugal and loving the tiles there, not just in historic sites but everyday domestic settings. I started playing about with all these images together, examining the ideas of possibilities within an everyday domestic setting and on an everyday building site, plasterers, pigeons, art, tiles...

Chester Cathedral floor tiles

Chester Cathedral floor tiles

Collage - Chester cathedral and Lisbon tiles, plasterers and dead pigeons

Collage - top left Chester Cathedral tiles, top right plasterers buckets, bottom, tiles from Sintra, Portugal

Collage - plasterers, tiles, dead pigeon

sketch - composition ideas - plasterer, tiles, dead pigeon, ladder

composition ideas - tiles, wallpaper, dead pigeon

Collage - plasterers, pigeons, buckets tiles, patterns, compositions

chosen composition from A5 (14cm x 21cm) sketch book scaled up to 118cm x 168cm

figure drawn out using the pocsa pen on the end of the stick - paint brush attached to the other end to blend the line using water 

image and design drawn out and starting to add colour

 

detail - final piece - top right hand corner 

This work was sold to Penny Lane Builders, seems like the most apt end and I'm looking forward to seeing it up in their offices this week.

They also bought some of Jane's photographs of their workers too who also helped myself and Josie run the work around Liverpool in their vans. I'd like to thank Gerard Mcevoy, Steve Ross and all the lads involved and I hope it encourages keeping an open mind when the next artist approaches them with an idea! 

I have a ton of thoughts and ideas with regard to the future of Dead Pigeon Gallery but think this has been a long enough blog post, but the upshot is I don't see it as a one show thing.

Til then, then.

one of Andrea Ku's bees

Patrick Kirk-Smith, Cathedral, 2017 paper, laser jet ink, gold leaf 

Deborah Morgan, centre, our 'writer in residence' chatting to Ange and Pop

I'd like to thank all of the artists involved, for saying yes and making some incredible work and a special thanks to Josie Jenkins who helped me with all the running around towards the end and admin stuff plus hiring and driving a van for the first time!

Patches, DPG mascot 

Josie doing some proper graft

Miss (Marie Gray) chatting to Mark Loudon

Andrea Ku - Observation 2017, observation hive and honey bees.

Colette Lilley, Plasterer and Process, colour pencil on wall.

Catherine Dalton - Curtains 2017, cotton fabric, lino cut, block printing ink, fabric dye.

Dead Pigeon Gallery

Afternoon All,

Was talking to a friend the other day about how we don't write letters anymore, (for obvious reasons) and I thought I'd take that approach to the next blog (this) as it may spur me on to write something, as I haven't been in blog mode since the dawn of time so I'm writing you a letter instead.




Dear Pals,

Hope all is well your end? Do respond when you can with tales of adventure and mishap.

I wanted to write for ages but didn't know where to start, so I'm starting in the middle, only it wont be the middle to you as you don't know where the middle is, to you it's the beginning so all is well. 

The Dead Pigeon Gallery - yeah what a name I know, ha! I came up with that after meeting a fella called Jason a few months ago, actually it was ages ago, more than a few months - I know there was a hurricane or something like that on the day (it was dead windy, proper fat wind) when we met for the first time to go and look around this building his family owns off the back of London Rd. (The hurricane thingy - fat wind - even had a name...not kidding)

Anyway, Ronnie of Coming Home (which I co-pilot) had got talking to Jason Abbott at some event or other, Jason had originally been introduced to Ronnie to ask him what he knew about the local history of the area around London Rd. They later got chatting about what each other does which led to talking about housing, specifically empty houses then empty buildings and eventually...art.

Meanwhile back at Coming Home headquarters I'm chatting to Jane MacNeil, a photographer we'd taken on to document our first year - about how I want to develop an exhibition responding to some of the photographs she's taken so far. 

I was particular taken with some photo's of plasterers going about their business working on our first house in Walton. Now all finished and happily tenanted. 

OnSite: The Plasterer - Home One

I had this thing in my head about sharing my residency role if you like, I mean we all know an artist in residence simply means that the artist, at some point, will respond to their new environment/themes/people around them and produce work that simply wouldn't exist if it wasn't for that set of circumstances. (Unless the artist is using the residency as an 'away from home studio' then obviously that's different and you apply or accept the ones you feel are right for you.)

At first with Coming Home that was my 'title' if you like, 'artist in residence' because I'm an artist (I know you know!) and I work at Coming Home - but it was misleading sometimes - as the point we wanted to illustrate is by having an artist co-run something like Coming Home was that, yes, it may lead to physical art being made - but more fundamentally it is the way an artists mind works that can add to the process. It's not something we see as a bolt on or an add on, it's integral, Coming Home has formed by ongoing discussion and debate, sometimes in agreement and sometimes not, by two people from very different backgrounds, but with similar aims.

In this instance Ronnie asked me to work with him because I wasn't a housing expert, I don't want to be a housing expert and don't find spreadsheets or any kind of administrative tasks for that matter interesting or healthy may I add!

Apart from the obvious reason that I lived in an area subjected to the Housing Market Renewal Initiative and watched my house and community bulldozed so as a result 'looked at housing' for the first time. 

It was because I have a background in Fine Art, meaning I'd bring stuff to the table completely different to Ronnie. I hadn't really realised it myself until this project but I feel like I've been trained to ask 'why' and analyse everything - but not necessarily from a business perspective, from a, human being broader social perspective. This led to a piss taking new title role at Coming Home for me (created during recent election fever) as Minister of Art and Ethics, we decided not to have 'shadow' as part of it to be positive that when Labour win we've invented a new role for an MP in Jeremy Corbyn's cabinet.

So, back to the space! 

On that very windy day we went to meet Jason in Kempston Street off London Rd. It's a massive site with lots of different spaces and structures sectioned off within, loads of potential exhibition spaces but I was taken with one part in particular...

top floor of former printers/warehouse owned by Jason Abbott's family

top floor - dead pigeons

...and all the pigeons in it. Many still alive, flying in through the windows and the roof, but many are dead. Everywhere you look, a dead pigeon.

I can only think that they've got trapped inside? Or died of natural causes maybe? (I hoped) 

I know everyone hates them - but it made me feel quite sad - but it also shows that there's always life in the spaces that look dead. 

I knew it would make a fantastic exhibition space - the light and scale of the room is incredible - plus - I like where it is - the back of London Rd - near TJ's - and all the memories that has for me and my family, seeing as pretty much nearly ever single one of us have worked there at one time or another, my Mum for over 20 years. 
And before then, my Nanny lived on Islington and worked as a tailor in the same area before she went off and joined the WAF. Lots of memories and thoughts sprung from just one site visit.

Jason told us about ideas to turn the entire site around and have it thriving again, working alongside other family run businesses that've been in the area for decades. He told us how his Dad had started a small printer business there in the 60's and how it had grown. It's had many different tenants since then but alas this part of the building has obviously fallen into disrepair but Jason and his family are working hard to turn it round and are about to start work in the coming weeks on an extensive refurb and it'll soon be known as The Tapestry, an apt name in area known for it's fabric.

Over the next few weeks every-time I spoke to Jason, I referred to the bit I liked most for the exhibition as,

'the top floor,'
'the middle building, you know?' 
'the bit in the middle'
'where all the birds are...'
'the dead birds...' 
'the pigeons'
'the dead pigeons' 

Then it clicked - that was it's name, The Dead Pigeon Gallery. I felt like it was a nod to those birds, the much detested urban pest. I loved the juxtaposition in my head of the words 'dead pigeon' and 'gallery' and how they throw a spanner in the works. Don't they? I love that the pigeons get a nod and get to join in on the Coming Home journey.

So, the current state of play is that, myself, Jane Macneil, Catherine Dalton, Patrick Kirk-Smith, Andrea Ku, Josie Jenkins, Erika Rushton, Colette Lilley, Deb Morgan and Jason Hollis have all agreed and are all wandering about Liverpool independently, thinking about either plasterers or pigeons!

I gave them all the same photo's of the plasterers Jane took that inspired me - they all know about Coming Home, then we invited them down to Jason's building, forever to be known to us now as, The Dead Pigeon Gallery. 

I've asked all the artists to go and do their thing, and handed the 'artist residency' baton to them if you like. 

It opens out the whole project, lets more dialogue in, leads to deeper questions and discussion about something like Coming Home, from the tenants to the plasterers and all the work the trades do, the solicitors to the architect - in a project like this, I was passionate about highlighting the work everybody does to turn an empty house into a home. 

There's loads of us! 

Maybe the next exhibition will be, OnSite: The Accountant!

happy first tenant of Coming Home

Right, so the nitty gritty and the main reason for this long letter is to invite you to the show, I know you're dead busy but if you put it in you're diary now you can work around it!


Opening night, Thursday September 7th 2017 

6pm - 9pm

Coming Home Liverpool presents....

OnSite: The Plasterer 
at
The Dead Pigeon Gallery

Kempston St entrance - off the back of London Road, Liverpool...

The show will run from the 7th - 14th September open daily from 1pm - 6pm

if you go up as far as Lidl, opposite is Glidart St, turn right onto Kempston

PS. I'll send some flyer/invites out too as well - but at least you've got a heads up now.

P.P.S I've missed you!


Yours Sincerely,


Jayne