Jayne Lawless: A Dog Called Bear

Societal Shift Commission 2022/23

On Tuesday 31^st January we all met up at Gill’s flat – a cracking flat above a chippy, with loads of space to all sit comfy and spread out. Gill Smith is an Illustrator. The plan was to be in the same room and think about the story unfolding from my commission in Ellesmere Port, how we structure it, how we deliver it. How to take an idea and develop it into something with a beginning, middle and end. I’m working on another idea that’s taking me off into a new artform (again), illustration and storytelling this time and it’s so fascinating. I am a third of the way into this project and I don’t think I’ll ever look at a book in the same way again.

For those new to my blog and therefore maybe my artwork, in the past my curiosity and ideas have led to many different outcomes, such as a short film requiring knowledge and expertise from filmmakers and animators, a huge outdoor installation people could walk through requiring a collaboration with architects, council officials, specialist builders, metal workers and theatre technicians. Then there was a steel sculpture that required learning how to weld and cut metal. The idea always dictates the outcome, medium or materials. And now I’m working with illustrator, Gill and playwright and writer Ginni Manning, to help us develop an idea about a dog in the North West town of Ellesmere Port.

After Gill and I have a brief recap, going over initial stages and ideas that have got us here, (I invited her to get involved a few months ago), Ginni then joins us. We’ve had a couple of meetings before and this is the first one we actually really focus on how we can begin to map and plot a storyline that can be made into a short illustrated story. Ginni asks a lot of questions, the direct ones that pin you down, make you think, like, ‘who is the story for?’ I made an off the cuff comment that it was for dogs. These are the type of questions that drill down and under the initial idea and I know will be vital in the end. Important questions. All three of us are here now, engrossed discussing covid-19, the effects on communities locally and worldwide, positive and negatives, humans and animals.

So, over to Ellesmere Port and this fascinating commission by Cheshire West and Chester Council. They’re starting a process to reflect on what happened during Covid-19, and as part of that process have commissioned artists to work across the borough collecting and developing in their own ways, stories and experiences during the global pandemic. They want to gain knowledge on the ways covid affected their local communities. This creative investigation will form part of a wider report that incorporates figures and percentages and patterns that have emerged. Ultimately it will help understand who and how people have been affected across their region and how the council can react and respond where needed. It is also an amazing opportunity to collect stories from voices that may otherwise not be heard, including from within the council itself.

Westminster Community Centre, Ellesmere Port, Oct 2022

I’ve always been inspired by BBC Radio 4’s, The Listening Project, and that was at the forefront of my mind going into this commission. For anyone who hasn’t heard it before it is basically a conversation between two people, not an interviewer and interviewee but two people who have a connection talking about something that is completely relevant to them, it could be anyone from the UK, it’s a snapshot from people’s lives, yet it always seems to resonate. This role requires me to listen and ask the question about experiences of Covid-19.

I’ve been hearing about how people roles in work may have changed, loss of jobs, furlough schemes, new roles, losses of family members, friends, pets, how many have met new people, become volunteers, had to shield, had to care for people shielding, had to be on call for the ‘covid hotline’, care for strangers, experience the fear of catching it, experience the fear of having it, the aftermath, long covid, changed opinions, fall outs, demonstrations, more opportunities, less opportunities, inclusivity via zoom, isolation via zoom, walks, fresh air, calm, hectic, each person’s story is unique and yet it’s all intrinsically linked. There is a universal common ground like no other looking at the pandemic, it is so vast a subject, it’s everything and everyone everywhere, but a project like this can start to build up a picture of people and their environment and how covid effected one town and go from there. I’ve realised that as I ask people to reflect on covid that I can’t put my finger on my feelings about it at all myself.

So, in the beginning there was video meetings with Cathy Newbery, Public Art Curator and Consultant, and Carmel Clapson, Arts Officer at Cheshire West and Chester Council, introducing me to the project and us talking about some of my ideas we discussed during the interview. I said at that stage I couldn’t determine an outcome before meeting the community I’d be working with. My practice is often so collaborative in nature, I honestly didn’t want to say where it may lead. I wanted to be directed by the people I met. I felt more comfortable personally thinking of it like a residency as that is a very familiar way of working for me. It was also paramount I had a base within the community too, so I became a familiar figure and could start getting to know people without the pressure of delivering a workshop or discussing the project ‘cold’ if you like. I find I work better on a slower burn, and able to build relationships with people naturally.

'Wezzie Wednesday's' at Westminster Community Centre

On one of the early video calls, Sharon Marshall, Poverty Truth Co-Ordinator for the council, and Lisa Denson, Mayor of Ellesmere Port joined, both were incredibly supportive. Lisa has since become a pivotal part of the project, she invited me to her community centre in Westminster on a Wednesday and said I could come whenever I liked. I knew they would all be busy as they run a foodbank, but I’m happy left to my own devices so this suited me down to the ground. My experience working with Fans Supporting Foodbanks (FSF) over the past few years in Liverpool also meant that I understood the concept of Foodbanks and the discourse around them very well. Having collaborated with FSF on previous projects too, we brought North End Sketch Club (NESC) - an ongoing art project I developed in 2018 – and the food pantry model together by sketching as people shopped, inviting shoppers to have a sketch and any members of the public, bringing musicians in to play, adding a different dimension to the food pantry while people visit. So being at the Westminster Community Centre felt like a great match and I have since dropped in on many Wednesdays. Lisa has introduced me to members of her local community, including Deb, who became the source of the story I chose to concentrate on and develop, around her neighbours’ dog.

The Westminster Community Centre is a small hub in the heart of the area of Westminster in Ellesmere Port, as soon as I was invited by Lisa I wanted to go. It made me laugh (to myself) that I would be working in Westminster! Known locally as, ‘Wezzie Wednesday’, there’s much activity there the whole time, alongside the foodbank there’s people from other services offering advice, a crafting table and basically anyone who decides to drop by are made welcome.

When I first started going in October 2022 there was a weekly Foodbank, run by local volunteers headed up by Lisa, also a local of the Westminster community herself. The foodbank runs between 9-11am. Now there’s also a service called, That Bread and Butter Thing, which runs along similar lines to the My Pantry model whereby people can sign up and pay a small fee for a number of items of food that has been subsided, a move away from the stigma that can be attached to a foodbank and stopping a lot of food going to waste. I normally arrive around 10.30am due having to wait until 9.30am to travel – but that’s another story about affordability of train travel! But it does influence your experience and who you meet when you arrive in Ellesmere Port. The actual train ride itself though is great and where Gill and I have done so much valuable brainstorming so far.

It was maybe my first or second visit that Lisa introduced me to Deb, a local member of the community who lives across the road, and I was informed, she was, ‘really great at art’, we bonded immediately. She took me around the estate, which was great as there’s no better tour guide than a local, it also gave me a good opportunity to scope out places to visit with sketch club, something I’ll bring when the weather picks up.

...around Westminster walk with Deb

I had also connected with Ross who runs the social media account, Ellesmere Port Social, around that time too - he introduced me to the M53 underpass amongst other things! He talked about how he and his friends would love to see the space developed in some way into an attractive spot – potentially using art - I get what he means, and thought it was a great idea. It would be brilliant to bring it into this project too, it’s already become a backdrop scene to initial sketches for the story we’re working on. The underpass under the M53 both connects and cuts off the community from the River Mersey and National Waterways Museum depending on how you look at it. Enormous potential.

The M53 Underpass

One day while chatting to Deb at the Wezzie, we were interrupted by some of the loudest barking I’d ever heard, I looked at her thinking, ‘what the hell is that!’ She nodded for me to look outside of the community centre, and that’s when I first saw this ginormous, amazing, slightly terrifying dog. It was her neighbour’s dog, Sam, he was so big, or looked so big in comparison to the small front step he was on, paws slung over the front gate that looked like the smallest barrier between him and the terraced street, he dwarfed his owner too. He seemed happy enough though, being brushed, but as soon as anyone walked past became stressed and agitated and his bark boomed out all over the street. Deb got on well with her neighbour albeit it was impossible for her to talk to him properly if his dog was out too, Sam was also anxious around Deb, even though he saw her most days, in fact, the only one he didn’t bark at was Deb’s own little dog, Lottie. We talked about how Sam had been brought into the street as a pup and he was a lovely little thing, the owner himself was known in the area as a dog lover and was seen out regularly with his previous dog who’d sadly died.

This little black German Shepherd pup was his new love. Then came covid and lockdown and the owner had to shield, so the dog couldn’t go out either, there was someone in the community that walked the dog initially but as time went on that had stopped. The owner had an illness that even when lockdown eased he had to be careful but most importantly, by now the dog had grown so big he couldn’t walk him as he wasn’t trained and he literally pulled him over. We talked and talked about all the different scenarios, how could we help the dog and the owner? One day Deb and I walked over to the local printers and were greeted by three gorgeous dogs that belonged to the printer, the conversation about her dogs eventually led to Sam. It turned out she knew Sam and his owner well, and had offered to help in the past re dog walking but the owner hadn’t taken him up on it. Understandably nervous given how anxious Sam was. Deb said she would pass the number of the dog walker on again and we crossed our fingers. During this time, it became obvious to me that the covid story we should tell was via the perspective of Sam the dog.

I wrote some ideas in a scrapbook, a brainstorm of words and thoughts, some based in reality and some fantasy. There is a lot written in old English folklore about the black dog representing a supernatural or spectral entity, how it’s sometimes used as a reference for depression. But fundamentally the thoughts about how covid had had such a profoundly negative effect on his life, a young dog full of life and happy suddenly confined to his house, couldn’t run or play or exercise and learn to socialise with other dogs and humans. In the most formative years he had to stay home during lockdown, it makes you wonder how many other dogs that happened to, and how many other owners felt that guilt. All the ideas and possibilities grew in the scrapbook, we talked about him becoming a local legend, something akin to the Loch Ness Monster even, did he even exist? Was he an urban myth? Each week people we were meeting and chatting with at The Wezzie were offered the scrapbook to take home, spend time with it, write in it if they wanted, draw a picture, stick something in, (or not), but keep hold of it. Then it comes back to the community centre. The scrapbook in itself is a beautiful object and we are thinking about scanning the pages now and making some books we can share for keeps, and we think its potentially a great piece of documentation for the overall project, maybe the council will print some for their library too?

Through the grapevine many other conversations started to bubble up around the central idea that there would be in essence, a story of Sam that looked at his take on covid and addressed the issues around fear, loneliness but also of hope.

Jayne

Gill

Deb

early ideas in the scrapbook - Deb

By Christmas I had also started think of a list of people I thought would be interesting to record conversations with that could potentially inform the main story about Sam, but primarily that would be kept and made available for now and future generations. I invited Mick Ord with his vast experience to join the project to record these stories. Mick is a professional interviewer and producer, and after many years of running BBC Radio Merseyside now has his own podcasts and delivers media training across the country. This element of the project will begin in February. Again, although I have selected people who I’d initially like him to have recorded conversations with, we have no pre-determined outcome yet what or where the voices may ‘live’. One thought is that they’re housed within the Cheshire West and Chester council webpages, and another that strands from them could be woven into our story about Sam, could there be a QR code in the book that takes the listener to their accounts of covid? This is definitely something that interests me a lot and we’ll see how that develops.

Christmas approached and on our last visit to The Wezzie before on 22^nd December, we decided to drop a card and a few gifts in for the owner and Sam to wish him a Merry Christmas. One of our ‘Wezzie Wednesday Women’, Anita had managed to approach the owner while he and Sam where out on the step one day, none of us had ever managed that! The dog would always get too stressed, undoubtably picking up on our fear, which was real! But Anita walked calmly up to both and amazingly Sam stopped barking and we all stood mesmerised as though we were witnessing an everyday miracle. They chatted awhile and it gave us the confidence that she could knock at the door and not stress the dog out too much with the gifts for Christmas. We didn’t know would be the last time we’d see Sam or his owner. Shockingly the news came to us via Deb over Christmas that the owner had passed away and Sam taken away by the police. If somehow a family member ever reads this we are so sorry for your loss.

Deb

We thought that if we could find a home for Sam, then maybe something positive could come from this deeply sad situation. Ginni had expressed an interest in potentially giving him a home and we all thought that would be amazing, so she contacted the police who were still holding him for assessment. It was then we all got stunned with the news that he’s been put down on Jan 10^th. One of the saddest covid stories I have ever heard, and one that has probably occurred a thousand times over. How many lives have been this profoundly affected by the pandemic that we don’t know about? Directly or indirectly this story highlights the knock on effect of the pandemic, without it the owner wouldn’t have had to shield and the dog would have been walked and trained, we have no idea how things may have turned out otherwise, but that period of isolation and shielding has shifted the entire course of their history.

It's hard to continue in the same vein that we were originally in, but in some ways we have even more of a duty of care to the story now than before. We hope to do Sam and his owner justice in basing our story on them, creating a legacy that will hopefully resonate with people and dogs everywhere. Via Deb we had told the owner before his passing about the idea for the story and he said he was happy for us to do it. I think it’s our way to show we care, and that these untold stories matter.

Cut, back to the flat now, where we’re re-assessing this story and discussing how everything has literally changed since we began. We all felt, and the members of the community involved that because the owner had originally been happy that we wrote about his dog that we should still tell it.

Gill

Jayne

pages from our scrapbook - Gill

Always in the back of my mind I’ve had the idea of a performance element to the project and I’ve begun to explore this now via Ginni, who has assisted at projects at Theatre Porto with the Young Writers', a local theatre 10 mins from the Westminster Community Centre that, ‘creates original, imaginative theatre for, by and with children and young people from our base in Ellesmere Port.’ I think it could be a fascinating collaboration, for them to possibly respond to our story about Sam? Help create that legacy?

There is so much yet to explore and people to meet within the Westminster Community and the wider Ellesmere Port area itself. This coming week in February alone will introduce more new people into the conversation. Starting with Jake, Theatre Porto’s community artist then Father Edmund Montgomery, the Parish Priest of Ellesmere Port and Hooton who moved into the town just before lockdown was called. Ian Prowse, singer/songwriter born in ‘The Port’, his take on lockdown, and the positive impact he had on people’s lives at that time is a great starting conversation.

Hearing as many voices as part of this project is important so we capture a broad sense of experiences. I am always thinking about the legacy too, to create something that lives on after the commission, a door opened or something introduced, future collaborations that unfold when you’re not there – a continuation – a development – a friendship – a continued story.

The dog Sam gained the nickname Bear to us as when I originally heard Sam barking that day and first saw him, I said to Deb, ‘that not a dog, it’s a Bear.’

A Dog Called Bear