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.

D   P   G                                                                                  

e    i     a                              

a    g    l                           

d    e    l           
      o    e
      n    r
            y

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

Artinliverpool on Coming Home

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

Feature: Coming Home, working on Liverpool

By

 Patrick Kirk-Smith

 -

November 2, 2016

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

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

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.

http://www.artinliverpool.com/review-without-these-walls-at-homebaked-anfield/

https://asenseofplace.com/2016/04/09/without-these-walls/

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. 

That film and the a-n Re:View Bursary (part three)

I’m just going to dive in all guns blazing and hit you with the good stuff.

As a direct result of getting the a-n Re:view bursary last year I’m now finally on the right road to making a short film. It was born out of a preceding public art project that started in 2012. That project was based on the design and execution of painting something big, bold, bright and positive on a property in an area of Liverpool that had been left devastated by the Housing Market Renewal initiative. It was to be a big flag, a banner and SOS call to the world that this wasn’t what we wanted. A derelict grey coloured landscape, the streets and skys above seeming to reflect the hundreds of houses covered in galvanised steel, empty homes and people-less roads. The painting never happened. Politics.

Granton Road street party in the 80's

The whys and wherefore’s of the mural project are well documented in my previous blogs on this site or here http://jaynelawless.blogspot.co.uk 

Peter Blake, Village Fete

But for the purpose of moving forward and not straying too far back here’s what’s happened up to now with the bursary:

• Late 2013 – a two year public art project ends in tears (mine)
• I got a massive cob on (an angry sulk) for ages

I’d thought about film throughout the mural project, from a documentation perspective initially. I’d met and discussed ideas with various film makers and about incorporating young people into the process; developing workshops based on documenting, ‘the making of the mural’. I also wanted to invite young filmmaker Viktor Krc over to Liverpool from Sturovo in Slovakia to get involved too, I’d worked with him for 3 months whilst Artist in Residence in Slovakia during this 2 year period.

• Early 2014 – a friend sent a link to the ad for the a-n Re:view Bursary
• An opportunity to look again at a stalled or ‘change of direction’ in a current project
• My interest in film had sparked the application
• Early 2014 –  I got the bursary
• The bursary enables you to seek out professional advice and offer to pay for mentoring time
• Being able to offer people some payment to talk about your ideas is brilliant – we all know in the art world how its taken for granted that so much is done for free
• I’d met with David Jacques (Artist/Film Maker) and Jah Jussa (Film Maker) early doors, they were great and full of reality checks, I knew this was going to be a long journey after our first few meetings. I knew I was a million miles off knowing what I wanted but interested enough to know I was on the right track with regard to this unknown medium.
• Gary O’Donnell, the composer who agreed immediately to write the score when the film materialised as well as act as a mentor in this development phase.
• Sam Jones (artist) who I could discuss content and approach with in depth and really think about what kind of feel the film would have.
• Mia Tagg (Filmmaker) then carried the baton on to actually knuckling down and thinking about structure and narrative and real practical lessons in what film making was about
• I struggled  - opened a gigantic can of worms and just couldn’t get it into my head how to approach it
• A massive story, it started out being a film about why I couldn’t find a wall to paint on but to talk about that you needed to explain the context, then how far back do you go???
• It was becoming the story of my life – which was not how I wanted it
• It was getting way too descriptive and detailed
• My friend Maria said a very important thing: ‘it should be your work – your work but in film’ – after thinking about it I got it.
• I’d forgotten that
• I’d forgot that my work has always been much simpler, abstract yes but letting the materials do the talking
• Then a stream of words emerged, not sure I can call it a poem but I scribbled them down so I wouldn’t forget them, I knew they where important.
• After all the thousands of words I’d written over the course of 6/7 months it came back to 56. Somewhere to hang everything else off
• Fifty Six Words spark a vision and a sound and a loose narrative
• The final mentor came about by complete chance whilst at The Liverpool Radical Film Festival at the end of 2014

On the closing night of said festival we were invited to join in a debate about some of the shorts watched that night that had looked at various political protests. I stood up (which isn’t normal) and started talking about how all protests don’t necessarily look like that (marches/placards.)  I used another project I’ve been involved with over the years, Homebaked http://homebaked.org.uk and my own work L5-6QW http://l5-6qw.tumblr.com as examples. After my ramble a woman called Janet Brandon (who I recognised because she’d been introducing the films) came over to say hello and chat about what I’d said. Within about 10 seconds I knew I wanted to work with her on some level. I had no idea what she did at that point of introduction but she was obviously into films. By the end of the conversation I’ve learnt she’s also a filmmaker. I looked up her work the next day and knew my instinctive creative alarm bell had gone off accordingly.

Early 2015 – In a nutshell, Janet Brandon has been my final mentor and has now taken the film project on itself. Her production company, Trick Films will be overseeing the project and Gary O’Donnell will be writing the music.

I’m really looking forward to working with Janet and Gary, getting to see this next bit first hand, I’m genuinely excited about learning from them, I believe this wont be our only collaboration either. There’s a buzz about it all again now and a clear time-line with an end in sight. It’s necessary for both my practice and my personal life that this particular chapter is brought to a conclusion.

the big reveal - shadow drawings

The bursary has been a great tool to give this whole project a platform to re-launch from – all the mentors have been valuable and continue to be supportive.

I think it’s not only interesting for people reading to see the kind of influences I’ve had during this process, it’s important.
It’s a group rich in talent and I’ve learnt a hell of a lot.

David Jacques
https://vimeo.com/user5423212

Jah Jussa
www.imdb.com/name/nm3595393/

Gary O’Donnell
http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p00dt5jg

Sam Jones
superforager.org

Mia Tagg

https://vimeo.com/miatagg
 
Janet Brandon

http://www.catalystmedia.org.uk/issues/nerve19/women_in_arts.php

https://vimeo.com/25571754