Pile 'Em High...

All Images: Belgrave, North Leicester, March 2016

Part of my day job as a Secondary School Technician involves supporting Art lessons.  This, in turn, periodically involves accompanying our GCSE Photography students and their teacher, whenever they take their cameras out into the local neighbourhood.  On such occasions, I normally try to take my own camera too, partly because it feels like too good an opportunity to miss (for fairly selfish reasons), but also because I believe it’s good for students to learn by example - as well as by just being told what to do.

It seems more likely they might get the point of this stuff if they see that we take it seriously ourselves, - and not always just to fulfill a formal objective.  These days, it’s increasingly difficult for anyone in schools, (on either side of the teacher/student divide), to see beyond the utilitarian imperative to ‘get the grades, - get the place, - (maybe) get the job/career’.  Those things aren’t without their importance, but I grew up with the view that education might be a bit more of a 360-degree process than that alone.  I don’t think it does students any harm to understand that some people still do this stuff for its own rewards - and always will.  Call me old fashioned - but I also always thought that was largely what being an Artist was about; you know, - once all the external expectations are stripped away.

Anyway - polemic over.  The images here all derive from just such an expedition.  In the past, I’ve usually found myself collecting more of my habitual kind of imagery.  This time however, as our students were coming to terms with street photography - and the challenges of approaching the public with a camera in hand, I found my own subject priorities shifting a little too.  Windows have played a fairly important role as a motif for me, for a while.  However, instead of focusing on blanked-out or otherwise obscured examples of the breed, I found myself concentrating instead on what was clearly visible behind the glass.  Maybe it was just a case of recalibrating my eyes after all the neutral colour and tendency towards blankness of my current work, but I found all this complex, polychromatic content very refreshing, for an hour or two.

Leicester’s Belgrave/Melton Road, from whence most of these shots originate, is one of the city’s main arteries, and one that has featured here before.  It also provides the commercial heartbeat of Leicester’s Asian-dominated Belgrave neighbourhood, and as such, constitutes something of an explosion of colour and visual incident.  It’s not without its occasional, more self-consciously designed examples, but it was to these rather more haphazard, untutored, and, let’s face it – cheerfully eccentric expressions of the window dresser’s art, that my lens was repeatedly drawn.  There is a distinctly homespun, aesthetic at work here that differs from the average shopping street.  The two dominant rules in operation often seem to be one of 'more is more', and another of, 'just pile stuff up and get on with it'.  Anyway, in a world of ever-expanding bland conformity - the kind of individuality expressed here is only to be celebrated.

Mail Shots 5

Central Leicester, February 2016

Time for a few more of these, I think.  They've been collecting in my Pictures folder for a while.  Just to keep you, you know... posted.

West Leicester, March 2016

North Leicester, November 2015

North Leicester, March 2016

North Leicester, March 2016

North Leicester, March 2016

North Leicester, March 2016

Coffee Grounds

These inconsequential images seem to encapsulate exactly the kind of intriguing clue I'm always coming across in my local, urban environment.  It's funny how even the crappest of details can trigger a new train of thought, or signal some meaning underlying the immediate surroundings.

Both Images:  St Augustines, Leicester,February 2016

The rise of mainstream Coffee Culture in Britain has always felt a bit bizarre, given how close we are to mainland Europe, - where something as straightforwardly enjoyable as a good cup of coffee, (at an affordable price), was taken for granted, all along.

Don't get me wrong, - I enjoy  a cup of 'quaffee' as much as the next person, but it does feel like, these days, we seem incapable of enjoying the simple pleasures of life, without having them marketed back to us by bloated corporations, under the banner of 'Lifestyle'.  The 'Blair Years', around the turn of the century, seemed to be all about that, - and it's certainly the period when it first became de-rigeur here for every aspirant pedestrian to trot along clutching an ostentatiously large bucket of mocha-chocca-chino, (or whatever).

Anyway, these images seem to give something of a lie to all that self-conscious Cafe-Society stuff, bringing it all resolutely back to the level of tawdry, crumminess for which, let's face it, - I'm a complete sucker.  It's worth noting that these cups seem to have been left by builders currently redeveloping the St Augustines area of Leicester into a cross between a student village and a S.M.E. start-up hub.  They're pretty modest by contemporary standards, although it amuses me how the bottom-most vessel still seems something of a poor relation alongside the others. Anyway, once the redevelopments are complete, I suspect, the cups can only get larger, and the beverages - more high-concept, around this neck of the woods.

Elephant's Memory

Central Leicester, February 2016

At first glance, the site depicted here may not look like much.  At best, it might just look like more evidence of my madness; sorry - I mean my fascination with lacunae and interim sites of transformation within the urban landscape.  There’s no doubt it also feeds into my even more current interest in visualising absences, erasures and what is ‘there-but-no-longer-there’.  Even seen in those terms, it’s not an especially spectacular example, although my camera was delighted to record those pleasing traces of long-lost staircases.

However, for a couple of reasons, the site has slightly more significance than might at first meet the eye.  It lies in a slightly overlooked backwater of central Leicester, on the corner of Wharf Street South and Gladstone Street, in a down-at-heel neighbourhood of sporadic light industry and more recent housing.  Even within living memory, this was a far more bustling, (if slightly edgy), district, and the site is actually located close to Leicester’s old Central Telephone Exchange building, and once futuristic Lee Circle Multi-Story Car Park, (both of which have featured here before).  What commercial activity lingers on now seems vestigial at best, and the most obvious contemporary life-signs come from the largely Asian and North African denizens who drift through in waves, between the City Centre and nearby Belgrave or St Matthews Estate.

Wharf Street South, Central Leicester, February 2016

In a previous professional incarnation, I worked as a Scenic & Display Artist for a company - based just round the corner, and used to regularly visit the building that once stood on the vacant corner plot.  In those days, it housed a Motor Factor’s business, - where we often purchased car paints and related sundries.  In the course of such workaday errands, I wondered about the building’s former usage, intrigued by its rather ornate frieze, and how the structure appeared to have been abruptly truncated, - suggesting it had once been at least one story taller.

Hints and rumours at the time suggested some connection with the tragic story of Joseph Cary Merrick, - preserved in popular memory as The Elephant Man; and a little research suggests this may in fact be the case.  Merrick’s struggle to find some place in society, despite the hideous deformities that blighted his short life, is pretty well-known, both from fictions, such as David Lynch’s film ‘The Elephant Man’, (1980), and from slightly patchy contemporary accounts.  What is certainly known is that he was born just a few metres away, in Lee Street.  It’s also the case that, during the years Merrick scraped a living as a theatrical Freak Show attraction, his Impresario, Sam Torr owned a theatre, - The Palace Of Varieties, on the very site under discussion.

Joseph Carey Merrick: 'The Elephant Man', c.1889

                                                                                                      

Film Poster: David Lynch (Dir.), 'The Elephant Man', Brooksfilms/Universal Pictures/
Paramount Pictures, 1980

As is usually the way with such Psychogeographic conjecture, there’s a certain amount of ‘what - if’ about all of this.  There’s no explicit evidence that Merrick actually appeared at The Gaiety, although it would seem more than likely.  That establishment was itself rebuilt in 1893, - as the building I knew; and it continued to operate as a theatre, and later a cinema, well into mid twentieth century.  Therefore, Merrick can never have physically climbed those actual staircases; yet it’s almost impossible not to imagine him doing so in the poetic imagination.  What’s more important is that some resonance of his passing seems to cling to the site, - and indeed to the wider neighbourhood.  This aspect of imaginative projection is what actually interests me most about the whole Pychogeographic project, - far more than any stickling over strict, historical accuracy.

Joseph Carey Merrick, 1888

In passing, I note that a certain raffish reputation always clung to the once-energetic Wharf Street area.  The Gaiety rubbed shoulders with a Pawn Shop, which possibly doubled as a brothel, - and may itself have been a nexus for amorous liaisons of the more commercial variety.  During my period of employment up the road, the prophylactic remnants of such activities regularly punctuated our car park; not to mention the day The Police fished a discarded murder weapon from the roof of our premises.  On another occasion, I left a nearby Techno All-Nighter, around dawn, to witness a quartet of primary-age urchins sitting in a parked car they’d smashed up, whilst making “brrm, brrm” noises.  Some things change; others – not so much.

Completed Painting: 'Vestige 4'

'Vestige 4', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Pencil & Coloured Pencil
On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2016

We’re already into March, - which I find a bit scary; but at least it feels like I’ve made a reasonably energetic start to the year, artistically speaking.  There are a variety of creative strands I hope to follow this year, including more printing activity, (fairly soon, hopefully), and a proposed new collaborative project with fellow artist Andrew Smith, (into which we’re just starting to feel our way, at the moment).  However, so far, 2016’s most tangible results are in the form of painting, - a reminder that it remains at the core of my activities.

So, it’s pleasing to be able to reveal the fourth in my series of ‘Vestige’ pieces, entitled, (predictably enough), ‘Vestige 4’.  There’s little point in my alienating regular readers by repeating the same old stuff, each time I post one of these, - as the basic premise of the series remains essentially the same, from painting to painting.  If you’re a new visitor, you can catch up here, here, here, or here.

Just as with the previous three ‘Vestiges’, I embarked on ‘4’ with the intention of pulling the series in a new direction visually, only to discover that the finished painting actually resembles a gradual evolution more than a dramatic departure.  In fact, I’m now starting to realise how that ‘reach-exceeding-one's-grasp’ feeling is actually a key feature of the whole process I’ve embarked upon.  Nevertheless, I did at least manage to avoid just slipping back, by default, into yet another world of mid-grey.  This one deliberately introduces a slightly (and I do mean slightly) stronger element of actual colour, and much more dramatic   dark-light contrast.

Southwark, South London, 2011

It’s worth mentioning that the starting point for this one was a group of photographs I took on London’s South Bank, a few years ago, although I resisted the temptation to reproduce any single image too slavishly.  In fact, of the four ‘Vestiges’ so far produced, this might be the one I currently feel most favourably disposed towards.  Although it proved a bit intransigent during its slightly stop-start, early stages, - it actually came together rapidly and rather pleasingly, in the end.  I think I also managed to strike a reasonable balance between putting in the necessary labour to find a solution that was in there somewhere, - and keeping things just fresh and open enough in terms of the marks I was making.  If there was a danger of things getting a bit stodgy early on, - this time, the solution really was to just keep going.