Signs Of The Times

All images: West Leicester, March 2020

For the first week, at least - The Apocalypse was remarkably full of light and colour.  Even the things I've photographed before, like this degraded poster hoarding, felt fresh and new somehow.  However familiar the subject matter, I never tire of all that visual entropy and those collaged layers of potential meaning.  This one seems to have acquired even more resonance, under the current circumstances.

The last image here speaks for itself, but did trigger a little train of thought, nonetheless.  When I was young, my mother would occasionally recount her memories of being a young girl during World War II.  We can only hope the current situation is less globally traumatic, and that it is over more quickly - but I still wonder how young children will remember it in years to come.  The only situations with any life-altering similarity in my own experience, are the energy crisis and 'Three Day Week' of the early 1970s [1.].  Looking back down the telescope, it occurs to me that children have the luxury of not seeing the bigger picture.  I do remember the novelty of missing school days, and going upstairs to the bathroom, with a candle - but was relatively oblivious to the wider social and political influences at work. 

But the negotiation between actual events and subjective perception remains problematic, even for adults.  Despite a little more insight and much greater perspective, those events from my childhood still feel like just another chapter in the history books, at this remove.  Maybe this will too, one day.  Maybe the only truly meaningful way to take account of it all, is to allow the subjective, and the objective, to inform each other in equal measure.

[1.]:  And, possibly - the Cruise Missile crisis of the early 1980s.  But that was (and remains) more of a psychological threat, than any tangible disruptor of everyday routines.  Any activism I involved myself with then, was willingly embraced - and is mostly remembered now, as a few interesting days out.

'Constructed City' 13: Laid Off

All Images: 'Constructed City' Screen Prints (Work in Progress),
Leicester Print Workshop, March 2020

For fairly obvious reasons, my regular printing activities at Leicester Print Workshop are now on hold for the foreseeable future.  In fact, it's already been two weeks since I made my last visit - during the second of which, my school workplace has also been mostly closed.  Like much of the population, I'm effectively living a locked-down life, and wondering just how different life will be in the future.  I'm choosing to believe there is 'life', and a 'future', if for no other reason that agonising over the alternative is futile and leads absolutely nowhere.  Who knows? - we may even emerge from all this, one day, a little wiser, if significantly chastened - and thus inclined to construct a slightly saner future.

Anyway, while we wait indoors, to find out whether or not this really is Armageddon, creative work remains as resilient a bulwark against negativity and despair, as it ever was.  I can't print, so have made the decision to expand the scope of my 'Constructed City' project to include painting as well - and have begun preparing a reasonably large shaped panel, accordingly.  But more of that in due course.  For now, it seems only reasonable to draw a line under what I achieved on my last couple of trips to LPW, before it closed.    

The good news is that I was able to bring all the pre-existing prints in progress to some kind of conclusion, in one way or another.  In many cases that involved adding new layers of (a slightly sickly) muted yellow, or of a lightish grey, and of black.  that yellow felt like a bit of a risk, but it actually helped to modulate some of the problematic bright yellow sheets, which had been bugging me slightly for many weeks.  As usual, the addition of more black provided a pretty direct way to tie together those last few that been refusing to just 'sit down' properly.

The results are both darker and denser than I originally envisaged, and I may have to drastically rethink my original idea that these images would function largely as backgrounds.  But that's okay - there's plenty of pleasingly nuanced detail going on within all that multi-layered complexity.  And, if it wasn't already obvious - it proves that an intuitive, in-the-moment, decision making approach works better for me, these days, than too much pre-planning.  It's essentially how my paintings have evolved in recent years, and it seems that's the kind of printer I'm going to be too.  One day, I might set myself the task of producing a technically slick, consistent edition of prints, but for now, there aren't two alike - and all that limitless variation feels fine by me.  It's also appears I'm unlikely to be adopting a less-is-more approach, anytime soon.  That's okay too - I've always tended more to a maximalist's approach to problem solving.  We can only be the artists we were always going to be, regardless of medium. 

Anyway, there's not much else to say about these - so I'll let you judge for yourself, for now.  In reality, much remains up for grabs, even now, as it's still my intention to start cutting up and reconfiguring many of these - collage style.  That in itself, will involve another round of improvisation and intuitive decision making.  The next time you see them, they may look considerably different all over again. 

It only remains to express the hope that anyone reading this, along with all those you care about, can remain safe and healthy in the coming weeks and months.  Whatever your circumstances - I hope they remain survivable, and that the 'symptoms' any of us may succumb to, are as mild as possible.  And, ultimately, nothing's changed really - I'm still resolved to just keep making stuff until I no longer can.

Music Re-View 8

All Images: March 2020

This is not a review of the album, which is awesome, or the pressing, which is cool. It is for the fact that/ it’s filled with glitchy sound effects/ early-Croydon dubstep/ and more than a little bit of chaos/ it is hard to imagine this album topping year-end lists or floating up near the top of/ a regular Amazon box/ lush and contemplative, if not quite futuristic anymore, it opens up a whole world of memory/ and came to me bent/ the results make it seem like the machines, excited at finally being awakened from their slumber, are excitedly/ getting wired and jabbering at each other all night long/ just last week I was asking in another context just how much of an exercise in nostalgia we should be prepared to countenance.

This music makes me feel infinitely smarter/ speedy, squiggly, squirrelly/ and infinitely stupid at the same time/ at this point my cranium could literally explode/ in a skittering, scattergun mish-mash of bubbling bleep-bloop tones, burbling breakbeats, twitchy textures and circuitous, chaotic cross-talk/ the jizz-fonk is still present and correct, but the junglist breaks and acid are also back in a big way/ there’s also a sequence of very authentic squelches/ like a madly profuse coral or insect colony/ it makes for a nice/interface session on the confluence simulator.

He’s found a rather touching musical language to articulate/ a million open invitations/ that can only be processed through movement/ - a crazy labyrinth of adventure, of never-ending death and rebirth/ he’s spent his long, lauded career/ munching on magic coins and fruit, and solving elaborate puzzles in a brightly lit, surreal landscape/ the potential for lifelong nerve damage/ imbues the LP with a jam-band quality that both makes and breaks it/ he doesn’t need the jazz inflections to stand out from the crowd - he does so naturally/ and where gaming is engaged with, it’s usually in some reactionary, disapproving way/ yesterday I listened to it in full, then listened to it again, and then/ he broke his wrist falling on ice.

If you buy one album this year, make it this one/ just get moving/ it’s a love letter to his fans, and perhaps/ some of the most stunningly intricate beatwork you’d get away with/ while piloting your hovercar/ instead of being repulsed by the seeming nonsense of it all, I’m left giggling at its willing absurdity/ you might find that this album scratches an itch you didn’t even know you had/ yet it’s hard top shake the feeling that it’s higher now than it’s been in years/ do whatever your devices tell you/ dance, run around, jump up and down/ while still being a head bobber/ lost futures abound/ CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER/ that’s probably for the best.

Entropic Geometry

All Images: West Leicester, February 2020

It's quite often been the case just lately, that I've set out with my camera, and a pretty circumscribed idea of the kind of subject I'm looking for.  Nine times out of ten, at the moment, that means documenting the progress and delicious Constructivist geometry at a selection of the significant construction sites currently transforming the urban landscape of Leicester.  The relentlessly sodden weather this winter has further narrowed my visual horizons - making me less likely to find subjects on a speculative derive, and more prone to heading straight to a proven hotspot on those rare weekend occasions when the clouds have parted for an hour or two.

But even within these pretty narrow constraints, there's still the opportunity for an occasional visual diversion, as these images suggest.  For a few moments, my lens panned away from the construction of new structures, to focus on a crumbling remnant of the kind of environment that that is generally erased by it.  There's still plenty of geometry here to seduce my formalist's eye, but the real theme is the way it interacts with the processes of entropy and history.  There are intriguing account of past activity and changing use to be found in those erasures and palimpsests, not to mention the glorious patina and organic patterns of a once-enclosed floor plane now returned to the outdoors.

As the yellow lines imposed on that ground indicate, all such tracts in a congested modern city must ultimately do duty as parking facilities.  In this case, though - even that seems to have occurred some time ago.  Either way, on an indolent Sunday afternoon - lost amidst a zone of massive local economic transformation, the real purpose of all these lines and edges is to delineate the miscellaneous evidence of time passing.     

'Constructed City' 12: K

All images: 'Constructed City' Screen Prints (Work In Progress), Leicester Print Workshop, February 2020

The rash of redevelopment work currently transforming sectors of Leicester is progressing, almost faster than my own 'Constructed City' project that feeds on it.  Nevertheless, printing work continues whenever I can get into Leicester Print Workshop, and a steady momentum is being maintained, thankfully.

The black layers have now been added to the first of my CMYK 'fragments', and, whilst there are always a few technical duds amongst any run of prints (or, any of mine - at least), there are also enough good 'uns to go into the pot.  This includes several completely 'straight' versions of the image, along with various other deliberately miss-registered experiments, and others where one or another of the CMYK colours were omitted, or where white was added to the four inks.

While preparing for the next of these primarily photographic images, I've also returned to the more free-form and increasingly layered prints that have been in play for quite a while now.  I began by thinking of these as potential backgrounds, but as many are now so dense with imagery, I may need to revise that notion a bit.  As I've mentioned before, the ultimate aim is to reconfigure all this stuff through a process of collage - and until then, it's futile to pre-judge exactly how well one section or another might sit.

The real trick is to resist the urge to think of any single print as a definitive image in its own right.  That's increasingly difficult, as some of them appear to reach something resembling individual resolution, and the desire to have some finished 'product' nags away.  But the key to this way of working is to keep all possibilities open for as long as possible, and to be prepared to 'kill one's darlings' at any stage.

It's all a bit Tantric, in terms of delayed gratification, I suppose, but all I can do is relish the mounting sense of anticipation.  I'm still in the generating-content phase for now, but definitely looking forward to the point when the chopping-up and rejoining can commence.  It feels a little closer, and hopefully - that's when something even more significant will emerge.  If not - I guess I'll still have loads of photos of inky screens...