'The Basin': The Cells [Draft 1.0]

 

All Images: Cumberland Basin, Bristol, February 2023 - April 2024

Spiral ascenders lead to imprisonment [with steel balustrades as seen across the scheme]. We face time within cells of text - entangled within crimes and misdemeanours. The conflicted narratives of our journey are scribbled onto the concrete and degrading polycarbonate of each panelak enclosure within the penal colony. The layered inscriptions are rehearsals for the mechanised operation, but, other than that, there is almost no decoration on the building. Are these the walls of the skull? Our final thoughts rattle around each sounding chamber but are enfolded into the roar of the machines, whose field of validity is situated in a sense between these great functionings and the bodies themselves. What the apparatuses and institutions operate is, in a sense, a micro-physics of power. How long will we remain here, suspended over the dock? Memory waits on remand and encrusts a slate that is never wiped. The evidence accumulates [does the case even progress?] and over-coding is a process without end. We have [with difficulty] gained some clues via calligraphic apertures and interstitial transparencies. Paradoxically, their overlapping left penal justice with innumerable loopholes, and so - the eventual verdict can only be imagined.

Further investigation reveals these to be open cells [unsealed all along]. Indeed, a significant aperture remains open to the pursuing elements, placing us close to ceaseless commerce. Is then the incarceration voluntary? If indeed monastic in nature [and thus scriptural], the prison functions in this as an apparatus of knowledge. Whatever the truth - we may pass through at any point, and define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle. Many such trajectories have been attempted, although, to date, each has merely led to another cell teetering above its coiled stairway [with steel balustrades as seen across the scheme]. Whilst alternative ramps of egress do exist, our mapping reveals such routes to be far from straightforward. Repeatedly, they double-back, curl into the labyrinth, or taper away to an impasse. It is the apparatus as a whole that produces ‘power' and distributes individuals in this permanent and continuous field where each attempt to escape is met with derision.

We must analyse rather the 'concrete systems of punishment', study them as social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by the juridical structure of society alone, nor by its fundamental ethical choices. We have formed the belief that the cells represent a duality - offering both welcome refuge [or at least - necessary respite] and the restriction of movement [chosen or otherwise]. The accommodation afforded is certainly squalid, and during crisis-events we have observed waves of fetid water being driven through a particular aperture with frightening force. Furthermore, their elevated position means the cells function as little more than blasting chambers when gales blow in. Nonetheless, at such times we remain content to squat there, pressed into the howling walls. Discipline makes possible the operation of a relational power that sustains itself by its own mechanism. So people actually see them - and they go inside and they look and they see how strong or safe they actually feel inside. To brave the conditions outside could be far more terrifying.

Subsequent observations have suggested one more possibility: namely, that the cells might  serve as checkpoints or way-stations on the journey. By their operation, the crowd [a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect] is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. Stationed as they are upon ramped dual carriageways, each 7m wide, the cells offer an ideal matrix of strategic points from which to capture flow variations on either plane. The prison became a sort of permanent observatory that made it possible to distribute the varieties of vice or weakness, and we have ourselves exploited their potential as framing devices of a parallel and accelerating reality. Furthermore, it is well known that this entire sector may pivot at any time. In such circumstances, the cells afford a position in which the punishment of crime is not the sole element, and we must situate them in their field of operation. Certainly, we must not to overlook the partition of the fourth cell - with its glimpsed switchgear. Regardless of topographical convulsions, it is certain that the disciplinary space is always basically cellular.

The watchtower supervises from above. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. Elevated upon a single stilt, the panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately. The roof slab is slightly Y-shaped which is reflected in the north and south elevations below, which are slightly canted inwards and have mullions between each vertical glazing bay. Exactly who lurks beyond those obscure windows? The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. Access is from below the northern viaducts, where the forbidden gate remains ajar - but we have not yet dared to climb the dogleg stair. An entrance door is located at the head of the staircase on the north side [it is aluminium and glazed with a central horizontal transom]. Were we to gain access there, might we encounter ourselves already gazing down from within?

Completed Painting: 'Untitled (From The New School) 16'

All Images: 'Untitled (From The New School) 16', Card, Texture Paste, Sand, Concrete Effect Paint,
Acrylics, Ink Spray Enamel & Digital Print on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm x 106 mm, 2023

It's quite a while since I made one of these 'From The New School' paintings, but I still regard the series, and indeed - the overall project to which they relate, as being active. It's certainly one of my more extended endeavours at this stage. However, I remain dependant on employment in the education sector for my daily bread, and so still find myself ruminating on different aspects of that world on a regular basis. The overall rational behind the series can be found elsewhere, so I'll simply direct anyone requiring the back-story here.

Fairly obviously, this particular iteration of an oft-repeated (and originally appropriated) motif relates to the crisis over defective/hazardous concrete construction techniques in British schools, which gained news traction over this summer. Appropriately enough, the media used in this one are the most substantial and textural of the whole series. Collage and mixed-media techniques do  feature in many of it's predecessors - to be sure, but this one is essentially a painted relief as much as it is anything else. 

Having reached No.16 in the run, I'm starting to wonder about the possibility of drawing a line under things at 20. It ought to be possible to come up with four more versions without becoming totally repetitious - I'd have thought. At that point, maybe I could even make some attempt to go properly public with them. It could be genuinely instructive to see the entire series together in one place, after all this time - I suspect. 

An achievable aspiration for 2024, perhaps?

X_mas [happy]

 

All Images: North East Leicester, November 2022

Season's Greetings, one and all.

Archi-Techno Excursion 001.2 (Central Coventry, April 2021)

 

All Images: Central Coventry, April 2001

Another selection of images from my recent Archi-Techno-inspired drift around central Coventry (note the intrusion of a few dynamic diagonals - and even some curves).

The City Clears Its Lungs

All Images: Imperial Tobacco Horizon Site, West Nottingham, May 2019

As I discussed in my recent printmaking-related post, one of the biggest current influences on my local environment is the impact of significant redevelopment and construction work, here in West Leicester.  As I write, the clang of girders, and clatter of pneumatic wrenches drifts through my open window, as another section of the local skyline is filled in with a complex cage of steelwork.

But, before such transformative physical statements can be imposed on a city, it's normally necessary to clear space for them to occupy.  Indeed, this continual process of upheaval - of drawing, erasure and redrawing - of rising, falling, and rising again, is a big part of what lends any major conurbation its characteristic dynamism.  That churning dynamism, and the drive to invent, and reinvent themselves on a grand scale, is of course, what all cities have been about - ever since they first appeared as a mode of habitation, in the ancient Middle East.

Thus, before this blog, as seems likely, becomes an arena for my already expanding library of construction-related images - it seems only fitting to include a few relating to what goes on (or comes down) before.  In this case, the site under scrutiny is actually on the outskirts of Nottingham, rather in my own back yard - being the rapidly vanishing Imperial Tobacco 'Horizon' plant.  This edifice has long constituted an imposing behemoth on the western fringes of the city - an effect that was only magnified by its stark, Brutalist design.  It's perhaps only fitting then, that its removal from the landscape should play out with such post-apocalyptic grandeur.  My camera was certainly never going to resist a spectacle of such thrilling devastation.  

To read a little further into the events depicted, one could naturally find significance in the erasure of yet another large-scale concrete monument to the modernism of my childhood, or even draw some conclusions about the rapidity of our culture's turn away from recreational smoke inhalation.  And, depending on what replaces the plant - they may also represent  more evidence of our turn from manufacturing, towards a service and knowledge-based economy.

That's all perfectly valid.  But, to be honest, when I stood on a pile of rubble to take these shots, I was mostly just captivated by the raw, visual excitement of those pulverised ramparts and mountains of shattered concrete - and with the muscular steel monsters rumbling around amongst them.  As ever, experience first - theorising later.

Mandy Payne: 'Out Of Place' At Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham

Mandy Payne, 'Urban Arcadia', Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2018

With the Half Term break, and enjoyably mellow autumn weather, came an opportunity to get out and about, and to take in one or two exhibitions by other artists.  It makes a nice change from fixating on one’s own, as I certainly was for much of the year.  One such is ‘Out Of Place’ by Mandy Payne, at The University of Nottingham’s Lakeside Arts, Angear Visitor Centre.

Mandy Payne, 'Out Of Place', Angear Visitor Centre, Lakeside Arts Centre,
University Of Nottingham, October 2018

Mandy Payne, 'High Rise II'.  Spray Paint & Oil On Veneer Paper Backed
Nut Tree On Panel, 2018

I’ve met Mandy briefly, a couple of times, at Leicester Print Workshop (where she carried out a two-year residency).  It was there that I saw her working on some of the lithographs in this show - and I’d also seen a few of her small, meticulous paintings, at various venues, in recent years.  However, this was my first opportunity to see a large selection of her pieces together, and to gain a greater degree of perspective on her work.

Mandy Payne, (L.): 'Faded Glory'. Lithograph On Paper On Concrete, (R.): 'Changing Spaces',
Lithograph & Multiple Monoprints On Paper On Concrete, 2017

Mandy Payne, (L.): 'Stripped Bare', (R.): 'Pretty Vacant' Lithograph & Monoprint
On Paper On Concrete, 2017

It’s fairly predictable that I’d be drawn to her work, given her fascination with mid-twentieth century Modernist/Brutalist architecture, and her appropriately formal approach to depicting its austere geometries and grids.  My own interest in such subject matter is no secret, as is my similar relish for the (often frontal) compositional formality it inevitably inspires.  I also share an interest in the idea of failed Utopias, implied by the very subject matter itself.  In fact such stuff has become a pretty familiar trope in various quarters, of late.  I’ve written about George Shaw’s paintings ofthe mid-twentieth century Tile Hill Estate on more than one occasion, and also about John Grindrod’s engaging survey of Britain’s architectural forays into ‘utopian’Modernism, 'Concretopia'.  When I occasionally summon the energy to attend to my Twitter feed, I also find regular bulletins from The Modernist magazine, This Brutal House, and The Manchester Modernist Society - all suggesting this is far from an isolated enthusiasm.  I’m often tempted to think it might mostly reflect a nostalgic reframing of the long-abandoned, and seemingly misplaced, idealism of a world some amongst us (of a certain vintage), were born into.  The subsequent questioning of our own place in a changing world inevitably follows.

Mandy Payne, 'Carpenter's Estate II', Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2018

Mandy Payne, 'Gone But Not Forgotten I', Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2018

Whatever the motivation, Sheffield-based Mandy Payne has a prime example of surviving Modernist public housing on her doorstep, in the city’s in/famous Park Hill Flats.  That complex has presided over Sheffield like a forbidding rampart for decades, and is impressed on my own memory from childhood family excursions there in the 1970s.  Park Hill became symbolic of both what might be achieved by a centrally planned public housing policy, but also - what might go awry when progressive idealism, political/financial expediency, and formulaic design ideology conspire to create an inadvertent dystopia.  That’s a well-told tale, of course, and clearly open to interpretation and individual prejudices.  Either way, our current free-market era has generally sought to deride or overwrite the architectural evidence of the Post War Consensus - either by demolishing or ‘gentrifying’ them (for which, read - often tarting-up beyond the reach of their original tenants).

Mandy Payne, 'Broken Brutalism', Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2018

Mandy Payne, 'Love Don't Live Here Any More,' Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2017

That process of post-modernist renovation and up-speccing has certainly been applied to portions of Park Hill in recent years, but it’s notable that Mandy’s artistic gaze remains resolutely fixed upon the begrimed concrete, austere brutalism and generally dilapidated aspect of its untransformed regions.  Her notes accompanying this exhibition claim that gentrification is an issue she’s definitely engaged with, but if I’m honest – I took little in the way of conceptual discourse, or critical analysis from viewing the work itself.  Mandy’s work appears primarily visual in its motivations, and sits resolutely in the familiar traditions of painting and printmaking.  Her meticulous and often intricate paintings (often executed on small, individually cast concrete slabs) suggest it’s all that delicious interlocking geometry - along with a desire to record the ravages of time and neglect in minute detail, which really concern her.  This occasional fracture between an artist’s stated intentions, and whatever slightly differing motives might really be betrayed, is something that interests greatly, as indeed – is the constant tension between the desire to engage with a theme or concept and the often irresistible pull of the purely sensory/visual.  It’s also only fair to admit that I’m as susceptible to the immediacy of the primary visual response as the next artist – despite habitual claims to be exploring ‘layers of meaning’ or the pretense of having reached for some supposed heightened degree of conceptual rigour, in my own work.

Mandy Payne, 'Between Boundaries', Spray Paint & Oil On Concrete, 2018

What the resolutely level gaze, uniform illumination, and seemingly objectivising aspirations of Mandy’s chosen style do suggest rather beautifully, however - is a kind of hyper-real freezing of time.  This is further magnified by the eerie absence of human life, or evidence of any real animation at all within her chosen spartan settings. There are definite stylistic (as well as historical) similarities here with George Shaw’s carefully depicted estate visions of a world now accessible only through memory.  Despite that, her paintings appear to resist the tendency toward photo-realism towards which Shaw’s images have occasionally slid.  For him there also seems to be an elusive element of lyricism - suggesting a degree of personal melancholy.  Mandy’s images feel, if anything, more depersonalised - and therefore, perhaps more like collective memories than meditations on personal history.

Mandy Payne, 'Brave New World', Spray Paint On Concrete, 2018

My response to Mandy’s interesting use of concrete as a substrate for many of her paintings is firstly, that this is both a pleasingly appropriate idea - and indeed, the kind of thing I could easily imagine having attempted myself in the same situation.  However, that is coupled with a slight disappointment that she hasn’t exploited the idea a little less discretely.  Careful examination of the paintings is required to reveal that, what appear as carefully painted concrete surfaces, are actually the raw, locally coloured material itself - modulated with carefully sprayed shadows.  This incorporation of physical materials comes more to the fore in some of her newer paintings of similar subjects outside of Sheffield.  Here, she uses marble slabs as a support - employing its characteristic veining as a more abstract solution to depicting areas of sky. Perhaps she's making more overt reference to the perceived status of rival building materials, and associated issues around low/high-grade accommodation, in the process.

Mandy Payne, 'Precinct 1', Spray Paint & Oil On Marble, 2018

Mandy Payne, 'Precinct II', Spray Paint & Oil On Marble, 2018

That all feels like something I’d personally love to see Mandy push further, and more experimentally, in future work.  It might also be something she could exploit further, or more noticeably, by increasing the scale of some of her images (although admittedly, not without a new set of technical challenges).  Certainly, their current dimensions, and detailed nature, require her to refine her concrete surfaces to such a degree that the material's characteristic surface qualities are somewhat lost.  In addition, my first reaction was that the modest scale of all of this existing work is perhaps also something of a missed opportunity to fully engage with the monumental immensity or engulfing immersion of the environments she depicts.  However, on further reflection, it does feel suggestive of domesticity, rather than of the over-imposing or self-aggrandising - both being standard accusations against Modernist architecture.  It is thus, an important reminder that what Park Hill’s authors were always supposed to be engaged with, was the provision of livable homes for real people.  Ultimately, it may actually be that Mandy is prioritising a more nuanced or balanced consideration of her chosen subject matter, over the more standard sensationalist readings often applied to it.

Mandy Payne, 'Out Of Place', Angear Visitor Centre, Lakeside Arts Centre,
University Of Nottingham, October 2018

I’m aware this discussion of ‘Out Of Place’ might appear somewhat hedged about with criticisms, or even like I’m rather crassly trying to tell Mandy Payne how she should be doing her own work.  Hopefully,  I’m really just trying to imagine how I would approach it myself – because it does occupy a stylistic and thematic area I could easily imagine occupying.  My comments actually come from a feeling of real engagement with the work.  As it is, and regardless of anything else written here, I genuinely enjoyed viewing pretty much everything in Mandy’s show, and also the way it all hangs together in its current,  beautifully illuminated venue.  There’s relatively little time remaining to view the exhibition, but I’d definitely recommend it, should you have the opportunity.

Mandy Payne: 'Out Of Place' continues until 28 October at Angear Visitor Centre, Lakeside Arts, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD