electric angel /design for life

back to bradford

i’ll be back in bradford this evening with andrew clay of woodend, at bmedia‘s third thursday event. it’s a bit of prodigal son moment for us both having grown up in the area and now returning to tell heady tales of the high life in north yorkshire, or more accurately of the creative sector on the coast and scarborough’s national and european enterprise award wins (andrew and i both presented to the judges). i’ll be wearing my creative coast cap and we hope that this event, a reciprocal visit after steve ding visited us from bmedia before christmas, might enable us to build some strong links between creatives on the coast and in west yorkshire.

mentioning bradford also gives me opportunity to post a pic of a community artwork project electric angel did several years back now – we recently obtained some better quality photos of the resulting metal gates in the east bowling community in bradford but hadn’t had chance to show them.

not long to go

it looks our public art collaboration with rachel welford and john clarke will be installed w/c 8th february. you can see progress of the project over at www.railwayart.com

rachel and i presented the project to students on the school’s creative and media diploma at the start of the year which prompted some good questions. the students are in process of delivering a project about documenting sense of place so there was lots in common with our piece.

[note to self - must blog about the diploma soon...]

the writing’s on the wall

typography-art commission at york and hull medical school – part of scarborough hospital. the work was commissioned by hafney [hospital arts for north east yorkshire] responding to some specific requirements:

it’s situated in a corridor which doubles as a waiting area for people arriving for interviews with windows on each side – one looks into the library and the other into an office. the work was required to obscure the office window giving some privacy without blocking light, reference to the library would be appreciated [hence a design made of words] and a some relevance to the medical school in general. we selected words from the school’s prospectus for an initial design and then further words were suggested by the school’s staff.

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the shop of priceless things

our most recent public art commission – a collaboration with poet john w clarke. the shop of priceless things is in rotherham town centre.

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opening soon

photo from the press call at ‘the shop of priceless things’ in rotherham on friday. poet john w clarke admiring some of the stock collected from the people of rotherham, me dressed as a tugboat captain for no reason other than it’s the warmest jumper i have. james behind the lens.

as you can see, this was taken part-way through the window graphics being applied – which was proving to be a struggle at only 5°. there are some tweaks being applied this week and we’ll have pics of the whole shop – all nine windows – early next week.

we’re opening a shop

we’re moving into the world of retail with a shop in rotherham town centre. the ‘shop of priceless things’ [formerly burger king - above] opens this saturday and is a collaboration with poet john w clarke.
we’ll blog some images next week.

our next project…

…will be the area shown below.

we’re pleased to announce that we will be working artist rachel welford to provide a piece of public art on the old scarborough-whitby railway line, now part of the national cycle route and an increasingly used alternative transport route into urban scarborough.

the artwork will form part of a new track surface near the road bridge at the bottom of woodland ravine in scarborough at the intersection of several routes. the work’s function is to act as a waymarker and signpost and will be visible to users of the line and by pedestrians and vehicles from the road bridge. adrian and rachel [taking a snap on the pic below] produced the winning design in a competitive submission with rebecca providing some vital technical insight to bring the idea to fruition.

the project will involve local community groups who use the track working with poet john clarke to generate text for the artwork. this project will be something of a new venture for us and we hope, lead to us applying for similar work in the future. we’ll blog progress on here as it develops. workshops with the community groups should begin in the next couple of weeks with completion of the project in october of this year.

some links:
friends of the old railway line
the cinder track – a project by university of sheffield students. summary of the cinder track project in this issue of renaissance news.
sustrans

no angels

typographic treatments of three poems by kate evans from her poetry residency in palliative care settings in north yorkshire. the resulting work has been produced as a limited run of posters which will be framed and put on the walls of hospitals and hospices, and postcards which will be there for patients and visitors to keep if they wish. the project is arranged and funded by HAFNEY.

the balance here was between visual interest and legibility and all three designs came out of an intuitive approach – reading the poem and then responding to it. the aim is to enhance how the poem communicates. i started working like this long before i discovered poetry concrete although who knows what influences i absorbed back in the day that prompted me to take this approach. that said, a relationship between poet and designer like this seems quite rare and i’m grateful for kate’s trust in me which – worse case scenario – could completely ruin the mood of the poem.

it’s interesting how people interpret the designs differently. the layout of no angels [the blue design] was inspired by renaissance paintings of angels which often have a spray of light emanating from them which doubled as soundwaves from ‘the blare of the alarm’ in the poem. kate thought it was maybe based on angel’s wings. i like that ambiguity. eternity [the red design] started with kate’s suggestion that she envisaged the poem in a spiral. sometimes had the longest gestation eventually ending up as a much simpler layout than my initial scribbles which were more like the complex peasholm magic lantern images.

although given free reign on design, i had some self-imposed rules – solid colour and one font throughout. as well as finding restraints useful, this was also a rational design decision to tie the three poems together visually.

bradford disabled people’s groups – unique and together

we were asked by bradford district council for some ideas of what they might do for an exhibition stand for an event. the stand was to represent voluntary groups that work with people with disabilities and they liked the idea of some kind of interactivity and ideally wanted to at least consult the groups that it would represent.

we suggested a creative session where the groups members would be invited to come and create artwork – both visual, tactile and audio – to be incorporated into the stand design. taking inspiration from anthony gormley’s field we invited the participants to make a clay model to represent themselves, and to create a photomontage/collage from images they had brought with them.

audio recordings were made on the day and developed into an ambient soundscape of voices and sounds to accompany the stands. we invited artist morwenna catt and audio artist joe gilmore to help at the session. we also asked both the people who run the groups and those who attend then what they valued about belonging – these quotes are the words you can see at the top of the stands.

the completed stand was constructed from three roller banners, thereby allowing it to be used in a cut-down version with only one banner if desired. the soundscape plays on CD behind the stands on a loop, and – this is the interactive bit – there’s plenty modeling clay and an invitation for people to add their own creation, thus building up a community of clay people as the stand is used in different locations.

in many ways this is one of the most authentic pieces of design we have done – it’s perhaps not very ‘cool’ but it includes the voices and work of the people it represents and we valued the opportunity to work with them.

bowling old lane cricket club gates

in 2006 english heritage commissioned two public works of art in bradford. we were asked by bradford-based artworks to work with members of the local community in the area of west bowling to produced designs for one of these – the end result would be gates for bowling old lane cricket club which lies at the heart of the community.

we led two workshops with local residents, young and old to discover more about the area. we began by drawing maps of the area from memory – these are maps that may not be geographically accurate but instead are defined by favourite places, local landmarks, events and memories. with some of the younger members of the club we went for a walk around the area armed with digital cameras – the end results were printed out onsite and quickly pasted into a rough and ready photomontage.

with some of the older residents the map drawing led to recollections of how the area had changed and some of the events and characters that had coloured growing up in this rapidly changing part of bradford. it was then our challenge to take these myriad images and turn them into something that both represented the history of the area and its role in the community today. historical fact: bowling old lane is not only one of bradford’s oldest cricket clubs but also lies adjacent to the original ground of bradford bulls [back then known as the 'steam pigs' because they played next to the railway line] – there’s a rugby ball hidden in the design. we started sketching ideas in the first session which went on to evolve into the final design.

as an ex-bradford resident what impressed me was the genuine connection that the older gentlemen of the cricket club had with the young players almost all of whom were from asian families. i remember that one of the big news stories during the design process was the declaration form several politicians that multiculturalism wasn’t working. in this square green oasis not far from bradford city centre it looked to be doing just fine.

some of the images that can be spotted in the design: birch leaves [the gates are on birch lane], west bowling skyline – an amalgam of buildings past, present and – at the time of the design – in progress, members of the community [the club is a focus for all types of community activities, not just cricket].

you can read a little more about the gates project here.