Author Archives: Iain

The “Imagined Places” exhibition at the RWA, Bristol

I’ve been working on Severn Waterscape (for Owain Jones) a mixed media diptych (see above ). This piece has been made specifically for an exhibition at the RWA Bristol called Imagined Landscapes. The exhibition will open next week (on Friday February 5th) and then runs until June 12th.

Early on in the planning of this exhibition Gemma Brace, the RWA’s curator, kindly asked me if I would suggest some people whose work might be relevant, so in addition to her showing my own piece, I feel I’ve had some degree of input into the exhibition as a whole. Of the various artists whose work I suggested she might look at, I’m particularly pleased that she’s chosen to include works by Eileen Lawrence and Will Mclean, two outstanding senior Scottish artists who in my view are not given their proper due south of the Border, and the work of two very interesting younger Bristol-based artists – Seila Fernandez Arconada and Jethro Brice – who often work collaboratively.

Gemma writes that Imagined Landscapes “explores an alternative understanding of place in contemporary art and the role of the artist as spatial narrator, cartographer and geographer”, an approach which links closely to my own concerns with deep and narrative mappings. Originally based around the idea of asking artists to respond to the notion of ‘Wessex’ – as much Thomas Hardy’s imagined literary place as any kind of physical or historical entity– I think that the resulting multi-disciplinary group exhibition will reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, on the intersection of literal and imaginal spaces, sites where physical location, memory and the imaginal or even mythic constellate landscape as place. As Gemma also notes the exhibition is, perhaps inevitably, haunted by environmental concerns. I write ‘perhaps inevitably’ because I hold to Edward S. Casey’s understanding of place, one in which he differentiates between a position, taken as “a fixed posit of an established culture”, and our experiencing of place which, notwithstanding its normally settled appearance, he characterizes as “an essay in experimental living within a changing culture”.(Getting Back into Place: Towards a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World 1993 p. 31) Such a definition of place in our present time cannot but have some powerful sense of environmental concern inextricably woven into it.

The artists involved include: Jethro Brice, Stephen Felmingham, Seila Fernandez Arconada, Paul Fieldsend-Danks, Paul Gough RWA, Lydia Halcrow, Tim Harrisson RWA, Rae Hicks, Eileen Lawrence RSA, Will Mclean, Gill Rocca, Melanie Rose, Jem Southam, Veronica Vickery and myself.

The politics of ‘flood defence’ – land management and social justice

“David Cameron has promised to invest £400 million a year on shoring up flood defences over the next six years; but official data shows spending was cut sharply at the start of the last parliament, from £360m in 2010-11, to less than £270m in 2012-13” (The Guardian 31.12.2015: 1).

I do not believe that David Cameron’s Government will deliver on this statement but, be that as it may, there is still something pathetic about his pottering around flood-ravaged England dispensing platitudes about funding ‘flood defences’. It is pathetic because the Government is clinging to thinking about water management that it knows is practically ineffective, socially unworkable and, additionally, defies expert opinion.

After the flooding of the Somerset Levels the Government, having consistently cut back funding to the Environment Agency tried, in desperation, to blame it for the consequences of the Government’s own policies. It was forced to back down and the ensuing climb-down involved consultation with a range of top water management experts. They told the Government that it needed to avoid the temptation to revert to dredging and start putting in place inclusive, catchment-wide thinking about the causes and prevention of flooding. (I’ve written about this before – see ‘Won’t Wash’ or: ‘high and dry thinking in a wide, wet, world’ The Government then proceeded to totally ignore this advice because it was going to be unpopular with regional Tory supporters.

Inclusive, catchment-wide thinking in relation to flooding is primarily about prevention rather than defence and, as such, requires fundamental changes in attitudes to rural governance. On Exmoor, for example, this thinking has meant reversing long-established assumptions – not least that water needs to be drained off the high moor as fast as possible (largely with a view to improving the land for grazing). The new policy reverses this, trying to ensure that the water stays on the moor for as long as possible and drains off it as slowly as possible, thus minimising both the risk of flooding downstream in the short term and substantially reducing the amount of soil washed down to silt up rivers in the middle to long term. This change in thinking is really only possible because since 1954 Exmoor has been a National Park, with its governance initially coordinated by local government and, since 1997, by a free standing Exmoor National Park Authority. What this means in practice is that this area of land is managed through a council made up of elected individuals who, in accordance with democratic convention, must act in the public interest and demonstrate that they will do so by publically declaring their personal and pecuniary interests. In short on Exmoor there is the possibility of genuine democratic debate as to the basis for its governance, thus distinguishing it sharply from the bulk of uplands in the UK. These largely remain in private ownership and are managed on the basis of the personal interests of individuals like the “exuberant hedgefund billionaire Crispin Odey”, singled out as a typical grouse moor owner by Telegraph reporter Clive Aslet .

This is where the issue of flooding and social justice start to converge. In 2014 the same Government that chose to ignore the call for inclusive, catchment-wide thinking in relation to the Somerset Levels almost doubled the subsidy to landowners who own grouse moors (from £30 to £56 per hectare). Unfortunately what is good in terms of raising grouse for shooting is bad for flood prevention. By increasing the grouse moor subsidy the Government has effectively subsidised miss-management of hundreds of thousands of hectares, both in terms of flood prevention and of opportunities to link good environmental governance and increased rural employment more generally. In short, the wealthy and privileged few are being rewarded for perpetuating a situation that brings misery to tens of thousands of their fellow citizens. (For a direct link between grouse moor management and flooding see George Monbiot’s recent blog entry). Misery that in this last round of flooding alone is estimated to be going to cost the country in excess of five billion pounds. My point is simple. David Cameron’s promised £2,400 million is not just about “shoring up” flood defences, its also about shoring up an exclusive and deeply anachronistic version of rural life and economy – one that the right to continue fox hunting and grouse shooting have come to symbolise in the minds of those who claim to defend ‘our’ rural way of life.

It will be blindingly obvious to anyone with any political sense that a Tory Government will not risk upsetting the wealthy landowning classes – whether in the name of flood prevention or any other eco-social concern. If they were to do so, we can be sure that organisations like the Countryside Alliance and Country Land and Business Association would do everything they can to defend the rural mythology that supports the status quo. (An example of such a defence is provided by Charles Clove in an article in praise of the ownership of rural land ownership (which, he suggests, was never “likely to attract capitalists who were not born into it as a way of life – unless for social reasons, or for sport” – a sport, however, where rich individuals from around the world pay something in the region of £140 for the privilege of killing two birds).

This leaves us with the practical question of what is to be done.

In my view there is little or no point in adopting a rigidly adversarial approach towards the rural establishment, not least because it is politically and economically very powerful (for good or ill), and often holds attitudes that are likely to harden further if blindly opposed. Nor is there any ‘magic bullet’ that can solve the complex of issues involved. The real solution to the worsening flooding in the UK lies in a whole cluster of changes, some of which have no obvious connection to water management.

These include the move to proportional representation that is necessary to restore something approaching a genuine democratic system of government to the UK, and without which serious land management reform will never take place. But it also requires serious work at many levels on ending the ignorance and calculated prejudice that is used to perpetuate the rural/urban divide – a divide that plays straight into the hands of those whose only real concern is the perpetuation of a status quo that, increasingly, has become both socially and environmentally toxic. This requires us to build dialogue and a degree of trust that, inevitably, with mean building new alliances and, inevitably, some compromise of long-cherished views on both sides of that divide. There are examples that point to new possibilities in this respect, for example The BurrenLIFE project – Farming for Conservation in the Burren in the west of Ireland. The aims of this project include:

Implementing best-known management practices on 2,000ha of the Burren, including new feeding systems, redeployment of existing livestock and targeted scrub removal.
Increasing understanding of the relationship between land management practices and the natural heritage of the Burren;
Developing new support mechanisms for the sustainable management of the Burren habitats;
Enhancing awareness and skills relating to the heritage of the Burren and its management through a range of practical initiatives aimed at empowering local communities;
Disseminating information relating to the agricultural management of areas of high nature and cultural conservation value through literature and the media.

Indicatively, it may be that the second and last of these aims are the most pressing. Developing ‘new support mechanisms for … sustainable management’ in any rural area has to involve looking long and hard at its eco-economic viability, which in turn will often require developing forms of employment that, in order to genuinely ’empower local communities’, will challenge a rural status quo that still takes its right to pursue activities like grouse shooting as a given. That in turn raises important governance, educational and cultural issues, including that of raising external understanding and support during what will inevitably be periods of difficult transition in such communities. It is here that the dissemination of information (and not only that relating to the environmental and agricultural management of an area) informed by inclusive catchment thinking – particularly through literature, the arts and the media – comes into play.

Assemble

I’ve just read an article by Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian (09/12/15) about Assemble winning the Turner Prize. Their winning is (I hope obviously?) a very real cause for celebration. But it is also a reflection of just how slow the official ‘art world’ has been to recognise the sea change taking place on its wilder shores.

As Higgins points out, to some people giving the prize to a collective of young architects is going to look like “a monumental category error, like giving the Man Booker to, say, an oral poet”. And it’s that ‘category error’ by the Art Establishment, surely, that is the most fundamental cause for celebration. Art as we have reinvented it, ‘art with a capital A’, will be with us for just as long as there are elites who can use it as a sign of their ‘wealth’ – whether in terms of economic or cultural capital – and social exclusivity (or ‘taste’ if you prefer the polite term). What has been happening for many years now, however, is a slow withering away at the edges of the categorical exclusivity, in relation to the arts as to all other disciplines, that separates our skills and knowledges into separate and exclusive silos. In academia this is glossed as the ‘inter-disciplinarity turn’ (an unfortunate term that tacitly continues to perpetuate the myth of the superiority of disciplinary knowledge).

In actuality, however, what is taking place, albeit often below the radar on which cultural pundits depend, is the acknowledgement that we live in a polyverse in which it makes no sense to ghettoise any set of skills or form of knowledge on the basis of traditional professional hierarchies. (This is, I think, the most important insight behind Felix Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophy’, despite his tendency to lionise aesthetics and the ‘artist’ over against science).

When Maria Lisogorskaya and Louis Schulz, two of the ‘eighteen or so’ members of Assemble, tell Higgins that they are indifferent to whether they are categorised as artists or not, that their focus is on “doing good projects”, which in turn is sometimes “about doing really good plumbing”, they give us a very clear indication of where the resurgence of an aesthetics of the everyday may be taking us.

Some years back my old friend Simon Read – who teaches art students at Middlesex University, makes extraordinary and beautiful predictive coastal maps, other kinds of large drawings, sculptural environmental interventions in the salt marshes on and around the River Deben, and is also practically engaged in the debates around environmental governance of the region in which he lives – told me a story. He was at the opening of a major exhibition in London when a friend introduced him as an artist to a well-known art critic. The critic asked Simon what he did. When Simon told him the critic’s response was: “how worthy”, with which comment he turned and walked away.

I hope that Assemble’s success will mean that, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons, the cultural influence represented by that critic will now be a little less dismissive of those for whom the skills of an artist are wholly compatible with getting productively engaged with the messy and complex everyday realities of our crumbling psycho-social environment.

Invisible Landscapes

On Friday last week I found myself at the Invisible Landscapes: Exploring Embedded Approaches to Place-Based Contemporary Art Practice seminar. This was organised by Simon Lee Dicker for OSR/Projects , who are based in West Coker in Somerset.

I had originally intended to skip this interesting looking event, simply because there is so much to do at home but, as it turned out, it provided the only opportunity for a meeting with three friends with overlapping interests – the artist and geographer Jethro Brice; Owain Jones, Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University; and John Fanshawe, an ornithologist and artist who is currently working with the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) . An added bonus was the chance to catch up with Jethro’s news during the drive down. Jethro is currently doing AHRC-funded doctoral research in the Geography Department at Bristol University into ‘crane cultures’ – the birds, not the machines – by drawing multi-species wetland narratives from the field and archives. (The purpose of the four of us meeting was to talk about whether we can initiate some productive interactions with CCI, and it seems we may have the basis for doing so. However, it’s far too early to write about that here).

After a brief introduction by Simon, we listened to two very different talks. Sally Watkins – co-artistic director and curator for b-side – talked very informatively about b-side’s work, particularly on Portland, which included drawing out the various different ways in which that organization understands notions of ‘site-responsiveness’ and ‘embeddedness’ in practice. The second talk of the morning was by Owain.

I have trouble knowing how best to write about this talk. (I’d heard a version of it before at a conference in Newcastle and raised some of the issues that concerned me with Owain then). Put briefly, this is because I think his take on our current situation is warped by a number of factors. The most significant is his stressing – referencing Felix Guattari – the aesthetic in opposition to science. While that position obviously went down well with an audience almost entirely made up of people from the arts, it seems to me to be a wrong-headed unless its heavily qualified, and may in any case – following Bruno Latour – be an outdated, binary position of the kind we badly need to avoid. I won’t go further into the reasoning behind this view here but I’ve discussed the question of scientism and aestheticism in contemporary culture at length in a chapter called ‘Beyond Aestheticism and Scientism: Notes towards An “Ecosophical” Praxis’ in Art, Science and Cultural Understanding, edited by Brett Wilson, Barbara Hawkins, and Stuart Sim and published in 2014. While Owain’s take on the chronically destructive nature of our current eco-social position is, at one level, as passionately argued as it is intellectually well-informed, it is in my view also saturated with – and in my view seriously distorted by – his own emotional discomfort with his inability, as an academic, to ‘know what to do’. (One antidote to which might be a careful reading of David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, published in 2010).

And this highlights a major ecosophical issue with regard to all articulations of our situation by those who earn their living providing “authoritative” accounts of that situation. Put simply, the personal ecology of the academic makes him or her singularly ill-suited to providing a helpful approach to our situation, simply because any such approach requires us to by-pass or overcome the fundamental presuppositions on which academic knowledge, and the whole material mesh and realpolitik in which it is embedded, rests. I found it sad and deeply ironic that, while Owain was rightly sceptical of all contemporary politics, he failed to acknowledge that the underlying psycho-social assumptions that underpin those politics also underpin the authority of academia. And no amount of aesthetic or imaginative work will change that situation until we acknowledge it for what it is.

Anyway, after an excellent lunch of bread and soup in a local pub we hear an informative talk from Sally Laburn, an artist and the co-director of The Drawing Shed, which is based in east London. This was followed by three parallel workshops run by Alexander Stevenson, Jethro and Tim Martin. I went to Jethro’s, in which we used mud to think about our relationship to non-human thinking, which involved me and my two peers in our group in an interesting and wide-ranging series of thoughts and reflections.

I enjoyed the day on a number of levels, and recognise just how important these types of gathering are to the regional arts community. However, one of the questions it left me with is around the issue of how we exchange with each other – starting with our terms of reference and vocabulary. If they also leave me somewhat saddened it is because I fear they may reinforce the very thing they appear to seek to overcome – the huddling together of individuals on the basis of a monolithic, disciplinary-based, world view – almost every speaker introduced him or her self by saying “I am an artist” – in a constellated world in which only the understanding that we now live in a polyverse will allow us to mitigate the extraordinary difficulties we increasingly face.

‘Erdkunde’ revisited: some thoughts on art and time

I’m re-reading Adam Nicolson’s Sea Room, a beautifully written account of his relationship to the Shiant Islands, which lie some five miles off the Isle of Lewis, and of the world in which they are enmeshed. It is one of a number of books about a specific place that seem to me to convey something of the essential concerns that underlie what, out of habit rather than conviction, I continue to refer to as deep mapping.

Yesterday I found myself speaking as a ‘representative’ of those concens as a panel member at the City Museum and Art Gallery in Bristol in a public discussion of the Museum’s Erdkunde exhibition. (I should say at once that John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work has grown on me to an unexpected degree since I referred to it in an earlier blog – their understated yet multilayered video and the surrounding material taking on a much greater richness and resonance as a result of my making an additional visit and through turning over elements of the work in memory).

Two connections with Nicolson’s book appear to me relevant to the exchanges during that panel talk and the questions from the audience that followed it. The first is the question of our experience of time, something to which we kept returning in various ways. Perhaps thinking about geology inevitably leads to thoughts of deep time and, in this case, its contrast with the sense of instantaneousness associated with so many of our new technologies. The second connection is not unconnected to this and has to do with what I can only call the politics (small p) of making worthwhile art, an activity which it may now be increasingly important to understand (given that any form of ‘Political art making’ is already captured within the dominant categories and networks of our existing culture).

In a beautiful account of gathering water from local springs close to the dwelling where he stayed on the islands, Nicolson writes (page 67) about the way in which, in the simple act of collecting water, his sense of time became no longer linear – that is part of the sweeping away of the past in the present towards the future that dominates so much of our lives. Instead his experience of time shifted, becoming what he refers to as the awareness of “a laminar flow”, one in which “different sheets of time” move at different speeds, “one over another, like the currents in the sea”. This is I suggest the same awareness of multiple, co-existing temporalities that we can move into when walking at a steady pace along a windswept rocky shore, one where the seemingly frozen geological movement of folded cliff strata and the low cliff edge blackthorns distorted by years of subjection to the constant of a prevailing wind are counterpointed by the just perceptible shift in the tide and, in another register again, the rapid passage of sea birds and the constant scudding of clouds.

The second point, what I have clumsily referred to as ‘the politics (small p) of making worthwhile art’, relates for me to what Nicolson writes about a particular form of thought. He identifies this (page 101) with the help of a phrase from Denise Levertov’s poem Overland to the Islands. There she names it as “intently haphazard”. Nicolson then draws attention to her presenting this in the image of a dog that is always moving, notices everything, frequently changes its “pace and approach” while retaining its overall direction; the act of an animal for which “every step” is “an arrival”. This, it seems to me, is the territory in which the materialised thinking – although ‘thinking’ is perhaps the wrong word here, James Hillman’s ‘the thought of the heart’ might be closer to the mark – that we intuit through examining the products of the activity we call art. One that is able to sidestep, even to a degree counter, the all-consuming instrumentality that increasingly dominates every aspect of our waking lives. And it’s in this territory too, and perhaps for similar reasons, that the spaces appear in which we are able to apprehend time as sinuous, as not strictly linear; that “laminar flow” that allows us to experience the complexities and contradictions, the currents and counter currents, that carry the present out of the past.

It was in this context that it dawned on me, reading a review of Massimo Bacigalupo’s Ezra Pound: Posthumous Cantos, that Pound’s magnus opus too might be thought of as related to the impulses that underlie the deep mapping project. A somewhat sobering thought that perhaps leads to difficult questions about the relation between the desire of inclusiveness (or should that be the fear of not being in control) and a certain brand of politics? However, it appears that these last, posthumous, Cantos tell a somewhat different story and one that, I must admit, I now want to hear.

Although not planned that way, I now realise that my re-reading Sea Room has turned out to be an unconscious act of preparation for one of my periodic periods of self-immersion in some aspect of Scottish culture. I’ve just bought a second hand copy of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s A Scots Quair, the first part of which is said to be the most single most popular book with readers in Scotland. I have resisted examine this impulse, part of my sense of an increasingly dominant in-between-ness in my life. Perhaps reading A Scots Quair will finally prompt that examination.

Landscape Values: Place and Praxis – 29 June-2 July 2016

I don’t usually use this blog to advertise events but this conference, set up by the Centre for Landscape Studies at NUI, Galway, looks to be really interesting in a number of respects. What particularly caught my interest was the following:

“Arranging the contributions around four themes: Place Values; Places in Action; Place Thinking; and Place Governance; the conference aims to reflect and critique the journey of values from their genesis and expression in place, through how they are recorded and documented, to the position they command or are accorded in governance and contemporary social praxis”.

“All of the human sciences recognise the important role that the collective values engendered in place-making have in building and reinforcing community cohesion. However, a 2015 survey by the Heritage Council reveals that, in Ireland, the public rank built and natural heritage equally. In fact, though the gap is statistically insignificant, nature is ranked ahead of monuments and buildings as heritage. This suggests that the values associated with nature are not only scientific, that ecosystems service more than just the biological needs of society, and that topophilia and biophilia are deeply intertwined. In short, place has ecological dimensions which, in terms of management, can be honoured by initiatives such as Natura 2000, Green Infrastructure and High Nature Value Farming”.

“Typically, however, many of the cultural values attaching to landscape are expressed only in the languages of poetry and the creative arts. Though uniquely sensitive to the synaptic and protean nature of the relationship between people and place, such expressions are commonly deprived of their force and agency during the decision-making process. When it comes to regional, national and international business and governance, historical and cultural values are usually required to cede to biophysical and economic ones, leading to an inversion of value-hierarchies customarily associated with community projects“.

I know (or have met) a number of the people involved in setting up this conference and, as a result, I’m further encouraged to enthuse about it in advance.

But anyone interested in submitting will need to get their skates on as abstracts (not exceeding 800 characters) and nomination of one conference theme has to be in by 17:00 (GMT) 27th November 2015 using the online abstract form located on the Landscape Values: Place and Praxis web site hosted by www.conference.ie.

Autumn (and art) in suburbia

Last night I worked for the first time in about three months. With my friend Luci Gorell Barnes I run a workshop that responded to the artists John Wood and Paul Harrison’s Erdkunde – itself a new video work responding to Bristol City Museum’s collections. (These were not, it has to be said, much in direct evidence in the film, but so be it). After meeting at the Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery to watch the Erdkunde film we walked up to the RWA (where Luci and I had already spent a frustrating half hour struggling to get PowerPoint up and working) and assembled in the small upstairs studio. I started us off by linking some of the key features of a deep map to what we’d just seen. What I said is pretty much as follows.

The word “Erdkunde” can be literally translated as ‘physical geography’ – but in German ‘Erde’ can mean ‘world’, ‘ground’ or ‘earth’, so it’s a very inclusive term. That makes it a perfect title for John Wood and Paul Harrison’s work. Their interest in collecting, cataloguing, and displaying various kinds of information – through notes, sketches, photographs, thoughts, ideas – questions how we look at things, identify them, talk about them. To do all that we use given systems of classification, even though our actual experience is always somehow both more and less than the systems and categories we use to tidy up the world. Deep mapping asks questions about the official categories we apply to space when we start to think about our experience of place.

So ‘deep mapping’, like the Erdkunde exhibition, is a way of questioning the relationship between official classifications of what is or is not important and our own immediate experience. Of course all places are shared to some extent, so our sense of place is always a combination of lived experience, given information, and various kinds of memory. Any deep mapping exercise begins by asking: “what needs to go onto a map of this particular place” and, because a place is always changing, being re-shaped, deep mapping is in turn always as much about time as it is about space.

I can identify each of these four snapshots taken in Bristol in terms of a particular place, but they are also evocations of different times – the slow change and decay of architecture periods over against the span of a human life or the growth of a sunflower.

We make sense of places through sharing stories, which are like crossroads where what’s important to us personally meets shared histories and social values. Here’s a story about a place in Bristol that’s no longer there. This was a medieval church dedicated to Saint Leonard – patron saint of prisoners – down on the Westgate, one of the original entrances to the medieval city, which became known as St Leonard’s Gate. This medieval church was in the way of ‘improvements’ to this area of the city that, in the C18th, needed to rework itself as a port in order to accommodate its expanding trade. So the civic authorities destroyed an ancient religious building dedicated to a saint who, according to legend, had the right to liberate prisoners and, having done so, to gave them land to live off. Ironically, they did this in order to facilitate the slave trade. I’m telling you this because one of the things deep mapping does is try to make visible the tensions between what’s remembered and what’s forgotten in constructing a sense of place. In doing so it inevitably asks questions about our values.

So deep mapping is a way of visualising the mesh of social tensions – both productive and unproductive – inherent in the processes of remembering and forgetting. Since these processes happen at the point where the personal and the public meet, deep mapping is always in some way collaborative. This slide shows a project by Rebecca Krinke called Seen / Unseen – the mapping of joy and pain where she and her students took a plywood relief map of Minneapolis / St Paul into the park and asked people to map where they had experienced joy and pain in their city. It’s purpose, however, was really as much to make an intimate public space for people to share their experiences and the stories that make Minneapolis / St Paul not just a city on a map but a lifeworld held in common as it was to make a specific art work.

Luci then talked about her Atlas of Human Kindness and opened up the parameter of the evening’s thinking by referring to ‘narrative mapping’ rather than ‘deep mapping’.

We then asked the participants to plot particular locations that mattered to them onto a big map of Bristol, using PostIts colour-coded according to three general types of experience, so as to create a high-speed pro-deep map of Bristol. Here are three photographs Luci took:

It seems to have been a good evening for the participants and it was certainly good for me to be ‘back in the saddle’ in terms of doing something educational, having been wholly emersed in family matters and the new house for so long.

So what has any of this to do with ‘autumn in suburbia’? Perhaps nothing, literally speaking, but I find it increasingly hard to take things entirely literally these days or, indeed, to keep the separate elements and levels of my life from seeping into each other across the usual boundaries we erect. At sixty-five and recovering from six weeks illness in a house that’s been half building site, I am tending to feel a bit autumnal myself, so very much in tune with the current season of ‘mellow fruitfulness’ and decay. And to find myself living in suburbia is, for me, to be living in a space that is neither truly urban – I got something of a buzz from being out on Queen’s Road at seven at night yesterday, the familiar feeling of the street on Friday night just starting to get busy – nor (despite the plentiful evidence of foxes, owls, etc.) rural in any meaningful way.

The world in which I now live is characterised by reticence – there’s little sense of neighbourly communication – on one hand and excess on the other. (Oddly, John Wood and Paul Harrison’s reticence in their film seemed to me to resonate oddly with the suburban world, their piece a kind of absurdist ‘Janet and John’ exercise directly at the culturally sophisticated). Excess out here, on the other hand, has seemed to me to be personified by the plethora of vast 4x4s – often two to a house – that I see driven by small, determined women in a hurry with little sense of how to manage the mechanical beast they’re in charge of. (Yesterday I watched as one such women took three goes at backing into her own drive, reversing clearly being something of a problem). Their husbands, large, corporate types, tend to have a better grasp of the beast, but seem to regard speed limits as some kind of personal affront.

I could go on but there’s no point in airing my prejudices – unnecessary consumption and similar forms of selfishness and excess are hardly the prerogative of the Bristol suburbanite!

Keeping on keeping on

As so often when things are difficult, I find myself turning to music as a way of steading myself, making space for something else to well up into whatever troubled place I currently happen to be in. (This will hardly be news to anyone who reads this blog regularly).

As I write this, in hopefully the dog days of a long bout of ‘flu that went to my chest, I’m listening to a new CD – by Alela Diane and the guitarist Ryan Francesconi – called Cold Moon. This sounds like the necessary and inevitable followup to her beautiful About Farewell and somehow perfectly matches where I find myself just now. If you’re into this kind of music – which is almost impossible to categorise (although she sometimes reminds me of the spirit of Sandy Denny, the intensely personal narrative refigured through the lens of a sense of the collective that belongs to any folk tradition) – start with the tracks Cold Moon and Shapeless and, if those press your buttons, listen to the whole CD.

And, while I adjust to the changes emerging in my life and try to pick up my health again, all manner of bigger and more serious storms rage elsewhere – not least in the political world and in the lives of some of my friends. The first are too large to think about in my current state and the second too personal to be included here. I am, however, turning once again to trying to realise a recurrent desire – the idea of organising a ‘hedge school’ for those whose I know whose creative potential in all its ecosophical dimensions has somehow been failed by their encounter with the university system. That desire, and an unexpected enquiry from a Dutch friend, remind me that there is still a great deal of interesting work to do out in that currently distant quarter of my life, no matter the current difficulties and sense of restriction.

Just a question, as always, of ‘keeping on keeping on’.

Up in the air

It’s been one of those weeks. As if fate wanted to throw a different light on all the usual, necessary stuff that has to goes on regardless, I heard that my uncle – my mother’s half-brother – died in his sleep after a brief period in hospital. So the family will be gathering for his funeral next week (some of whom I will not have seen since the last family funeral).

During the week I also discovered that I have won something called “the Derek Balmer PPRWA Painting Prize” at this year’s RWA Annual Open Exhibition for my piece Washington & Vicinity (Arlington betrayed), a work in part inspired by talking with my friend Mona Smith about the history and mis-treatment of the Dakota people. (See the earlier post Two works for the Annual Exhibition at the RWA). Apparently the prize is awarded “for excellence in painting”, something I was under the impression I no longer really ‘did’, at least in the traditional sense!

Then today – although in fact, since I’m writing this in the early hours of the morning, actually yesterday – I helped my elder son, who has been semi-camping here in our new house, and his partner move into their own new home. It’s great for them and that move is a serious milestone in any parent’s life. And then my younger son, who has been very ill for a while, has come to get some rest and a bit of help with his work. Meanwhile my wife and daughter are still up north, and sadly must stay there, until this house is in a state where they can come back to a functioning home with proper heating, etc. However the building work proceeds a pace and hopefully, despite the endless and inevitable minor problems that that process throws up, I hope it will continue to do so. And finally, I thought (wrongly) that I had recovered from a nasty cold and discovered today that I haven’t. Just another week in the polyverse.

Meanwhile, of course, everyone else continues to pursue their own priorities and, where those involve me, to hope that I will put their’s at the top of my Urgent List. And no doubt I’ll try to do what I can.

Two works for the Annual Exhibition at the RWA

This year I’m sticking out my neck (in RWA terms) and submitting unframed work, basically reconfigured maps of Washington. It will be interesting to see what the response is, particularly given that I am due to work with the RWA and Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery in conjunction with an exhibition that has the archive and mapping as one of its starting points.

Iain Biggs

educator / artist / researcher