Christmas Postcards from Leahdee

Bristol so far...

My artistic endeavours in Bristol have been slow. I have been more focused on networking since I arrived. I joined the Bristol Creatives and attended their monthly meeting which I thoroughly enjoyed, met some interesting artists and gained valuable contacts. I am looking forward to attending a meeting of community arts group Phoenix 52 (an arts initiative running very local to me).

I have also been following the progress of a new festival called the Bristol Ecoshows. The pilot was running while I was still in Lancaster but it is now in its early stages of development. I had a meeting today with festival organiser/creator David Mowatt, to see how I might fit into the programme of participatory arts planned for the city. I am looking forward to meeting the other artists involved.

I want to start work on a new project as soon as possible, and am awaiting the guidelines for Ecoshow artists to see if I can work on something that would fit with what they are doing. I am finding it hard to be inspired at the moment - I am hoping to find my feet here soon.

In the mean time I am hoping to volunteer at Dance Voice and hopefully re-connect with Art + Power, an organisation I enjoyed working for earlier this year. I was pleased to bump into 2 of Art + Power's participants today while waiting for my meeting with David.

Lancaster Guardian, Friday September 11 2009

Expressing Pride: Tent Donation

Throughout my exhibition in the shops, I have had regular visits from a group of participants who are homeless. They have been keenly engaged in the work and have made valuble contributions to the 'Beach in an Arcade' pebble painting installation. I am happy to announce that they will be collecting and keeping the Expressing Pride tent at the end of my exhibition. I feel that this will be a positive end/new beginning for my community based installation.

Painted Pebbles

Over the last few days at Mapped Festival, I have watched my collection of decorated pebbles grow. They look fantastic and yet again I find myself over whelmed by the creativity and imagination of the general public. It has been a fantastic experience to have the opportunity to share this creative experience with everyone who has entered my Expressing Pride shop. I found out this morning that I might be able to take over a shop space in Bristol when I move there at the weekend. The painted pebbles created in St.Nicholas' Arcade in Lancaster have inspired a new idea for my next endeavour. I hope to take the painted pebbles in a different and exciting new direction... watch this space.

Mapped Festival Opening Weekend

Mapped Festival is now in full swing across Lancaster, with 4 other visual artists: Carlos Franco, Lauren Miller, Carla Nizzola and Laura Stevens, we have transformed disused spaces in Lancaster town centre into a fantastic collection of contemporary art. I am extremely proud to be a part of Mapped Festival. Two excellent performances from David McBride and Chris Williams started the festival off on a fantastic start at the pre-view evening on Friday.

Both of my shops have had many visitors, many more than I had anticipated for the opening weekend. I am thrilled by the positive and creative response I have had to my interactive A Beach in an Arcade piece, where local people have been painting pebbles for the creation of a 'Lancastrian' beach.

Photographer Richard Davis managed to capture the essence of this piece in this photo:

The shops are a perfect venue for my work, capturing the interest of people passing by. I am also in love with the architecture surrounding the shops, which contribute beautifully to the "Brighton" and arcade theme in Expressing Pride.

Figuratively Speaking: The Frames

I have nearly completed the eight thinner frames for Figuratively Speaking, and the five large ones are in the early stages of development. This framing process has consumed me for the last few weeks. Each frame had to be hand-made, each side, shelf, partition, support and front piece cut individually to fit. I have 13 frames in total, with 10 shelves each and 1-2 partitions in each shelf. This has been a mammoth task but seeing the first 2 painted today has given me the motivation to complete the set.

Roughly 150 people have contributed and participated in Figuratively Speaking at different stages: the painting/decorating of the figures and the making of their "little worlds". I feel I owe it to the participants to show the full collection in a beautiful and impressive manner, thus I will continue to push ahead for the completion of the frames for Mapped Festival next Friday.

Mapped Festival

I am one of seven artists exhibiting for Mapped Festival in Lancaster from the 11th - 18th of September. I have chosen to show 6 pieces I have been working on recently: Figuratively Speaking 2008, Describe Your Identity, Two Too Many, GreenLancaster, Expressing Pride and an intercative piece that will form an addition to Expressing Pride.

Figuratively Speaking is made up of 125 hand made white clay figures (10cm tall) that were decorated by guests/visitors to my peice at the Retold exhibition in Liverpool in 2008. I am currently working on the construction of 13 frames in which the figures will sit, alongside photos of the figures held by their 'decorator' and images of the worlds created for them by the participants in my 'Little World Making' workshops. The frames are prooving to be more difficult to construct than my plans suggested. I want to create small indentations (or boxes) that sink back into the frame, for the 125 figures to sit inside looking out at the viewer who will see all of the processes involved in the Figuratively Speaking project.

Describe Your Identity was an interactive piece I ran at a women's activism event at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool. I got speakers, research staff, academics and the general public to describe their identity onto the figures using black marker pens. The collection of 40 figures will be shown at Mapped Festival. At the moment I am considering the possiblities for their presentation. I do not want to frame or box them, I want to treat them as I see the work - as expressions of people, I want them to be seen together to show how different we are and yet how similar we are (they were all made from the same mould).

Two Too Many was an experiment to see if I could mix street art with street dance and politics! (it can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTGs2YTJRU8) I think I bit off more than I could chew with this one. I am not a trained street dancer or trained in the wonderous art form that is graffiti, however I am extremely politicised and activist in nature. I was trying to create a work that would attract the younger genorations on first impressions and then show them a significant and disturbing truth (in this case, that every week in the UK 2 women are killed by a male partner). I am unsure about the quality of this piece, although I recently heard that this work is being used to start debate at a college in Essex - so I must have created something worth talking about. Again I am unsure of how to present this work at the festival as its large boldness may distract attension from the rather more delicate work in Figuratively Speaking.

GreenLancaster was a commissioned work for a volunteering organiation at Lancaster University. The project was designed to attract potential "green" volunteers to the work of GreenLancaster. We created a billboard on which staff and students could contribute images to the GreenLancaster logo. The final piece is being displayed on campus, but at Mapped Festival I will be showing photograph documentation of the process of the billboard gaining input from participants. I am also currently working on a sculpture made out of recycled materials to go in the GreenLancaster office. I am struggling with the aesthetics of this piece and feel restricted by the material constraints - however, I accept the challenge and will stick at it. I have so far created the main body of a "tree" like form using a glass bottle and a plastic bottle. I am decorating the "trunk" with a broken mirror to hopefully catch some of the light coming into the office space.

Expressing Pride is my most recent work and one that I am very fond of. I wrote about this piece in my last entry, however I fear it may be causing some issues already. As a social and political artist I am very aware that I am "putting myself out there" so to speak, it seems strange to me that I have already faced some negativity when the work is not even on show yet and no-one has even seen the work standing. I hope that its aesthetic beauty and proud comments can banish such ideas... we'll see.

I am planning to build a structure that will help the tent maintain its shape and I will be exhibiting and selling some of the photos taken on-site. My aim for the small shop (the site planned for this work) in the centre of Lancaster, is to re-create the scene - Brighton Beach in an "Arcade" (St.Nicholas' Arcade, Lancaster). I am going to offer pebbles to the visitors to this work, so that they can decorate it and place it around the tent, building up a new beach for the work.

A proud installation

I made a new installation to exhibit at Brighton Pride last weekend. I took a white tent to the pride campsite and proceeded to paint “What does PRIDE mean to you?” on the far side. My friend wrote “who are you?” on the opposite side. My aim for this piece was to engage the LGBT community in an interactive art piece that would outline and depict positive identities. While the questions were answered on-site and the tent seemed to fill with responses, people seemed unwilling to add to the door side of the tent. It was left blank until the last day, when we moved the installation to Brighton Beach where, in contrast to the other sides, the front became the site for political and activist statements. I found it interesting that while the 3 ‘walls’ had gradually gained a varied response from participants, outlining individual notions of identity and pride over the course of the weekend, the door ‘wall’ went from a blank canvas to a strong political and social demonstration piece in a few hours.