The thinking behind our process

When asked by B Arts and Arts Council England to collate and edit the final book documenting the PSI programme, we came up with a list of questions we wanted to ask the artists involved. The purpose was to gain insight into their process and the themes that informed their work. As participants in the programme, it was only fair we asked ourselves those same questions and our responses are posted below. All artists' responses were printed on the reverse side of the Raw Material book poster jacket, and we'll also be publishing them here soon.

Can you tell us about your creative practice, your process, and what you produced for your PSI commission?

We work mainly with portrait and landscape photography. Our commission was to document and represent the PSI programme and to produce our own body of work responding to North Staffordshire. Producing our own series has been very different to the relatively straightforward process of documenting events. The former can be much more about communicating our own impressions of a place with some degree of poetic license.

Our process relies a great deal on the coincidences and accidents that result from wandering around and bumping into people and places. In those encounters, we’ll often share an intense if fleeting moment with the subjects of our photographs and aim to produce an image that reflects that encounter.

Left: Katie, "I want to be a hairdresser or something when I'm older. I'm into all that stuff."

What themes did you explore in researching and producing your work?
Initially, we believed the idea of ‘intervention’ was something that could hold our own work and our documentation of PSI activities together. It’s a term that can be used to describe the work of regeneration officers and artists in the public realm and we wondered if this could be represented in any way. We were also interested in the language used by them and that in each of the discourses lies this idea of a public. Artists, the public, and regeneration officers seemed like a good framework with which to structure the work. The more we talked to people and matched their stories to the landscape, the more the theme of fragility and rawness emerged. In the end, our work was really about matching the raw nature of the landscape with the emotional landscapes we were encountering.

How would you describe the identity of North Staffordshire and in particular that of the six towns?

Our views on the North Staffordshire landscape are that it shares the wounds and crises wrought on all post-industrial towns and cities. As the need to brand and market cities becomes prevalent, there’s this urge to find a unique selling point to a place. But working the way we do, almost every door we go through leads us into new cultural terrain which only highlights the complex identities of any one place. Any unique identity of the six towns we came across often seemed rooted in historical ideals or territorial mindsets rather than in anything we could directly see.

How have the social and physical landscapes of North Staffordshire influenced your work and your process?
Our immediate impressions of Stoke-on-Trent were of a landscape marked by countless open scars. To documentary photographers, this is well-trodden ground so we were conscious of trying to stay away from that and instead explore the idea of a fragile porcelain-like beauty; as visible in the personalities we met as in the landscapes we saw.

Are there any surprises or accidents that you've come across that have informed your work and your process?

There were two main surprises. In January 2008, we saw The Wizard of Oz at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle under Lyme to photograph the characters on the theatre grounds. We were struck by the relevance of the story to regeneration and to the artistic process and had our own epiphany watching the epiphanies of the characters as their quest to reach the Emerald City results in an unexpected twist. Then, near the end of shooting in March, we visited Hanley Baptist Church by chance and met Trevor and Anne who somehow manage to feed scores of homeless people every Thursday evening. Talking to them and spending an evening with those who use the Church brought home an altogether different perspective on the significance of the scarred landscape.

When making artwork, who do you make it for?
Photography is such a universal medium that we would of course want our work to be read by all. But there are different languages of photography and we try to steer away from clichés as much as we can. It was fascinating for example to watch photographers from the local newspaper setting up scenes with PSI artists and participants. It highlighted to us just how constructed the language of photography is and also how conservative it can be. In that context, we hope our work can stretch people’s understandings rather than reflect what they already know to reinforce stereotypes we rarely identify with.

Above: A local press photographer sets up a shot to represent the performance of CLAY at Burslem School of Art. By asking his subjects to hold up a slice of bread with a hole in it, he is creating a vignette-like effect that will frame the portrait. Well prepared, the photographer brought his own loaf of bread.

What role has the local community played in the production of your work?

To produce the kind of portraits we do relies on people opening their doors to us and welcoming us in. It never ceases to amaze us just how easy this is once we get over our own insecurities and fears for not making those approaches. To that extent, a community’s willingness to let us in determines whether any portraits are made and we were rarely refused that opportunity here.

How has your work been shown and what has been the public's reaction to it?

We kept a blog throughout the project which published interviews and photographs we did as we went along. Between October 2007 and April 2008, the site had 1,264 visitors from as far as New Zealand, India, Mexico, and Israel. Locally, we distributed as many portraits to those we photographed as we could and the reaction to that has been very positive.

An exhibition of the work also took place at the Airspace Gallery in Hanley in June 2008.

What life do you see this work having beyond the PSI programme?

We hope this body of work will form an important part of our collection of work in the North of England and that it can be seen in the UK and abroad at festivals, exhibitions and other contexts.

How has your practice benefited from this commission?

This commission has challenged our practice and ideas about what documentary should strive for. It has also helped clarify what side of the fence we feel we should be sitting on regarding documentary, as we have favoured the production of images and sequences that invite interpretation rather than restrict it. On another note, when you work on a project like this so intensively for six months, it lives with you every night and day and we have become more confident that with time and patience, order can emerge out of chaos and the resulting work will find its own rhythm.