Exhibition Opening

Tuesday night saw the opening of Raw Material at the Airspace Gallery, the final installment in the Place Space Identity Programme of 2007-2008 and closure to our work on the project. Thanks to all those who came, we truly appreciated your support and hope to see you again soon. Entertainment was provided by DJs Steve Boulton & James Moulden and friend and poet George Chopping. A big thanks also to Airspace's David Bethell, Andy Branscombe & Glen Stoker for all their help in putting the show together. Finally, we want to thank Susan and Hilary at B Arts for managing the programme and to Kathy James at Arts Council England West Midland for making it all happen. If you'd like to keep up to date with our other projects you can visit our website or simply get in touch. Thanks for watching!

A great time was had by all.

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.

Exhibition set-up

We finally set the exhibition up at the Airspace gallery today and thanks to the hard work of Andy, David, Glenn and young trainee Ryan, it looks like it's going to be a great show. Running from the 16th June - 21st June, opening times 11am-5pm. For more information, call 01782 261221.

Update & Exhibition launch

For the past couple of months we've been frantically putting the book and exhibition together for all of this work, which has meant the blog has been neglected since the last entry. As the project comes to an end, we aim to continue adding entries as a way of sharing the process of how we produced the book and final exhibition.

In the meantime, as I write this Liz is downstairs cutting and dusting prints, framing them and making other preparations for our trip to Airspace today to put the exhibition together. The launch is on Tuesday 17th June and we hope to see you there.

Book Launch

100 copies of Raw Material have finally arrived, just in time for the launch on Monday the 9th June at Hanley Park.

The book is protected by a poster wrap containing all the PSI artists' interviews on one side and on the other an enlargement of a plate design donated to us by Spode, depicting a scene of rural arcadia that seems perfectly fitting to the project. The book has an exposed spine and has the title 'Raw Material' debossed on the front. Inside are three sections. The first presents our body of work produced in response to the Stoke landscape and inhabitants and has a running motif of vulnerability, faith and role-play throughout. The aim of this is to contextualise the physical and cultural environment in which the artists were working, whose documentation of their work follows the following second section. Finally the book closes off with a third section voicing the positive and negative personal experiences of regeneration officers working in this area and those of young children whose lives have been affected by changes to their physical environment.


[Update - 9 June 2008] The launch of Raw Material on a bright and sunny day at Hanley Park, and great to catch up with Phoebe Cummings, Louise Wood, Tom Wichelow, Gavin Peacock, Brian McClave, Roger Brown, Rachel Grant, B Arts, Kathy James, members of CLAY and the Airspace crew, David and Andy.

Book printing

Raw Material, a book combining our own body of photographic work with documentation of the PSI programme and a section on Regeneration officers, their work and those affected by it, has being designed by Music in Manchester. Special thanks to Anthony who's put so much care and attention to the design of the book and to Matt (Music's production maestro) - they've been a pleasure to work with.

Publish PostHighlight printers in Warrington check proofs for colour variations across the separate paper stocks.

We've been working on the book solidly for the past few weeks, deciding on the edit, text and how to integrate such separate bodies of work into one cohesive whole. Coming across a William Morris speech given in Burslem over 120 years ago has resulted in a seamless link from artists to regeneration. In Art and the Beauty of the Earth, Morris states:

Of all the things that is likely to give us back popular art in England, the cleaning of England is the first and most necessary. Those who are to make beautiful things must live in a beautiful place. Some people may be inclined to say, and I have heard the argument put forward, that the very opposition between the serenity and purity of art and the turmoil and squalor of a great modern city stimulates the invention of artists, and produces special life in the art of today. I cannot believe it. It seems to me that at best it but stimulates the feverish and dreamy qualities that throw some artists out of the general sympathy. But apart from that, these are men who are stuffed with memories of more romantic days and pleasanter lands, and it is on these memories they live, to my mind not altogether happily for their art [.]

I abide by my statement that those who are to make beautiful things must live in beautiful places, but you must understand I do not mean to claim for all craftsmen a share of those gardens of the world, or of those sublime and awe-inspiring mountains and wastes that men make pilgrimages to see[.]

For surely there is no square mile of earth's inhabitable surface that is not beautiful in its own way, if we men will only abstain from wilfully destroying that beauty; and it is this reasonable share in the beauty of the earth that I claim as the right of every man who will earn it by due labour; a decent house with decent surroundings for every honest and industrious family; that is the claim which I make of you in the name of art.

William Morris

13 October 1881 before the Wedgewood Institute at the Town Hall, Burslem

The last pictures

Fittingly, this is the last photograph we took in Stoke as part of this project, shot earlier this afternoon. It is of a burnt-out camera found on the remains of an outdoor fire behind rows of terraced houses being knocked down in Hanley. From now until the publication of a book and exhibition, all efforts will be on the daunting task of editing images taken over the course of the past six months into shape and working on production.

Earlier in the day, we'd visited the North Staffordshire Afro-Caribbean Association where amongst others, we photographed the following portraits and details.

Spotted behind Hanley Cemetery

Scars on the Landscape

"Most studies of ruins have concentrated on the noble piles of classical antiquity, scenes of rural quaintness or the fake ruins installed in English country estates. Yet the 20th century has produced more ruins than ever before, whether through warfare or as a remorseless, short term-oriented capitalism turns solid things and places into air, rendering the contents and activities housed within industrial buildings instantaneously obsolete. In Britain, at the end of the 1970’s and through the eighties, the government of Margaret Thatcher allowed ‘market forces’ full reign, promoting an orgy of real estate speculation which produced a reconstructed industrial landscape. But not everywhere was able to capitalise on this economic reconstruction and in many areas, as old industries died, the buildings that housed them lay dormant and empty. This process persists and the material legacy of the industrial revolution, in the form of ruins, can still be found in most British cities.

These ruins are largely understood – especially by bureaucrats, city promoters and planners - as offensive to the character and aesthetics of the city. The sooner these scars on the landscape are demolished and swept away, effaced in the name of civic order, the better. They are matter out of place, a continuing rebuke to attempts to render urban space productive, smooth and regular. Imagined as sites of urban disorder, dens into which deviant characters – drug-users, gang-members, vandals and the homeless – are drawn, the imperative is to extinguish their decaying features from the urban backdrop." Tim Edensor, found here.

Stoke Dream #3

I'm cycling through a sprawling metropolis, rushing to get to a meeting on time when I take a series of wrong turns and end up in Stoke, in a complex of pink, high-density high rise apartments not unlike those found in Hong Kong. Inside the complex, rows and rows of pink and red clothes hang from washing lines that criss-cross from building to building. Weaving through them, I find the door of an apartment and decide to see if I can cut through the flat to get to the other side. The door is unlocked and as I carry my bike on my shoulder through the tiny apartment, I notice that the living room is tiny with the floor plan shaped like a diamond, with only a TV in the corner and two raised doorways side-by-side leading into it. I hear faint music and head towards a narrow corridor at the opposite end of the living room when out from one of the doors emerges a youngish lookng-man in his thirties. Unfazed by the sight of a stranger in his living room with a bike, he asks if he can help, to which I admit that I'm lost. He takes me out of the flat and points the way out of the complex. We begin chatting and he tells me he works in business. I ask what kind of business and he replies, "pure business." When I explain I'm a documentary photographer he interrupts, "oh yes, my grand-father was Stanley Matthews don't you know." Amazed, I explain the documentary we're doing in Stoke, and ask if he'd like to have his portrait taken. "Only if I can see your place" he replies. Keen to explore this new relationship with a potential subject, I agree and we return to my two-up-two-down which is a very long terraced house and looks like it's been furnished entirely from an ILVA catalogue. I show him the marble walls which have just been installed and the antique though rusty motorbikes parked in the conservatory, which he takes great interest in. It's then that my mother walks in and he embraces her hand, creepily continuing to kiss the length of her arm. My dad arrives and wonders who this man is, at which point things start to get awkward. We say our farewells and the man leaves. After a heated exchange in which I justify to my parents who and why this man is in my house, I head for the back garden and stop at the motorbikes, realizing one of the tires has been slashed and is leaking air.

The 'SoHo Effect'

Researching last night's dream, I discovered the following:

"The pattern of gentrification is typically known as the 'SoHo Effect' and has been observed in several cities around the United States. A backwater of poor artists and small factories in the 1970s, SoHo became a popular tourist destination for people looking for fashionable (and expensive) clothing and exquisite architecture. This has been frowned upon by many people now living in SoHo."

In a bizarre twist, further research has led me to this item in the New York Times:

"Mr. Deitch [owner of famous SoHo-based Deitch Projects Gallery] said he was stunned by the police action. ''This is unprecedented,'' Mr. Deitch said. ''I have never, never in my experience known artists to be arrested while they're putting up a serious museum exhibition in a leading gallery.'' Mishka

Stoke Dream #2

As our work in Stoke gathers pace, I've noticed that the place and its landscapes have started to occupy my dreams. I've had two of them now, the second last night and the first ten days ago. After the first one, I wondered if I should include these dreams on the blog or not, and whether it had any significance to the project. Now the second one has come, I think I should and have back-dated the first one on this blog to the date it appeared. What follows is last night's dream:

"I'm at a warehouse party in Stoke, overlooking a busy street filled with bars and cafes that wouldn't be out of place in New York's SoHo district. At the party, a sudden army of graffitti artists passes through the space we're in and head out in an impressive regimented silence. They ask us not to draw attention to them and from that, we allude they've been working on something outside, maybe on the exterior of the building we're in. Slightly drunk and keen to show my allegiance to them, I stand up and shout "we're with you" which is followed by an awkward silence. As they leave the building, someone shouts that they've been caught. We rush to the windows and see that police dressed in riot gear are raiding the cafe these artists have wandered into. Angry, we all head for the roof with tennis rackets and balls and start hitting the balls at the police as they bundle the artists into police vans."

Discarded paintbrushes found in a derelict area on the top floor of the Airspace factory last November.

As a documentary artist/photographer, can I consider this dream a valid document? Mishka

Reviving the old buoyant communities of folk memory

"Many of those fighting to keep a heart beating in the old communities believe that a nation which once gratefully took the coal, steel, textiles and ships they produced owe them something else. Self-help can only go so far. But it is living, enduring industry, they say, which sustains living, enduring communities." From an interesting (if a little dated) article found here.

Stoke Dream #1

This dream is back-dated, insofar as when I first had it I wasn't sure if it ought to be included on the blog or not. With the second Stoke dream arriving last night, it was time to include it.

"I'm in a car, heading into a brand-new estate of new-builds looking for my friend Jason. The problem is I've got three friends called Jason and they all live somewhere on this estate. I drive over cobbled speed-bumps, anxiously trying to recognize one of the squares I'm sure Jason lives on. Although I've been here before, the squares all look the same and none has attached itself in my memory to each of the Jasons I know. I'm running late now and get out of the car and go on foot, thinking this will speed up the search. The regimented houses have small paths in front of them that run the length of the facades. I'm walking along one when another friend Simon and his wife spot me from one of the windows. I haven't seen Simon for years and they come to their door to greet me and let me in. Simon is a best-friend from school, someone I used to be very close to. Feeling obliged to enter his house, I soon find myself in his small bedroom on a laptop, doing a Google search for Jason. That's when I notice his younger brother also in the room, lost amongst a drum kit in one corner of the room. Simon and I don't have much to talk about, so he shows me a tune he's learnt to play on his new piano - his latest hobby. I don't recognize the music - it seems jumbled to me, a bit of a mess - but out of politeness I smile and tell him it's nice, that he's got talent. We don't really talk much and I carry on googling, though get distracted by typing in Jason Streatham and ending up on a modelling website for Russian girls. Simon comes back into the room and tells me he knows Jason, though with further description, I realize it's not the same Jason I know. He points me in the direction of his friend Jason's house, towards an equally non-descript housing development across a strip of fluorescent grass. Keen to leave, I head towards it knowing it's not the right Jason, but too resigned to look elsewhere."

A new-build near Rachel Grant's home, photographed last November

The relationship between these dreams and the photographs makes me wonder which comes first? The images or the dreams? The place or the identity? Mishka

Keeping the Craft Alive

Pottery chief claims industry is in a 'vicious circle': A leading pottery manufacturer has called for better wages in the industry and an end to switching production to other countries. Hugh Edwards, the executive chairman of Moorcroft says low pay and outsourcing has created a vicious circle'. From a BBC News website, Friday 16th August, 2002.

Video found at the Moorcroft Pottery website

A Post-Industrial Condition

"The industrial revolution made cities the focus of production, population, culture and society in Britain but the last three decades have been characterised by a loss of employment and population, a relocation of manufacturing and the adjustment of other economic structures. After a long period of continued growth the advent of decline led to questions being asked about the role of the city in a modern economy, including the need for cities to readjust to these processes of urban and regional change which have seen the economic benefits of a city location decline in favour of urban fringe and more rural locations. The development of urban policy over the past three decades has been a process of responding to the continually changing nature of a modern economy and to its spatial manifestations." D. Noon, J. & Smith-Canham & M. Eagland (2000) 'Economic Regeneration and Funding'

Whose culture? Whose city?

"Building a city depends on how people combine the traditional economic factors of land, labor and capital. But it also depends on how they manipulate symbolic languages of exlusion and entitlement. The look and feel of cities reflect decisions about what - and who - should be visible and what should not, on concepts of order and disorder, and on uses of aesthetic power." pg 7. Sharon Zukin (1995) The Culture of Cities.

Tour of Regeneration Areas

We were at the Renew offices on Trinity Street on Friday 12 October and met Place Space & Identity artists and Renew programme managers responsible for the regeneration strategy in Hanley, Meir, Burslem, Newcastle and Coalville. Following an overview of Renew's plans for North Staffordshire presented by Phil Brundrett, we headed out for a mini-bus tour of the affected areas. First to Newport Lane in Burslem, where an eerie quiet hangs over rows and rows of boarded up terraces awaiting demolition.



In the back alleys we came across two demolition workers, Roy and Mike, knocking the walls down of an abandoned terrace.

"We've been asked to knock these walls down but to be honest
can't really see much wrong with them." Roy & Mike

Amongst the rows of boarded up terraces, occasional signs serve as a reminder that people continue to live here. Even the Cathedral Church Of Our Lady Of Grace asserts its existence with a panel on its front lawn (below right).

Then, we headed for Meir, an estate of 1700 properties containing 60% social housing. Here, Phil Brundrett explained the potential he saw in the area.

"If people are dying to move into areas like Congleton and Macclesfield
because of the greenery, just think what we can do here." Phil Brundrett

From Meir, we headed to the City Waterside project, described by Renew's Mike Sidebottom as "our jewell in the crown." The City Waterside website describes the development as "a pioneering urban neighbourhood in the heart of historic Stoke-on-Trent. Set on 120 acres (50 hectares) of land in a unique landscape - it will become home to a thriving, sustainable, mixed community."

Artists Impression of City Waterside

City Waterside under construction, with tour group in the background

City Waterside is the result of John Prescott's Design for Manufacture Competition challenging the housebuilding and development industry to create high-quality homes whilst reducing construction costs to around £60,000. The motivation is to provide first-time buyers with the opportunity of getting onto the housing ladder, even if they're very small properties. As Prescott said in 2005, "My £60,000 home competition has proved wrong those critics who claimed you can't have both quality and quantity. People deserve decent, affordable homes with good access to jobs, public services and green spaces."