On Practice
'On Practice' is an experimental approach to documenting or mapping my current artistic and academic practice. The piece was produced alongside 'but what happened in the Summer' and 'Untitled (A Millenium of Mancunia)' as a way of understanding the relationship between the two pieces.
'On Practice' is still in progress and continues to be updated and rewritten.
As a first introduction we will begin with…
Cities [always a reflection of the societies that build them]
Contested space
Methods of creating, thinking
Light
Realities - so pleasantly subjective
The centres, their orbitals, the lost liminal lands in between
Writing, as art
Writing, as a walk, a type of paper, a conversation, a line or a view.
Crowds*
Individuals
Utopias and their Anti-Utopias
Absurdity
*The plural pronoun and satire of the modern shared everyday takes its biggest influence from Ferris’ Then We Came to the End.
But now it’s here in the space
simultaneously of out there, beyond these walls but very much situated here. To be held and handled, sat with and absorbed. To be looked up at, the light of a late afternoon plays differently on it’s surface to the mid morning or fluorescent night. One will certainly look better.
Which do you prefer?
Alternatively, it has been multiples
occurring many times, but most importantly
taken with you, in a pocket or forgotten at the bottom of a bag.
It then returns to the city it is of.
Out into the crowds.
That may be where these two pieces come down to; so many layers on top of each other but still separate. Firstly buildings, secondly people.
Calvino, in Invisible Cities, talks of a city that is built on the next with the same name yet never knows the first. Sometimes the inhabitants have lived in both, but they don’t know one from the other.
Here we have the same; so many layers of renewal. Transfigurations of concrete and metal so that the layers no longer know each other yet can exist almost simultaneously.
And still we are constantly told what we are a city of; Manchester is worse for it than many others. They tell us we are a city of things already gone; music, industry and people that are no longer here yet supposedly retain centre stage in our collective identity.
So as one piece talks of these layers of realities, forgotten buildings on forgotten foyers, the other talks of the crowds, a satire of the ‘city marketing speak’ which flattens 2.8 million people into a single entity of a city that no longer exists.