Upcoming Event: BALTIC Self-Publishing Artists Market

Come to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead on Saturday 21 April for the BALTIC Self-Publishing Artists' Market. I'll be exhibiting my work alongside over fifty other international artists, small press publishers, printmakers and zine makers. 

BALTIC Artists’ Books Market

Come to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, on Saturday 13th & Sunday 14th May 2017  for the annual Artists’ Book Market, 10.00-17.00 each day.

The market is a wonderful event that I’ve been proud to exhibit at for the last three years. This year look out for Stichill Marigold Press (run by poet and former merchant seaman Leonard McDermid - also once my primary school art teacher!),  Visual Arts in Rural Communities and of course the impassioned presswork of organiser Theresa Easton. Full programme info below.

BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead plays host to an annual national two-day Artists’ Book Market. Over 40 national and regional artists, bookmakers, small press publishers, artist’s groups, zine artists and bookbinders will be exhibiting and selling their work direct to the public.

This two-day event is FREE and accompanied by a series of artists’ interventions: BALTIC Freelance Artist, Bethan Maddocks will be delivering a free drop in 3D pop-up book workshop on Saturday. Sunday Nicola Singh plans to engage book market visitors with an evolving page projected onto the wall of the book-market. Foundation Press will be bringing their Risograph Printer for both days, working collaboratively with visiting artists in their pop up space on Level 1, creating a new body of work in performance and print.

Exhibitors include: Kitbooks, Shoddy: a disability art project, GINNY, Simon Moreton, Tamsin Daisy Rees, BBB Book Collective, Gemma Lacey/Red Plate Press, Kerry Douglas and Gillian Stewart, Stroud Artist Books, Jessie Churchill, Andrew Robinson & Andrea Campomanes, Andrea Allan, Hestan Isle Press, Elizabeth Jardine Godwin, BookCasePress, Chloe Spicer, Julie Macbean, Visual Arts in Rural Communities, Nancy Campbell, Newcastle University, As Yet Untitled, Stichill Marigold Press, Malcolm Gibson and Rachel Gibson, Roncadora Press, MA Book Arts at Camberwell College - University of the Arts London, Heather Prescott, Michelle Holland, Z.A.M, Less Than Five Hundred Press, Greyscale Poetry Zine, Asterisk Collective*, Kate Jackson, POUR-ZINE, Anne Proctor, Moonkwayk Studio, paperwallah, Hazel Terry, Sue Bennet, SideburnedPoet, Katie Forrester, Editions, Bertrand Bracaval, Theresa Easton.

Events

I'll be performing or exhibiting my work at these events over the next few months. Further information on times, venues and booking can be found on my website. 

This year's World Book Night United Artists project takes place over 10-12 March in Loch Ness. Watch this space to see whether we spot the Monster!

The Polar Tombola comes to BALTIC Gateshead

What happens when a language disappears altogether? 

If you were asked to exclude just one word from your own vocabulary, what would you choose? 

Come to BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead on Saturday 18 July to answer these questions and puzzle out some new ones. The Astonishing Polar Tombola runs from noon to 3pm as part of the annual Artists' Book Market, an amazing weekend celebration of books organised by Theresa Easton. Over 40 national and regional artists will be displaying their work in the BALTIC galleries and artist-led workshops will be in progress for those who want to make a book themselves. Entry is free.

Image (c) Caspar Evans / Small Publishers Fair

The Polar Tombola welcomes players of all ages and languages. Learn a new word from an endangered Arctic language, and leave behind one of your own words in return. By playing the game you will take part in a movement to raise awareness of vulnerable languages, and your word could be included in the Anthology of Abandoned Words, published by Bird Editions in 2017.

The Polar Tombola was first performed at the Small Publishers Fair, London in 2015, and a Grant for the Arts from Arts Council England has allowed the project to tour. Look out for future events in London, Cambridge and Bristol over the following year. There's more information about the project in this post about the 2015 event.

Arctic Events in Newcastle

In November the Lit & Phil in Newcastle-upon-Tyne will host two events as part of the series Quujaavaarssuk and the Queen of the Sea. The Lit & Phil is a venue full of character, which possesses - among other things - a mesmerising collection of early literature on the Arctic - I spent several months researching in the stacks on my return from Upernavik in 2010. 

Ice and the Imagination


Tuesday 4 November 6pm


FREE


This wintery workshop will take classic works of polar exploration and natural history from the Lit & Phil collection as a starting point for new writing about ice, snow and the environment. Poet Nancy Campbell will introduce work by contemporary writers on the subject and guide you through prompts to create your own poems and stories.

Seven Words for Winter: Arctic Poems


Monday 17 November 7pm


FREE


In this reading Nancy Campbell will evoke the atmosphere of ‘the most northern museum in the world’ on the remote island of Upernavik in Greenland. These poems describe the disappearing arctic language and environment and retell the colourful myths of the Inuit coastal community. The evening will open with readings of new work from writers who participated in the Ice and the Imagination workshop.

Numbers are limited so booking is advised for both these events.

Please contact The Lit & Phil, 23 Westgate Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE
 

Tel: 0191 232 0192 

Email: library@litandphil.org.uk

Thanks to Arts Council England for supporting these activities

Words Across Northumberland

I have been appointed as a Words Across Northumberland Writer in Residence.

Stories from the Flood places a creative writer in two Northumbrian libraries, Morpeth and Rothbury. Both towns were affected by catastrophic flooding in 2008. Susan Fletcher (in Morpeth) and I (in Rothbury) will spend time meeting staff and visitors and creating a body of work on the themes of flooding and climate change. Having researched and written on these issues during recent residencies in Denmark and Greenland, I look forward to bringing a global perspective on climate change to the region of the UK where I grew up.

I will make an initial mobile library tour of the area on Wednesday 19 June, and will be meeting the public in Rothbury Library on 20 and 21 June.

From the Rivers to the Sea

If you travel to Newcastle by train, one of the first things you see as you step onto the platform is a caustic yellow sign marked with an 'M' which points the way to the city's Metro system.

The Metro was introduced to Newcastle in 1980. Although planners had the foresight to commission Margaret Calvert to design a typeface for the transport system, none of the Metro architecture demonstrates the decade's flamboyance and extroversion. Most stops are cursed with a determined, squat functionality, and an ominous Cretan gloom pervades the tunnels that run beneath the city centre. In recent years Tyne and Wear Metro have made dramatic improvements to the stations by introducing a number of public art works.

Hilary Paynter was commissioned to produce a work for the Central Station stop in 2004. Paynter is one of Britain's leading wood engravers, and the choice of artist was no doubt inspired by the memory of Thomas Bewick, one of Newcastle's more famous cultural exports, whose 250th anniversary fell in 2003.

Paynter describes the station as 'a fabulous commission to work on'. She was given a flying lesson so that she could get an overhead view of the landscapes and cityscapes through which the river and the Metro pass. The resulting panoramic wood engraving From the Rivers to the Sea does not miss a single historical or geographical detail from the region. 

Paynter's work pursues ‘the idea of the Metro as a journey in and out of the past and the richness of historical context’. The progressive panels show ‘changes in the landscape, including those wrought by man and, in their turn, those changes wrought within man’. The work moves from depicting from tiny natural details, reminiscent of Bewick's subject-matter, such as a snail making its way through wild grasses, to monumental buildings and wide Northumbrian views. One panel honours the architecture left behind by 20th-century mining and shipping industries, another the grand sweep of Newcastle's neoclassical streets laid out by John Dobson in the 19th century. Others reach even further back to the city's past.

In the panels shown below, a bird's eye view of the mouth of the River Tyne flowing into the North Sea has a gleeful catfish superimposed on it. Intrigued by this image, I emailed Paynter to ask about the different elements. She replied that her 'ideas entwined and led to related themes' throughout the commission, explaining that this panel refers to the Roman remains at Wallsend (or 'Segedunum' to the Romans). 'The view of the Tyne is from a satellite image. It resembled a catfish, inspiring the next bit of the design. There was an aquarium there, which was another reference. Then, in the reconstruction of the Roman baths at the site, there were murals of fish. ... I love engraving old stone. The statue of Fortuna in the niche was discovered on site.'

Paynter's wood engravings were printed and then the images applied to vitreous white enamel panels. Whether the objects depicted in From the Rivers to the Sea are modest or monumental, what most impresses me is the success with which the intimate medium of wood engraving - usually pinioned within the pages of a book - has been translated onto such a grand scale to form a public art work with a direct and dramatic narrative.

 

I hope some of the following images, snapped in the seconds before my Airport-bound Metro pulled in, will give a sense of the scale and success of the work. 

Sardines sur la Tyne

I always like to encourage the positive representation of sardines in public life, so I was delighted to find them honoured, albeit canned, on The Blacksmith's Needle, a contemporary sculpture opposite the Baltic on Newcastle's Quayside. The Blacksmith's Needle is a large cone of forged steel, with a maritime bell hanging within (the bell was rung - probably for the last time - when the work was inaugurated in 1997 by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie).

The Needle is divided into six sections, intended to represent the six senses, each designed by a different blacksmith from the British Artist Blacksmiths' Association. Sardines, it goes without saying, satisfy all five human senses. But when Stephen Lunn, from The Forge at Red Row in Northumberland, pulled the short straw for the elusive sixth sense, he admitted, “It was hard work to represent the sixth sense in ironwork.” He finally decided on “beach stones and pebbles, because just as they are worn down by the sea, I wear down metal into the shape I want it to be.”

"Mermaids on toast?"

Geordie Dialects

Traces of early invaders linger in bilingual signs to the bus station at Wallsend, although I believe the Romans invaded the farthest reaches of Northumberland without Arriva's services.

The Lit and Phil

The Literary & Philosophical Society is one of my favourite libraries. This Newcastle institution is located so close to the Central Station on Westgate Road that the parquet floors resonate when intercity express trains pick up speed on their way to Edinburgh. Now the largest independent library outside London, the Society was founded in the tumultuous 1790s as a ‘conversation club’, with an annual subscription of one guinea.

From its outset, the Society had an enterprising, inquisitive and liberal nature: the first women members were admitted by 1804, and various groundbreaking demonstrations of new technology took place, such as George Stephenson’s miners’ safety lamp in 1815. In 1820, The Newcastle upon Tyne Society for the gradual abolition of Slavery in the British Dominions was established at a meeting held in the Society’s rooms. The lecture theatre was the first public room to be lit by electric light, in a demonstration by Sir Joseph Swan on October 20th 1880.


The library collection now holds 150,000 volumes. The first catalogues were sorted by the size of the books, which would have been serious and improving works, such as the industrial treatises pictured above. It was only in 1891 that the decision was made to purchase novels; nobody seemed any the worse for this radical move excepting possibly, as one distinguished member pointed out, “those unfortunate enough to read them”. Novels now form a significant part of the collection, including an ever-expanding choice of contemporary literature. Even so, my favourite pursuit is to turn for entertainment to the older books which describe arcane subjects from chimney sweeping and jungle exploration to the breeding of sheep.


As the Lit & Phil is a lending library, these books have not lost their personalities through years of institutionalisation. They have escaped into people's homes and travelled on trains. They have been quoted from during after-dinner speeches and read to children at bedtime, returning to the library with a souvenir claret ring or a few biscuit crumbs hidden amongst the pages. The worn volumes exude stories, not only textual, but those of past members who enjoyed the books and have left their traces.

A team of dedicated bookbinders is working on the collection's preservation, but it will be some time before the Herculean labour of restoring volumes from over two centuries of publishing is complete. Meantime, some books in the reading rooms betray not only the habits of their readers but also the rescue efforts of librarians. Bias binding is an expedient way to hold the decrepit pages and boards of histories together, and to assist long-sighted browsers a Tippex enthusiast has carefully painted the faded titles back onto their spines. By contrast, the CDs in the famous music collection are very tidily arranged in little scarlet boxes, which almost conceal their contents.