Level 6 Module at BCU - Work to Date

My current project is a psychogeographical art piece referencing Guy Debord's definition as "the study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behavours of individuals" quoted in Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley (Pocket Essentials, 2010).

My work started looking at the closure of small shops impacting on how we perceive our surroundings and how this will impact on our environment going into the future.

I started looking at Regency Clemens Street in Leamington Spa.

This is the 'end' of town which had a fashionable life in the 1800s when the Spa facilities were being developed but which has now declined into student housing, struggling shops and charity outlets. 

Clemens Street has been a significant influence on my family.  My father worked as a butcher at 35 before the war, my parents moved into one room opposite when they married and started a family in 1946.  My brother lived at 37 - I lived at 14a when I returned from the USA.  My brother took over my father's shop in 1976 and was now closing it.   In my Negotiated Module proposal I said "I thought about documenting the life of this shop through various means and producing material that is essentially historical in nature but has an underyling personal bias like work done by Natasha Kerr".  

I started off by visiting the street on a number of occasions taking photographs, influenced by the work of Ed Ruscha (the artist's book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, 1963).  I then formed these into a streetscape as my ideas were formulating.

My next stage was to go into the shops and take more detailed photographs of the contents.  This is a Portuguese shop but there are also Indian sweetshops, a Polish Sklep, restaurants, the local MPs surgery, greengrocers etc. 

I took a number of photographs within my brother's butcher's shop prior to its closure. 

Doug who had worked for my brother for over 30 years hung this heart in the window during the final week ....

I spoke to the shop keepers, took their photographs and passersby with the thought of doing Vox Pops using a flip camera.  I soon rejected this idea as I felt quite uncomfortable doing this given the very personal nature of my involvment with the area. 

Using some of the photographic series I had taken, I merged them within Photoshop and used them as the starting point for some 'architectural' drawings of the different blocks within the street - these were deconstructed following architectural work by Lebbus Woods and Daniel Libeskind.

Not wishing to completely focus at this stage on Leamington Spa, I undertook similar photographic 'explorations' in Digbeth, Birmingham, walking, looking and taking photographs of what caught my eye:

I took similar sets of photographs in the Birmingham Jewellery Quarter. 

I put some of the pictures through the Photoshop programme but soon rejected this approach as too obvious and not the way in which I wished to work. 

I returned to Leamington Spa on a number of occasions to take photographs of very small detail along the street - signage, graffiti etc. 

Out of this initial work has come a set of small child's blocks onto which I've fixed some of the photographs of small details to encourage closer viewing. 

Influencers on my work to date are:  Rachel Whiteread and Colin Booth's installation at The Institute of Play at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood which I saw in December 2010.

I quite like the idea that these blocks can be reordered in whatever way the viewer wishes - a little like memories of time and place which are changed with experience.  Next steps are to edit the photographs, re-take some images, manipulate them with Photoshop and explore different sizes and types of blocks on which to afix the images.

Currently reading Iain Sinclair's Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire realising that literature is very closely connected to psychogeography as a subject