Is There A Place...?

I visited an interesting exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall on Saturday that featured lots of ‘Edgelands’ inspired work by different artists, including George Shaw, Paul Winstanley, Barry Thompson, and Birmingham based painter Graham Chorlton.

According to the gallery, ‘‘There Is A Place...’ ...brings together a group of artists who explore our psychic connectivity to landscape. The drawings, paintings and prints within the exhibition reveal 'a sense of place' as seemingly generic urban and suburban views evoke personal and collective memories. The reverie of teenage hideouts, suburban housing estates and motorway junctions, each depicted in painstaking detail, are at once familiar yet unnerving for all’. Mmmm...I think you can probably see why I might find myself interested in this with my own current ‘Edgelands’ interests...

A new artist to me whose work I found really exciting was Laura Oldfield Ford (above). She makes large-scale detailed drawings of the ‘Edgelands’ landscape in biro on top of layers of acrylic splashes and fragments of type which include graffiti, but also dates that reference some of the history of the locations she depicts. She had created some really striking drawings commissioned by the gallery of the underneath of the M6 motorway near Walsall, a stone’s throw to where I have been working in West Brom under the M5. One piece referenced a number plate that had been found in the undergrowth believed to belong to a car belonging to the IRA who had attempted to blow up this stretch of the M6 during the 1997 election campaign. Laura’s blog is a really interesting read: http://lauraoldfieldford.blogspot.com.

Laura seems to be as much of a writer as an artist, and I really enjoyed reading about the bus journeys around The Black Country she made to develop these commissioned pieces. She travelled around areas I know particularly well, the places I grew up, and I found it very grim reading at times. Some of it made me wince, as much as for the truths I recognised in her words, and her descriptions and prose reminded me of Black Country born writer Anthony Cartwright, whose novels, ‘Heartlands’ and ‘The Afterglow’, I have mentioned before.

Laura’s work had a much more politically and socially charged edge than the other artist’s in the show, whose work seemed much more informed by the personal and memory. This of course can be seen in George Shaw’s work but also in the minute and intricate pencil drawings of Barry Thompson. Like Shaw, Thompson’s work references his adolescence and idle hours spent in the town he grew up in. I r particularly liked these pencil drawings of poems written on small scraps of paper. I’ve been thinking of doing something similiar with bits of hand-written things I’ve been collecting for some time now. I felt a bit beaten to it....

In fact, I felt a bit beaten to it by lots of the work in many ways. As I’ve been researching my ‘Edgelands’ theme, I’m aware that it is a very well-trodden path by artists and writers alike. My task is to try and find my own distinctive voice within it all...