An Arts Council funded project to develop my creative practice.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ve received some funding to work on my tours this summer.
The grant will support a period of research, experimenting with new partners, travel to explore my practice, and research and development time to create new abstract and more artistically centred work.
The grant will allow me to spend time with project partners Hayley Suviste and David Birchall of The Manchester Ear and Curious Ear Mcr, this will involve discussion and collaborative ideas being mapped out in reaction to my preliminary vision of how I can drive my critical walks into a more abstract and immersive practice, as well as plotting out alternative ways to access or host these outside of the physical experience.
I’ll undertake a series of local field trips to reestablish my ideas and practice amongst the landscape, gathering new ideas and identifying any changes as well as carrying out a more practical recce of the walks. This will also include interviews and informal chats with residents of the areas I’ll be focussing on. In the long term I want to look at the lifecycle of our city centre villages: the Northern Quarter, Chinatown, and the Gay Village, but initially I want to look at an area just outside of the centre in a state of flux and on the precipice of mass change through gentrification so the Irk Valley, the setting of my Follow the Buddleia tour, will be my focal point for this grant.
In the final stages of the grant, I will set to developing my ideas and creating new work with follow up sessions with Hayley and David. During this time I will be evaluating the best ways to present my work as well as establishing partnerships with local youth centres and arts organisations with whom I would like to directly share my work with in the long-term.
My main aims are in presenting new, more artistically focussed work that complements my critical thinking style and allows me to bring my creative work to the fore alongside it. I’ve been compromised financially into landing on the more practical side of that line until now and I would like to reignite the arts within my work.
I’d like to incorporate my place writing and poetry, as well as soundscapes, into my walks to reach a new audience in order to fulfil my ultimate aim of engaging people in the places they live.
I am keen to have a body of work that can inspire others to make changes or make their own art. Developing experimental walks and associated multi-disciplinary projects that can be accessed online will creatively address issues facing citizens today (gentrification, privatisation of public realm, restricted arts and culture opportunities) and I’d like to reach a wider audience by this means, especially young people from low-income neighbourhoods who either participate in the work via being in the audience or are inspired to create their own responses to place. I envision my project continuing in the same vein my walks have until now in that they have mobilised others to consider how they can experience their city and make changes through art, culture, and participatory placemaking that make those places thrive for them.
I’ve worked on my walks for ten years this summer, and over that time my artistic practice has been either concurrent but separate or has presented itself through curatorial opportunities in the short term. I’m very keen to merge the two disciplines now in earnest. I have established myself as the only anti-tour guide in the UK, and one of few in the world, it is a natural progression for me to push the boundaries of that now.