Ensuring inclusivity – Wigan SWAP residency

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I’m working with a group with a lot of daily challenges at the moment, and engagement in my weekly sessions at Wigan SWAP has been patchy since the summer. This is not just for my activity – attendance has been down for many of their sessions during September.

There are so many possible reasons for this. Sometimes it’s just raining, so women stay at home. I may see the same faces several weeks, and then not see them again for ages. Sometimes people seem to vanish – their circumstances may change in some way, or they may have been relocated by the Home Office without much notice. Something positive or negative may have happened with their asylum case.

Sometimes women are physically present in the space but not up for participating. There are babies and toddlers around. It’s a drop-in session where people arrive and leave at different times. It’s very multilingual, which presents its own challenges. People may want to join in with my activity, but only have 15 minutes to do so before rushing off to collect a child from nursery.

This all means I’m having to think quite carefully about how to make my activities inclusive. I need to consider how to make it possible for people who are participating for the first time to get involved – as well as those who have been present but patchy.

In socially engaged practice, it’s important to keep remembering that the process is the work. This is something I personally find quite difficult to keep in mind. But I do hope to make something out of all this eventually – so how can I come out with some kind of output in these circumstances? Crucially this needs to be something where the women I’m working with feel they’ve been part of something positive for them too, rather than it being an extractive process.

When I started attending these sessions in January, I noticed that many of the women seem to enjoy working with textiles – knitting and sewing seemed to be popular. I’ve thought hard about how to pull together the photography with this and came up with the idea of putting images shot/produced by group members onto textile items. My sewing skills are rudimentary so I’ve enlisted the support of Project Linus, a voluntary group who deliver sessions at SWAP once a month.

Over recent weeks I’ve run some cyanotype sessions where women could create materials to use on these textile items, but turnout has been disappointing. So the only way to ensure inclusivity has been for me to spend some time over recent days making a big pile of cyanotype pieces, so there will be enough materials for anyone who wants to do some sewing with them this week. I’ll put a message into the group’s WhatsApp chat to let women know what’s happening, which may drum up a bit more attendance – fingers crossed.

A small selection of work in progress from this commission will be exhibited at Open Eye Hub in Leigh in October.

First photography memory

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My friend Alicia Bruce recently asked her Instagram followers an interesting question: What’s your first memory of a photograph?

There’s a few reasons I think this is interesting: I believe the act of both being photographed and photographing others can make particular events more memorable than they otherwise would be.

But I also think the material photos themselves can get confused with genuine memory – my recall of particular things sometimes extends little further than a given snapshot, which gives me a strange outside-looking-in perspective on the event in question if I’m the subject of the image. Such is the case I think with the answer I gave to Alicia, which concerns something which took place when I was six (my childhood memories are – generally speaking – quite vague).

I went to Malta on holiday as a kid (my 6th bday was there) and one day we went to a beach which should have been lovely, except it turned out to be flying ant day. The sand was covered with dead flying ants, and the water close to the shore. We have a family photo of me stood in this horrible anty water with my inflatable armbands on. It’s seared in my memory. I think it’s one of my first photographic memories.

This trip down memory lane led me to seek out the photo when I visited my mum’s house, and to keep it for posterity. Here it is, my first photo memory. Most of the other respondents wrote about being given their first cameras but I think my memory of this fairly weird event is constructed and shaped by the fact there is photographic evidence. The black stuff all over the sand…. that’s the flying ant corpses. Yuck.

The cameraman – chasing for clicks

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A couple of weeks back the UK was rocked by a series of far right/racist riots, mainly across towns in England – the pretext being the murder of three young girls in Southport, but widely stirred up by the likes of Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage and other populist figures who spread misinformation on and offline.

As I watched the videos of these mobs attacking housing asylum seekers, targeting mosques and marauding through town and city neighbourhoods, several things struck me. One was how many people had brought their kids along for the ride – even in Rotherham where they broke into and tried to burn down one of the hotels.

The other was how many of the crowd appeared to be filming what was going on, streaming it to social media. It reminds me of the streamer-agitators who follow the weekly pro-Palestine marches, goading attendees in the hope of getting a rise – which in turn would generate more clicks and engagement. The more extreme the better; it becomes a self-reinforcing doom loop.

In both of these cases it’s about attention and clicks – there is little attempt to engage with the issues, it’s simply theatre for its own sake. It really made me think of a clever animated clip which I saw years ago and which still sticks in my mind, so I went looking for it:

Complex family histories

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I had the sudden realisation earlier today that it is the fourth anniversary of my Dad’s death. It’s no longer at the forefront of my mind as it was before – the scab has grown thicker and much more difficult to dislodge. The anniversary is something I have been reminded of a few times over recent days, but then partially forgot again. Maybe this is a self-protective thing, as I no longer see the value of going back over that week again and again.

Lately my mind has been much more on trying to understand the context of dad’s family history, which carries a lot of colonial baggage. My dad was Anglo-Indian – it’s not really a term he would have used himself but I have come to understand since his death that this is what his family were. They were in India for many generations, I’m not exactly sure how long but there were certainly some of our European ancestors there by the late 1700s. As with most of the AI community there is some mixed ancestry there – something which didn’t really get talked about. The names and details of the Indian women were rarely recorded – they were typically given new Christian names in order to marry European men. There are a lot of silences and gaps within the narratives of this history.

There’s a lot of complexity around this history and community which I find challenging – they generally saw themselves as a cut above Indian people and aspired to being as British as possible. They weren’t especially liked by the Indians, who they tended to stay separate from, but were also looked down at by the British. In some ways they were collaborators with an empire which was bleeding India dry – they were the administrators which made the whole thing possible. Some AI families remained after Indian independence in 1947 but many left, seeing no future for themselves there. My great grandmother stayed behind, along with two great uncles but all those with children moved to the UK so we have no relatives there now.

I don’t quite know how to make some work about this but I think I’m building up to it slowly.

  1. My dad visiting the site of his childhood home in Kolkata (now demolished)
  2. My dad and I
  3. My DNA’s ‘ancestral regions’

Palestine protest at Manchester Open exhibition

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This week has been interesting. After HOME in Manchester pulled a literary celebration of Gazan writing following a complaint from a Jewish lobby group, there was outrage from many people in the city. The weekly peace protest ended up outside the building on Saturday and this week artists in the Manchester Open exhibition came together with the desire to get involved. There was an open letter signed by around 170 artists (there are 480 in the show) and then last night I was among a group of participants of the exhibition who went and took down our work from the walls in protest about the silencing of Palestinian voices. It was a sombre action – it’s a strange feeling taking art out of an exhibition part way through. It put pressure on the bosses at HOME though – it turned the whole thing into a PR disaster for them and today they reinstated the original event. Their apology was somewhat mealy mouthed but still, it’s a result. Their original excuse that they were being politically neutral in cancelling the event was shown to be a nonsense. More here.

 

 

 

Lost Voices on film

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Filmmaker Jason Lock produced a short film about the Reflections commission I worked on this year, along with parallel projects by photographers Sam Ivin and Tadhg Devlin. I worked with a small group of Traveller women to document the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on their lives, while Sam worked with unpaid carers and Tadhg with people who live in rural areas of Cheshire West. The film can be seen here and you can explore my project, Got Through It, here.

My West Bank visit blog posts

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The horror unfolding in Gaza over the past two months has led me to think and speak a lot recently about my trip to the West Bank and Israel in 2008. I just sent a colleague some published stories I wrote during that time, which made me also search my blog for posts. There are quite a lot so I’m pulling it all together just in case it’s of interest to anyone.

Reflections work at Open Eye Gallery

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Work I’ve produced during the past year with women from the Traveller community is now on show at Open Eye Gallery, where it will be until 23 December, and it looks brilliant. Our work is only a small part of a much larger showcase of socially engaged projects – it is in the atrium area outside the gallery along with the other two Reflections commissions by Tadhg Devlin and Sam Ivan. Inside are another three fabulous projects from different areas of Cheshire and Merseyside.

Of the people I worked with, only one was able to attend the opening night – disability and poor health prevented some of the others. But I’ve now given copies of the zine to everyone I worked with and am going to try to help those who are able to visit the show. I’ve also given copies of the zine to the various partners and individuals who helped me develop this project.

More info about the show here.

 

Reflections project – sharing

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My Reflections commission with Gypsy and Traveller women is about to make its way out into the world – always a nerve-wracking moment for me. Are the participants going to be happy with it? Even though all who have audio have already listened to and approved it, and I read transcripts back to everyone, none have seen the finished zine which I have made and which features everything. I always have a nagging fear that someone will see the final thing and have second thoughts. Anyway, positive mental attitude!

I have printed a short run of these physical zines so will be giving copies to participants, partner organisations etc – hopefully I can do the participants next week. Fittingly, considering the pandemic-related theme of the project, I have just tested positive for Covid, so I’ll have to leave it for a week or so. Anyway, generally speaking the zine will be accessed digitally – it will be hosted on a dedicated project website which the council has built, and QR codes in the exhibitions will take people to it if they want to read more. You can also download it here.

The other online element to this project is audio clips featuring the voices of some participants. Again these will be linked to from the exhibitions using QR codes – you can listen here (scroll down to the pink section).

The first exhibition of work starts next week in Chester – and it’s a public-realm event featuring six images from me plus quotes and QR codes. I’m a fan of these types of interventions because I hope it will reach a broader audience than a gallery event. This is what I want my work to do – to hopefully show a more rounded image of Gypsy/Traveller lives and experiences. Later in the month a different set of images will be part of a group exhibition at Open Eye Gallery. More info about all of this here.

 

 

 

 

Picturing High Streets exhibition – Chester

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There’s something quite nice about giving a project some breathing space before it gets shared with the world. It’s not been down to me, but work made by people who attended my workshops at Cafe 71 in Chester last year has finally been exhibited in the city centre in a public realm show (my favourite kind of exhibition I think because it gets in front of a non-art audience).

This was one of my first socially engaged commissions – last year I ran nine sessions at the mental health space as part of Historic England’s Picturing High Streets initiative. I was very lucky to be given this opportunity by project managers at Open Eye Gallery and Photoworks, as it was a real spring board to several other projects since then. The project saw me purely work as a facilitator – I made no work myself but designed the sessions, which aimed to tease out people’s feelings about Chester city centre, particularly the area of the Rows (incidentally a place I spent many Saturday afternoons as a teenager).

The group made photos and these led to discussions but in my personal view, their most interesting work was collages which combined images from the Historic England archive with photos from magazines. The work looks fabulous printed large – unfortunately the summer holidays have meant that I haven’t been able to see it myself but I’ve been sent some lovely photos by Open Eye Gallery and I know some participants have visited too.

Images by Rob Battersby.