A night on the tiles.

Museum curator Poppy Learman, wearing green velvet and an excited grin, led me to see how she and her co curator Liz Stewart, also in a fabulous green ensemble, had displayed my drawings at the new exhibition they’ve conceived and now realised, which has recently opened at The Museum of Liverpool.

Galkoff’s and the Secrets of Pembroke Place

Such a thrill to see the forty one drawings they chose, from over a hundred I listened to and drew, made into a massive wall of Liverpool voices and stories.

They’re pasted up on the reverse of the beautiful frontage of Galkoff’s kosher butcher which has been carefully reconstructed, tile by shiny green tile, inside the museum, as the centrepiece for a show that uncovers all kinds of history of its particular part of the city, once lively home and shopping area to many, including a busy and established Jewish community.

The sixty stories not pasted up, are also available to look at in a flip book which is part of the extensive display.

Every single person I met on my story collecting odyssey in Liverpool had something interesting and surprising to say!

I’m looking forward to contributing to a symposium on the work around this show. It’s going to be on December 9th and I’ll talk about the story collecting process and read some poems.

Galkoff’s Symposium

If you’re in Liverpool, do visit the museum. It’s the perfect spot to take your imagination and do some time travelling, and once you’ve heard Galkoff’s Sausage Song for yourself, maybe also find some lunch.

Wearing shiny green clothes is optional. Or maybe just give yourself a polish and wear a glazed expression?

The Practical Visionary

book cover design (rough) with vine leaf and bible cutout London

If the Sun & Moon should doubt,

They’d immediately Go out 

[from the Auguries of Innocence, William Blake]

Poet & collaborator Chris McCabe and I have been sharing and exchanging ideas about one of our favourite genii, William Blake for a few years now, including teaching creative courses on him for The Poetry School.

one of the many Blake works transformed into mosaics by Southbank mosaics, these illuminate several tunnels in North Lambeth

These have involved reading, writing, walking Blake’s Lambeth (including the amazing Southbank mosaics, e.g. above) drawing and collage and also a printmaking component, for which we were lucky enough to get to use Slaughterhaus Print Studios in Stockwell, where students could try the heavy wheel of an etching press, and immerse themselves in some of that engraver’s back to front thinking that was such an essential part of Blake’s process.

L to R: Anne Macaulay, Victoria Grigg, Julia Bird, Me, Chris McCabe, Evalyn Lee, Catherine Jones, Mike Sims, with some of our work, at Slaughterhaus Studio in Stockwell.

This September sees the publication of Chris and I’s book in response to William B: The Practical Visionary, as well as an exhibition at the Poetry Cafe of some of the original work that this has generated.

One of a series of 7 Lambeth puddle collage poems made collaboratively for the book.

Our publisher, the small but heroic Hercules Editions, run by poet Tamar Yoseloff, was named for the road Blake and his wife Catherine lived on in their most productive 10 years, making illuminated books in Lambeth, the borough I was born and raised in and live in still, and the borough Chris is in during his working week, as the librarian of the National Poetry Library at the Southbank.

Do look at The Practical Visionary Kickstarter campaign – there’s more here about the way we created the content and the pages, starting with quite a funny spontaneous video, made at the end of a publishing meeting.  Though I say so myself, there are some amazing art bargains available in the list of rewards for supporters.

We’ll be launching the book officially at the Poetry Cafe on October 17th, but the week before, there’s a chance to come and do some Blakean responding of your own at our evening workshop at The Poetry Society.

Whoever your Blake turns out to be, I hope you catch a glimpse of his colour and fire somewhere in the pages of The Practical Visionary.

Golgonooza the spiritual Four-fold London eternal
In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling,
Thro Albions four Forests which overspread all the Earth,
From London Stone to Blackheath east: to Hounslow west:
To Finchley north: to Norwood south

[from Milton by William Blake]

3 huge drawings in a small sweet shop, 100 little drawings in a vast warehouse: a couple of shows.

I’m proud to be a ‘distinguished friend’ of The Migration Museum Project and was recently invited to hang 100 of my drawings collected live in ink on the theme of home, in their current premises on Lambeth High Street.

If you’d like to see them fluttering along the high walkway like inky washing, they’ll be up until September 2nd. I’ll be at a special late opening there on Thursday 26th July. Please come.

Neighbourhood of Stories

Madam Europa

I was invited to make an installation for a unique space in the lovely town of Lewes.

Come to a private view and reading of three massive collage poems that are hanging in the window of this sweet ex sweetshop. I’ll read the windows and there’ll be milling and chatting under the sherbet lemon sun… right round the corner from Lewes Station, you’ll find the Lansdown Sweet Shop and opposite that is the Symposium Wine Emporium where there will be a table and a glass of something chilled…

 

Tate Modern

Today is the final day of a surreal and wonderful week in my life as an artist.

100 of my ink drawings are up at Tate Modern.

They are part of a residency/take over at Tate Exchange , a public engagement area set aside on level 5 of the Blavatnik building.

A selection of my project ‘Stories collected live in ink’ is there thanks to Wasafiri Magazine in which I’m featured artist this issue.

Wasafiri is a journal of international contemporary writing and is based at Queen Mary University London.

Queen Mary was offered the weeks residency to showcase some of the many cultural programmes that are based there.

This current issue of Wasafiri explores the theme of refuge, with essays, fiction and poetry from global voices on the subject. It’s been guest edited by Bidisha, and I was honoured to read at the launch at Tate on Friday, and participate in a panel with Bidisha and fellow poets Olumide Popoola and Lisa Luxx.

Part of the remit for artists taking part in activities at Tate is that we should do a 10 minute talk in front of a work we choose in the collection.

This really exercised me, so many incredible paintings that I love and grew up on. But for the sheer bravado of it I chose Interior Scroll by Carolee Schneemann

I also did a two hour story collecting session – which was a blast: intense yet joyful as ever.

One of the great thrills of this opportunity has been to put the voices of all kinds of people into a space where they might not normally be heard, and to create a new set of ‘neighbours’ in displaying the drawings made with people from Southall, Liverpool, Northamptonshire, Devon, Brixton, and many other places next to each other.

I chose these 100 stories from my big archive boxes in the studio in which I have about 1200 drawings collected over the last decade. I decided on home as my theme, so that I could include very ‘settled’ narrations as well as the sometimes difficult stories of people more recently arrived. I wanted to reflect the cosy ways in which we create home for ourselves even perhaps fleetingly, on the road, or the impossibility of that comfort sometimes in long term situations!

Above all I love the collective of recognition such an exhibition creates, I’ve been touched to see people look at the drawings and cry. And amazing feedback such as this!

These pictures are records of real subjective feeling, often described as metaphor or fact to me, who subjectively aims to honour and depict them. It’s all true! Subjectively true.

And of all the extraordinary twists: I find myself (like Marcia the security guard below, I never thought I would) ‘at home’ in Tate Modern!