It's very exciting to announce the final artist commission in Ground UP's current programme of events. This is a public art commission, funded by Keepmoat. Read more about it on our Commissions and Opportunities page .We hope to commission this work in collaboration with residents, in the same way that we have worked in partnership with local people to commission the current two residencies.
Earlier today this collaborative shortlisting activity was referred to as our 'Community Consultation Day' and this led to some interesting reflection. From the outset, the Ground UP project set out to test the consultation process by recruiting three Creative Collaborators whose role has included working alongside communities and engaging local people in the commissioning process. The aspiration was that capacity could be built within the community to both know and understand high quality art and to develop the skill to commission it. This is 'collaboration' and is quite different from 'consultation'.
I tried to illustrate some of these ideas with another mind map which shows a ladder leading from 'consultation' to 'participation' and eventually to 'delegated power'. This is based on work by Sherry Arnstein who theorised community participation as a ladder. I have included the model from her original paper below. I have also included a great table developed by the International Centre for Public Participation which shows some of the goals, promises and techniques that can be used to encourage community participation and empowerment. The challenge for Ground UP is to keep the goals of collaboration in sight.
Steph 30.07.13
Coal Clough
Some of the photos were of Kelly's own family, as she grew up in the area... and it was great to find out more about some of the amazing old photographs.
Caroline and Dave, Huckleberry Films
Jacob's Join
The craft group from The Fold/Ground UP project had a group outing to the SAMS scrap store in Blackburn. They returned with lots of materials and ideas for future projects, and we joined them as they gathered for lunch back at the Fold.
It was an 'ideas lunch' with the community, and ideas were shared about future plans. It was also a 'Jacobs Join', which meant everyone brought food with them to share. One of the artists hadn't heard the term before, and we realised it was a specifically Northern term. If you use the phrase where you live, let us know so we can see how local it is! Wikipedia refers to 'potluck':
'A potluck is a gathering of people where each person or group of people may contribute a dish of food prepared by the person or the group of people, to be shared among the group. Synonyms include: potluck dinner, spread, Jacob's join,Jacob's supper, faith supper, covered dish supper, dish party, bring and share, shared lunch, pitch-in, carry-in, bring-a-plate, dish-to-pass, fuddle. It is also referred to as a smorgasbord or potlatch'.
We filmed some of the meet up, shared food and ideas and looked at old photographs that one of the artists was drawing inspiration from.
Our youngest lunch member was little Phoenix!
Caroline and Dave, Huckleberry Films
'A potluck is a gathering of people where each person or group of people may contribute a dish of food prepared by the person or the group of people, to be shared among the group. Synonyms include: potluck dinner, spread, Jacob's join,Jacob's supper, faith supper, covered dish supper, dish party, bring and share, shared lunch, pitch-in, carry-in, bring-a-plate, dish-to-pass, fuddle. It is also referred to as a smorgasbord or potlatch'.
We filmed some of the meet up, shared food and ideas and looked at old photographs that one of the artists was drawing inspiration from.
Our youngest lunch member was little Phoenix!
Caroline and Dave, Huckleberry Films
Sorting and Creating
After the excitement of our visit to SAMS last week, we met this week to sort though our goodies and divide the spoils.
It was a quieter session this week and was definitely affected by the school holidays and childcare needs, but we are a strong and friendly group and what began as a deliberately unplanned session became a fun and companionable creative couple of hours.
Our painted pottery was ready for collection and everyone was really happy with the final results. Half will go to Iain for his Stoops Mobile Souvenir Shop and half went home with the makers. I was so impressed by people's generosity in donating their work to the project and that everyone was enthusiastic to hear that they won't be sold for money, but exchanged for ideas, memories, songs or jokes 'more valuable than money'.
It was a quieter session this week and was definitely affected by the school holidays and childcare needs, but we are a strong and friendly group and what began as a deliberately unplanned session became a fun and companionable creative couple of hours.
Our painted pottery was ready for collection and everyone was really happy with the final results. Half will go to Iain for his Stoops Mobile Souvenir Shop and half went home with the makers. I was so impressed by people's generosity in donating their work to the project and that everyone was enthusiastic to hear that they won't be sold for money, but exchanged for ideas, memories, songs or jokes 'more valuable than money'.
While we were sorting through the wool for rug making, Fi remembered that Jo at SAMS had said that the wool tufts were great for making quick and easy pom-poms. Part of our mission that session had been to support Annette with ideas for the summer of craft sessions she will be doing with children at the community centre. Excited by the possibility of quick and easy pom-poms (and who wouldn't be) we set to work creating examples for Annette to show the children and experimenting with different techniques. I remembered I had a bag of googly eyes in the boot of my car (of course) and our mini monsters/aliens/creatures came into being.
We've decided to have a break over summer. When we talked about holidays, childcare and other commitments it seemed to be the best idea. We will all keep seeing each other though as we have the two residencies underway and Iain will be out and about with his mobile souvenir shop.
Cath
Reflecting on the Residencies
Kelly Loughlin’s recent blog post resonated in many ways with my own
research which relates to cultural heritage and sense of place. Among the
many connections, some of which I have been able to include in the mind-map below, I wanted to tease out a few to expand upon.
The key ideas emerging from Kelly’s piece relate to memory,
commemoration, continuity, loss and resistance. I’d like to take each of these in turn
beginning with the notion of memory. For
Kelly, South West Burnley is a landscape of memory, physical changes and gaps
in the urban environment bringing memory to the fore. We became quite excited
yesterday as we exchanged our thoughts around the idea that physical places are
only the residue of much richer and more complex landscapes that exist within a
community’s imagination.
Catherine Degnen (2005) has written about
‘memory talk’, in a study of local people in Dodworth, South Yorkshire where
their conversation continually made reference to both buildings and people long
absent. For Degnen talk, “shuttled between present and past, individual and
collective…” (ibid: 230) so that people ceaselessly placed each other through,
“shared memories of where what had been and by what events they had experienced
together” (ibid: 733). In this reading, physical relics of the past were less
necessary as memory talk reconstructed, “where what had been...” Here the
landscape of memory is brought from the reserves of the imagination to the
foreground of human dialogue, what Dixon and Durrheim (2000) have called
‘discursive sense of place’.
Kelly described the way in which
places in South West Burnley that have fallen silent or are vanishing, work to bring memory to the fore. Paul Morris (1996) has explored ‘community beyond
tradition’ and the way in which a sense of community comes into the focus at
the point of its dissolution. This relates to what Kelly describes as a sense of ‘loss’
actually working to galvanise interest in the past, with memory serving as a form of resistance. A similar argument can be found within the discourse of globalisation and its accompanying loss of local distinctiveness:
“the search for meaning takes place… in the reconstruction of defensive
identities around communal principles” (Castells, 1996: 11).
For Kelly, memory is associated with
continuity and this is a notion that has emerged in the field of environmental
psychology. Researchers Claire Twigger Ross and David Uzzell (1996) explored
sense of place in London’s docklands and developed a process model for the
creation of a sense of place that linked to a feeling of distinctiveness (being
different to other people in other places), self-esteem (feeling proud of local
features and characteristics) and a sense of continuity over time. This
continuity is not just temporal, but is also related to a sense of the
continuity of one’s own identity associated as it is with place.
Identity is a key theme in any
investigation into culture, heritage and sense of place. The way we choose to
see our place and its history is bound up with notions of our own culture and
identity. Indeed Bella Dicks has argued that we all have an “identity centred
relationship with the past” (2003:125). Our cultural identities however are
complex, working in layers related to ourselves as private individuals but also
our collective identity. Benedict Anderson (1991) famously deconstructed the
notion of community by suggesting our collectivity is imagined and it seems to
me that the connections Kelly draws between memory and community must be
tempered by the knowledge that no one community can be viewed in terms of
homogeneity. Identities are plural and we must remember “the multivocality of
people in place” (Dicks, 2000: 99). Indeed, Elaine highlighted this sense of
fragmented community in conversations during the residency interviews. As a
resident who is not part of an existing group, she pointed out that she and
others like her could easily miss out on engaging with some of Ground Up’s
activities.
This problemetisation of the notion of
‘community’ also links with our South West Streets Museum project. It has been
argued that an interest in the past, in history and in heritage and museums, is
a symptom of economic and other forms of decline (Hewison 1987, Lumley 1988).
In the late 1980s this discourse was placed in the context of the decline of
industry. In a ‘preservation mania’ people became increasingly interested in
the vernacular heritage and social history of working class communities in
post-industrial areas (Dicks, 2003: 122; Harvey, 1996: 306). Likewise, communities
have become more interested in telling their own story and presenting their own
past, in what has been described as a ‘democratisation of heritage’ (Samuel 1994). The South West Streets Museum project can be seen in this way, as a form
of ‘unofficial community heritage’ (Crooke, 2008: 8). The challenge of the
museum however, is to represent community as a ‘whole’ when in fact, as
indicated above, communities have plural identities and interpretations.
Unofficial community heritage can be
seen as a grassroots interpretation that stands in opposition to official forms
of heritage where ‘community’ is a notion in resistance to ‘government’
(Witcombe 2003, 79-80) and it can be argued that Ground UP as a project and
more specifically the South West Streets Museum, lie firmly in the context of a
top-down / bottom-up dialectic. Geographer Yi Fu Tuan suggests that place has
to be understood from the perspective of those who have given it meaning (1974:
213), a postmodern approach, “eschewing grand narratives in favour of personal
observations and local knowledge” (Samuel, 1994: 196). As Kelly asserts in her
reflection on her time in South West Burnley, memory really can be a form of
resistance, this along with so much else in my review of literature around
heritage and sense of place, underpins Kelly’s observations and it will be
exciting to see how this translates into her art.
Steph 19.07.13
Steph 19.07.13
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined
communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Rev. and
extended. London: Verso.
Castells, M. (1996) The rise of the
network society. Cambridge, Massechusetts: Blackwell
Publishers.
Crooke, E. (2008) Museums and
community: ideas, issues and challenges. New York: Routledge.
Degnen, C. (2005) 'Relationality,
place, and absence: a three‐dimensional perspective on social memory', Sociological Review, 53,
(4), pp. 729‐744.
Dixon, J. and Durrheim, K. (2000)
'Displacing place‐identity: A discursive approach to locating self and other', British Journal of
Social Psychology, 39, pp. 27‐44.
Dicks, B. (2000) Heritage, Place
and Community. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Dicks, B. (2003) Culture on
Display: The production of contemporary visitability. Maidenhead:
Open University Press.
Harvey, D. (1996) Justice, nature
and the geography of difference. Cambridge, Massechusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
Lumley, R. (ed.) (1988) The museum
time‐machine: putting cultures on display. London:
Routledge.
Morris, P. (1996) 'Community Beyond
Tradition', in Heelas, P., Lash, S. and Morris, P. M.(eds)
Detraditionalisation:
critical reflections on authority and identity. Malden,
Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers
Inc.
Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of
Memory: Volume 1. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.London: Verso.
Tuan, Y.-F. (1974) Topophilia: a study of environmental
perception, attitudes and values London: Prentice-Hall
Witcomb, A. (2003) Re‐Imagining the
Museum Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge.
Cabin Craft Group Visit to SAMS
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| Jo explores the many potential uses of a carpet tile |
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| Right, let's split up and get the whole place covered! |
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| This could be a wig (well someone had to do it!) |
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| Thank goodness we went in a minibus! |
We returned to the Fold for an al fresco jacobs join lunch and Caroline, Kelly and Caroline and Dave from Huckleberry Films joined us in the sunshine to share ideas and talk about our SAMS goodies!
Add your photos to the collection
Days I'll be available to scan photos - come along and add your photos to the collection. Kelly
You Are Here
It has been a very hot and an interesting week. Walking the streets of Coal Clough, Hargher Clough, Stoops and Bleak House; meeting people and following leads...
Returned to Stoops & Hargher Clough Community Centre to gather school photographs from Chris, then got talking to people on Cog Lane about some of the photos - and the faces and places they recognised.
This led me to return to Coal Clough Lane at the weekend to visit Lilly, an elderly housebound resident who has lived in her terraced house since 1950. Old biscuit tins were brought down from the bedroom and we spent the afternoon going through the contents (photographs) and talking about family. Mary, the next door neighbour called in with a plate of hot, home cooked food for Lilly; and joined in the discussion about history, family and place.
Another Cog Lane resident came forward asking if I'd like to look at his dad's old cine films (Super8) which are stored in the attic. I love old home movies - let's hope this bunch has survived intact and are viewable. Looks like another interesting week ahead!
Kelly
Family, history, photography...
How are the communities of South West Burnley seen? In what ways are they visible?
Media headlines and Government statistics present a particular image, and it's an image that endures. These 'official' sources are preserved, made available and, in time, they become the record - consulted by historians.
Over the past few weeks I've been exploring census records with residents in South West Burnley. Sites like ancestry and find my past can be frustrating, because there are always gaps, people disappear, change their name - there's a lot of guesswork involved. When someone begins to explore their family tree, the strongest starting point is the information they already have - the family stories and half-remembered rumors they carry with them. This oral tradition can be crucial in deciding which 'John Sutcliffe' is the one we're looking for: "I was always told he had something to do with the railway", "He had a lot of family in Colne", "Two of his brothers died in the war"........
Family history is a process of recovery, an attempt to recover meanings and connections from the past, and sometimes this process helps to locate us in the present and carry us forward in some way. We assemble the fragments and pass them on to our children.
If we're lucky this inheritance comes with a collection of photographs. Studio portraits of young men in uniform at the outbreak of war, wedding photos, school photos and family snapshots. Family photographs are an important part of oral culture, oral tradition - they are part of an ongoing conversation about family and community. Many people post treasured family photos on their Facebook page, and they share them on community pages.A single image can generate an avalanche of comments; eliciting memories and forging connections.
There's a wealth of photographs out there - on mantle-pieces, in drawers, in family albums. Collectively, these images provide a record of the way people in South West Burnley have documented their own lives and neighborhoods across time.
Despite the advantages of Facebook, these personal and family archives remain largely invisible. The stories and memories they represent can easily be lost. It's common to find old family photographs for sale on flea markets, fragments of a conversation that has been interrupted or come to an end. These photographs always raise questions; who is the person? where was it taken? when? what was the occasion? When they are shared on Facebook these anonymous photographs generate new threads of conversation; sometimes a building or setting is identified and we try to reintegrate this fragment into a collective conversation. Photographs are the ultimate conversation piece.
We need to bring these photographs together in one place. Make them accessible to more people and keep the conversation going. Family photographs tell stories of life in South West Burnley; stories of families, streets, communities, celebrations, work and traditions. What stories do we want the children of South West Burnley to inherit - what do we want to pass on to them?
As part of my work with Ground Up I want to build a collection of photographs taken in the area and by the people of South West Burnley. The collection will form part of an exhibition held in the local area, entitled You Are Here.
People who want to participate can bring their photographs to scanning days at venues in the area.
Coal Clough Library, Monday 22nd July, 2.30pm to 6.30pm. (more to follow)
It would be great to find photographs of events, gatherings, people outside their homes, schools and places of work.
Photos will be scanned at a high resolution, and the original returned to you in a few minutes. Details about the image will also be recorded.
If you are interested in the project and/or want to be involved please contact me here at the Ground Up blog or the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ground-UP-Burnley/366156833465215
Or, come along to a scanning day and share your photographs.
Kelly
Photo Walk
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| Pushing the boundaries of SW Burnley |
Dave and I both went on the photo walk last week, and really enjoyed meeting John, Pat and Simon. It was great to be able to come on the walk and just meet people and talk/listen to them - as we'd decided to just come and take part, rather than documenting it through film.
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| I wonder if Jodie was ever found? |
We
planned initially to go to Scott park, but after we set off we all
started discussing the boundaries of SW Burnley, with John asking if we
could 'push the boundaries of the triangle' and suggesting we go and
explore the industrial areas on the other side of Rossendale Rd.
It
was interesting to see the busy area and walk through the buildings,
butty vans and people having lunch... being part of the temporary
community that lived there during the daytime. There were lots of cars
in the parking areas, suggesting that a lot of the staff come from
outside the area. I wonder how many SW Burnley residents work there?
The group was keen to walk around the cemetery after this, and the nature of our location led naturally to talk about loss and death, and discussion of this being 'secret Burnley, the bit no-one really wants to talk about, but where everyone ends up'.
Caroline - Huckleberry Films
What do you miss about home?
I have been lucky enough to spend the last week in San Francisco in California attending the Performance Studies International Conference (PSi) where I was presenting a performance. Being so far away from lovely England brought with it a new perspective to home and what it means to belong. When you travel, you experience new things, hotter climates, cooler climates, different traditions and rituals, unusual geography and whilst this is (usually) a good and interesting experience, it can also make you realise what is special about where you live and the sometimes unexpected things that you miss. In my case, it was cups of tea, a more equable climate and, of course, people, particularly my family. I spent quite a bit of time out there driving on the wide expansive roads where surprisingly there are no roundabouts! Thats was something I did miss, since they allow a much freer flowing traffic than regular crossroads.
I am looking forward to returning to Burnley in the next few days, and talking with everyone about their families, homes and what they would miss if they travelled away.
Caroline
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