Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 8, Issue 1, 2015

This article reflects on the process of creating Afloat, a sculpture commissioned for the Brighton seafront that has since been adopted by the people of Brighton as ‘The Brighton Donut’. The images are courtesy of Nicholas Sinclair, copyright 2015.

This article is based on the paper I gave at Place-Based Arts: Brighton Writes on 29 May 2015. Walking allows for an immersive experience of place. As the tradition of the flâneur, the interventions of Situationists and the practice of contemporary Walking Artists demonstrate, walking and creativity share a manifest connection. In this article I present my use of alternative walking practices and discuss how these can be used to generate new creative work. Inspired by psychogeographical methods, I have developed a series of exercises, which I use to create text and which I employ as Learning and Teaching tools with writing students. These include:

• Liberties – using the dérive to break convention and explore place afresh

• Constraints – using randomly generated directions to steer experience and facilitate discoveries

• Subverting mapping and signage – using superimposed mapping and reinterpreting signage in search of synchronicity

• Gathering materials – using alternative walks to observe and record materials including found text, sound and image.

This article draws on my own practice-based research and recent case studies using these methods.

In 2013 the Dutch artist Krijn de Koning was invited to undertake a residency at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA). This resulted in an Edinburgh Art Festival co-commission, Land, in the Sculpture Court at ECA, his first work in the United Kingdom. During the fellowship Krijn and I worked with a group of students on a project centred around 100 small plaster objects that were donated by the estate of Eduardo Paolozzi to the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh in 2007. These models and casts were stored in cardboard boxes in a cupboard next to the Turing Room. In that room we unpacked the boxes and catalogued the objects in sketchbooks and photographs. The intention was to make the works public but what proved to be more intriguing were our discussions about the different senses of history and value we ascribed to the collection.

This article reports on work emerging from an earlier research project that investigated undergraduate students’ autobiographical experiences of creativity at the University of Brighton. It found that students’ creativity was effectively supported if opportunities were provided for them to reflect on the things within their experiences that inspired their creativity. This research informed the creation of workshops and interview practices seeking to improve postgraduate students’ resilience and self-belief surrounding their place within their discipline. We argue that by offering students opportunities to reflect upon their practice and identify existing skills and experiences that contribute to their development as artists, that they will feel better prepared for place-based creative work. We further suggest that a process of reflection, action and discussion can enhance their personal, vocational and academic development. Our findings indicate that these learning opportunities can help students through liminal spaces in their work. The authors present a case study from a post-graduate Creative Writing MA course at the University of Brighton where students are engaged as artists in residence on a specific core module. We identify our model of best practice as being a fundamental part of the transformation from student to artist.

Utilizing multiple narratives to move in and out of a critical reading of Among the Salt Flats, a performance score written by the author in 2014, this article explores the different modes by which a performance writing practice generates multiplicities of place. The disruptive characteristics of performance jar the perceived fixed temporalities and locations of writing. These disruptions in the time and place of writing invite new proximities to the page which in turn recuperate the distance of representation. This article rewrites the disrupted linguistic geographies of Among the Salt Flats, focussing on the destabilizing force of this form on linearity and represents it through a text that moves between critical writing, image and first-person narrative.

We drive out to the Bonneville Salt Flats in my brother’s car. I sit in the passenger’s seat and we talk; I never learned how to drive. I look out the window at the flat-lying desert, endless and uniform in tone, shape and texture. The air outside parches the earth. From inside the car, I lick at the cracks in my lip that resemble the only breaks in the monotony of the ground. As we come closer to our destination, the landscape transforms into frozen greyish rifts and waves. We take the car out over the crust, park and proceed on foot past the warning signs.

This article explores place as subject matter and proposes to read the town of Peacehaven itself as archive. Two distinct photographic strategies are mobilized, each exploring the intersections of place, memory and archive.

Firstly, I show how surviving traces of the town’s original vision are mapped and recorded through documentary photographs. Photography is used in its forensic or detective mode to create a photographic record for the future. This methodology of site-marking is informed by the technique of site-writing, a term coined by architectural historian Jane Rendell, who has used the process of writing as a form of spatial construction. This is complemented by a second visual approach that takes the shape of a commemorative site-specific intervention performed as a public outdoor event. As part of this intervention, lost landmarks are temporarily conjured through the projection of archival photographs onto bare chalk cliffs below Peacehaven’s iconic Meridian Monument. Through this intervention, new, layered photographs emerge and are recorded. Whilst representing what has been lost, the photographs also seek to reinterpret the archival images in a new context. A space emerges within which lost landmarks of Peacehaven are made visible in the present.

Site-specific art grows out of a rejection of the enlightenment models of production and exhibition. The degradation of place and memory that accompanies globalization suggests a rationale for the increasing contemporary concern with site-specific and site-responsive artwork which is discussed in the first half of the article. A detailed reading of an installation, Anima/Animus, by artist collective Wilson-Eflerová (WE), which took place with Winchester Cathedral in 2013 follows as an example. The value of this work is seen as lying in its ability to assert connections between self and other that have been imagined in other times. The medieval statutory that seeded WE’s piece was created during the 1220s as part of a movement towards more realist representational styles and serves as a pre-enlightenment model for an embodied and interconnected world. A world that relies on a very different value system to those of a global market, and one that had from the start appealed on many different levels to a range of interpretive communities and which continues to do so in the present.