MA Week 49 - meeting up with Mandy Payne, and the endless dissertation

Reflection on the past week, 30^th November 2016

 

Meeting the artist Mandy Payne

On Monday I had the real pleasure of spending the afternoon with the Sheffield-based artist, Mandy Payne. I came across Mandy’s work via Twitter and it really struck a chord. For the past four years she has been investigating the brutalist Park Hill flats complex in Sheffield, recording the abandoned urban spaces, the gradual boarding up of the complex, and the gentrification of part of it (see Mandy’s website). My interest in her work is fuelled by the fact that I was an undergraduate student in Sheffield many years ago and I remember the complex well, towering as it did (and presumably still does) over Pond Street Bus Station.  

Mandy was talked to me about her career, inspirations and working methods, which was really thought-provoking and insightful. She has had a previous career, as an NHS dentist, and her art career has taken off quite quickly. Whilst acknowledging that Mandy kept her creative work going alongside her previous career, which I certainly didn’t, this does give me encouragement that I can make something out of my artwork now if I persevere. A unique point of a lot of Mandy’s work is that it is on concrete, and she had to do trials to get repeatable results for the unusual substrate. This again was encouraging as I realised that my own testing and trialling is a part of the normal process of producing artwork and is not completely through my lack of technique! 

Mandy was interested in seeing the brutalist architecture of the University of Leeds so we went for a good wander around the campus. I often wander there on my own but it was different to walk and talk with someone else. Just as I pointed out my usual paths and interesting buildings and shapes, so Mandy pointed out things I’d never considered, and in some cases never even seen, and other shapes that I’d overlooked. I enjoyed the fresh set of eyes and I hope Mandy enjoyed my “guided tour”. We talked about how stimulating it can be to walk with someone who knows the area, but how we are all bounded by our own little rituals of whereabouts we walk and what we look at. We also agreed that you can go out looking for visual source material and find some really good inspiration, but quite often the most fruitful source material finds you when you’re not expecting it. Mandy had gone for a wander with someone in Sheffield and he had directed the walk to Park Hill flats. She had never been before but was immediately inspired. It’s the same with the Armley walk – it’s driven my practice either directly or indirectly since I did it 10 months ago.  

Although we both use the urban as source material in different ways, it was great to spend time with another artist with similar interests and the conversation never dried up! Mandy has kindly invited me to go down to Sheffield in the New Year to have a look at Park Hill flats and I will definitely be taking up the invitation.

The endless dissertation

The walk and talk with Mandy was a really refreshing break from the endless writing. Today I had an even more intense tutorial than last time. I have been having real trouble regarding how to discuss my chosen artists within the dissertation. There are three artists; Mandy, Rebecca Appleby and Stuart Whipps. I was considering whether I needed to include Whipps as he doesn’t have such a strong place attachment as the other two artists. Sharon has suggested that I should continue to include him and use his practice as a “link” to the other two as they are more relevant to me at the moment. I was also thinking of removing a summary of the similarities and differences between the artists’ practices, but Sharon again challenged me on this. I will try this and see how it works. I also had a tutorial with the specialist writing tutor, Karen, last week and she has suggested weaving the artists through the essay. It just seems like artist’s block of a different kind! 

Anyway I have made a breakthrough with the first part of it. I had written small sections on each of heritage, identity and place, and I was struggling to pull them all together. I woke up the other morning (they are all rolling into one now!) and realised that the point of the section was to argue how intermeshed they all are – so why was I separating them out? I’ve now re-written it as one section, starting with Ann-Marie Bathmaker’s “life histories”, rambling through identity, heritage and place, and coming back to Bathmaker. It feels a lot more comfortable now and hangs together quite well. 

One of the strangest things about that was that I fathomed out the exact way of rewriting it during a lunchtime walk on Woodhouse Moor. I usually walk there for half an hour most lunchtimes, but I haven’t been for ages, due to tutorials and meeting friends and being buried in the library. Woodhouse features strongly in the dissertation, as does walking, and it made me wonder why I hadn’t seen my lunchtime walk there as a powerful analytical tool rather than a nice-to-have while I am in this intense reading and writing phase. The same walk also revealed to me a bit of a hole in another section – something that hadn’t even got on my radar up to that point. 

All of this structuring and re-structuring means that I am now about a week behind where I wanted to be, so I will have to use my contingency time of the coming weekend, which is not ideal, but that’s what contingency is for.