i’ll start with the good. in terms of place specific cultural experiences, the pen room is one of the finest museums i have been to in a while. whilst walking through the jewellery quarter (which is definitely still full of sparkling things) a tourist information sign for a pen museum was exactly the kind of thing that would turn my head. the pen room opens with a bold claim, that at the height of the city’s industrial output three quarters of everything written in the world used a pen from birmingham. big talk. whilst i have no means available to me to even begin to verify this, i can confirm that there are lots of different pens in this place. more pens that i have ever seen in my life. i had a go at making a steel pen nib. i wrote my name in braille. i looked at lots of pens. a hugely enthusiastic and knowledgeable volunteer provided a bridging point and means of engaging with a pretty overwhelming collection, and thus showed the importance of places like this. if cities and communities are to retain a grip on their cultural and social past, then places like this need to be supported. if you are ever in birmingham i really do suggest heading to the pen room, and make sure to leave a donation to support their work.

from pens, to art. ikon gallery had always been one of those names that i knew, but couldn’t see a time that i would be able to visit. before considering the exhibitions within, the gallery building is marvelous. housed in a converted neo-gothic school, ikon makes great use of its space. in particular, the glass lift inside the building does a great job of presenting the interior of the space; it does that showing you the outside of a building but on the inside trick that i always gawp at (see also the great court at the british museum and john rylands library). the lift also has the added extra of housing one of martin creed’s sound installations, which was a welcome treat as just a week earlier i had failed to find his similar work at the festival hall. i digress.

ikon gallery. image – ikon gallery

the three display spaces in the gallery work really well, set across two and a bit floors. in terms of the work on display, timur noviko’s fabric works capture perestroika-era soviet life in a way that i’ve never thought about it before, and his seven pictures on rice paper, produced after the artist had gone blind, are simple, beautiful and inspiring. on the first floor a collection of john flaxman’s sketches are aesthetically interesting, but i’ll admit don’t do a huge amount for me. they are very well displayed though.

however, the space that interested me most in ikon is the ‘tower room.’ currently home to a video installation by/of the angolan artist nastio mosquito, this room seems to exist outside of the rest of the gallery spaces, in a nowhere ground between the first and second floors. from studying the building from the outside you can see where the tower fits in, yet it somehow felt like it was in a different place to me once inside. i’d be really interested to see other uses of this room, as whether it can live up to the title it has been given.

from ikon i drift towards the heart of civic birmingham. the town hall (where i would later see steve reich and the london sinfonietta perform within beautiful surroundings) proudly sits next to the council house and birmingham museum and art gallery. these are big buildings, built by industrialist proud of their city. i pick up shades of leeds here, overblown and unabashed grandstanding in civic terms. the victoria square into chamberlain square run of public space is really well done, and features everything you expect of a regenerated city centre – large scale buildings set around a modern sculpture and/or water feature, and the remains of sculptures which used to dominate the space but are now somewhat overlooked. not necessarily a criticism, certainly not when you consider the issues of public/private spaces in this city (more on that later).

the round room. image – heart of england galleries

the entrance to the museum and art gallery houses a memorial which i think capture the essence of the boom in museum culture and its civilising aims - by the gains of industry we promote art. you do the hard work, and here we will educate you. on walking up the stairs you are punched in the face by the grandure of the round room, a vast space crammed with paintings on pretty much every available point of the walls which reach upwards to the high domed ceiling. this is a fantastic entry point, and shows something of the respect with which the elders of birmingham past viewed their cultural duties.

with limited time in the gallery, i soaked up the wonderful collection of modern british art which included some brilliant examples of lanyon, heron, hepworth, moore and epstein. there is also a great display from new art west midlands, the highlights of which were grace a williams’ work on notions of photography and art, and lizzie prince’s drawings inspired by brutalist geometry.

lizzie prince. image – lizzie prince

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what of birmingham the city though? there are signs of interesting things happening culturally, though i would also note that in the little time i was there i didn’t feel like there was any kind of coherent arts scene, in a way that manchester, sheffield, leeds, nottingham and liverpool have. there are signs of interesting architectural conversations trying to happen around the city, especially with the new library building which i will definitely want to see once it is topped out. however, the overarching feeling i left the city with was one of unease at being constantly ‘managed’ through spaces. pretty much every journey on foot through the city is forced to wind through an enclosed private space, be it the icc’s deluge of conference rooms, the premiere retail experience of the mailbox, the confusion of corporate non-identity of the cube or paradise forum shopping centre. there is a cloying sense of paranoia that is enforced on you as a pedestrain, knowing that you are merely walking from the view of one cctv control room to another, becoming another footfall on a visitor counter whilst being subjected to piped sound and recycled air. birmingham is by no means alone in this approach of managing public/private space, just take a walk through liverpool one or wakefield’s trinity walk to get the same experience. as someone who loves exploring cities and discovering their identity through their streets, what i learnt about birmingham is that it is more interested in commerce than retaining a coherent city identity. which maybe is exactly what the identity of the city is; commerce, conferences and chain coffee.

so, on this occasion i was in the park so as to head towards the serpentine gallery. i will admit that up until this point the gallery existed in my head as a name that i head read before, and as a point on a hand drawn map from a friend which recommended the bookshop there as the best repository of art books in the city. (they weren’t wrong about this, but i only had five minutes and no money to spend in there, so will have to return on another occasion to take full advantage of this terrific shop!)

mekas with his bolex in lithuania – jonas mekas ©

on display until the end of this week (sunday 27 january) is an exhibition of work by the lithuanian film-maker, artist and poet jonas mekas. i hadn’t been aware of quite how much a part of the new york avant-gard mekas had been, which i presume is why one of the first films you reach in the display is documenting a night in with john lennon, yoko ono, andy warhol and more eating dumplings. here is mekas as artist within a circle. yet i feel that if anything this piece was at odds with the rest of the exhibition, which casts the artist’s process and approach as based on something quite different to this somewhat showboating, namedropping video. perhaps that is just my reading of it.

walden – jonas mekas ©

in the time i spent in the gallery three pieces really stood out to me as capturing the essence of jonas mekas’ work, combining poetic-film-making with filmic-poetry. as a film-maker he is best known for his style of ‘film diaries’ which sensitively record the day-to-day, focusing mainly on his family and the arts community of new york. it is this foregrounding of the everyday which i found so captivating. idylls of semeniskiai sees a combination of a 29 poem cycle studying nature and the acts of life in the artist’s native lithuania in the 1940s, coupled with image which he recorded on a return in 1971. the two elements are combined with a lightness of touch which allows both to exist, whilst their combination brings a sense of place to both. this piece shows well the static method of display moving images which runs throughout this exhibition, taking three or four frames of a film, and printing them as a split second glimpse of life. with the poems describing the acts of life, and the images capturing an essence of activity, both media lend differing methods of ‘animation’ to a shared subject with real impact.

lavender piece 2012, installation view at serpentine gallery – jerry hardman-jones ©

further down the same park facing room lavender piece resumes this theme of capturing and displaying life, with no interjection to guide thoughts in a certain direction. sixteen screen display different 16mm films, capturing fragments of activity from across mekas’ life. a view out of a snowy window counterbalances a self-portrait of the artist dancing around his office, alongside images of family trips out with children. my notes for this piece boil down to five words, which i think do it about as much justice as i can. “life. noise. snow. movement. travel.”

these notions of recording life, interspersed with the rhythm of life, come together perfectly in outtakes from the life of a happy man, which is being premiered as part of this exhibition. here mekas has taken an assortment of offcuts of film, the pieces of life which he hasn’t used in artworks before, and brings them together into a feature-length piece. these are outtakes of homelife, the city, nature, lithuania, family and more. this assemblage of life is pieced together in a non-linear random order, meaning that there is no consistent ‘story arc’ to be following, with the artist instead placing the viewer in a position where they are to observe life, rather than seek a narrative within it. i feel that this is what i will take away about mekas’ approach, the observing is more important than the story, the singularity of activity alone is of huge importance. displaying this film in the domed central room of the serpentine gallery is a master stroke, as the viewer cannot be anything but immersed within the installation. as an onlooker you almost become part of the process, your being there observing these observations is almost an intertextual layer of interpretation.

simply put, this is a wonderful exhibition. if you are in or around london this week i fully endorse getting yourself to the serpentine and spending at least a couple of hours absorbing this.

situated at the dropping off point of kent on the east coast, dungeness is a headland like no other i have seen in this country. as the road winds towards the coast there is a certain point where you switch from being in the uk to regarding an ‘other place.’ the vast expanse of, well, not much, feels far more like the images you see of abandoned scandanavian coastal regions than britain. following signs for the old lighthouse, the barely marked road flanked on one side by ‘the village’ on one side and the expanse of shingle on the other.

the accommodation of dungeness village resembles a cross between railway carriages, tin huts and sheds. at the time i felt this was a mere observation, but it turns out that the majority of the chalet-esque huts are actually built around the base block of railway carriages from the point in the headland’s history when the southern railway owned the majority of the land. these are building constructed to stand up to bracing elements, but also to retain a sense of impermanence. one picks up a sense of a classic ‘stay indoors until the strangers pass’ spaghetti western in terms of atmosphere, though then again i did visit early-ish on a saturday morning, with the only people out and about on the ‘streets’ an assortment of folks gauping at the bleakness (like myself), fishermen (who one presume are all very accustomed to this view) and twitchers who had ventured down from the rspb reserve. that said, the britannia inn was hugely welcoming. there was something quite fantastic about drinking in what felt like the last pub in the country, the warmth of the open fire and strange collection of keyrings almost accentuating the nothingness outside.

the beach at dungeness is famed for being one of the largest expanses of shingle in the world, and as such is of ecological and scientific importance. the headland is protected through various means, including designation as a national nature reserve, special protection area, special area of conservation and a site of specific scientific interest. december wasn’t the right time to go hunting for wildlife, though some research suggests that this part of the world is home to a host of rare spiders, beetles, moths and bees. on my visit, the main focus was on taking a wander along the boardwalk over the shingle to reach the coast.

on the headland itself there are three main landmarks which standout when looking back from the coast. the most attractive two points are the lighthouses which stand at either end of the main residential stretch, with the nuclear power station lurking in the background. at one end is the 1901 built high light tower/the old lighthouse. this name could be seen as something of a misnomer, given that it is actually the fourth lighthouse which has stood on this stretch of coastline. due to the shifting nature of the sea, the beacons constructed in 1615, 1635 and 1790 all became increasingly redundant as the coast receded, meaning that the growing shingle banks were creating a greater distance between the beacons and the ships they were to guide. the light from the 1901 lighthouse, first lit in 1904,  could be seen from 18 miles away. however, the building of the power station in the 1950s blocked the beam from the lighthouse, thus rendering it as redundant as those which preceded it. however, this lighthouse escaped the bulldozer, and stands now as a tourist attraction.

the fifth dungeness lighthouse was first lit in 1961, and continues to provide a beacon for sailors along the east coast now. where the old lighthouse has a very traditional fat at the bottom tapering towards lantern design, this 60s piece of utilitarian engineering stands like an interjection of the modern world into the forgotten surroundings of dungeness, though with far more conventional beauty that the behemoth-esque lines of the nuclear power stations which sit beyond the old lighthouse. i think the 1961 lighthouse is possibly the focal point of this conurbation, but then again i am a sucker for that era of design.

i’ll also posit a controversial point; i’m moved to argue that the power stations actually add to the feel of dungeness. there is something about the looming presence of the huge buildings which offsets the cluster of huts which make up the village – the power stations lend a sense of solidness which adds to the accumulated emptiness of the rest of the landscape, a concrete concretion within the shingle.

yet it is not the power stations which characterise this area. dungeness is all about the relationship between the shingle, sea, rails and time. the human hand shows itself in the placement of objects, yet it is the battle between object, elements and the clock which give this area a real sense of place, a place which is nowhere yet could not exist anywhere but here. dungeness is about huts and boats which were once by the sea, but have been left to decay as the sea continued its journey away from the english coast, receding back into itself, leaving these objects as remainders of a time which may have passed 10 days ago, 10 years ago, 10 generations ago. it is this complex relationship which may yet prove the final undoing of dungeness too, with some theorists positing that the sea will return inland within the next 150 years or so, leaving only the lighthouses above the waves as a reminder of the lives which once floated here.

republic of the moon, fact

one of the first exhibitions which i saw this year, and easily one of the most enjoyable. here fact brought the moon to liverpool, with seven artists declaring their vision for lunar life. the standout work was definitely agnes meyer brandis’ the moon goose analogue, a fantastic project which followed the artist putting a team of geese through their training ready to fly to the moon. alongside the documentation of the training regime the artist had constructed a full lunar control room from which you could see the ‘astronauts’ at work on their moon base (also known as pollinaria in italy).

bill drummond: ragworts, site gallery

for this exhibtion dummond created a series of ‘scores’ which provided the soundtrack to the city of sheffield. placing words into a world without music, drummond created a new means for negotiating thoughts about the city, how it relates to the inhabitants, and visa versa. the scores were placed throughout the city, and led followers around sheffield, with instructions to say hello to birds along the way amongst other actions. seeing the scores together in the gallery space at site, all of a sudden the static words on the page became a passionate landscape vision of a city. this was truly wonderful.

heather & ivan morison, ben rivers and david thorpe – the hepworth wakefield

the first of two exhibitions from my former place of work, the spring 2012 group show brought together three displays looking at notion of utopia and apocalypse. i did enjoy david thorpe’s intricate cabinets and paintings, but this exhibition was really about the interplay between ben rivers’ film slow action and heather & ivan morison’s installation/object theatre/puppet performance anna. where rivers created/edited four forms of utopia, the morisons constructed a world in a state of assault from creeping ice based on anna kavan’s fiction. to have had the opportunity to work with these displays was an absolute joy.

louisa may parker – bank street arts

louisa may parker works with notions of drawing in a way very similar to an artist who appeared in this list last year, and i think that is one of the things which i saw in this display in one of the front rooms of bank street arts in sheffield. alongside a series of intricate and beautiful works on paper, the artist had installed table, book – a sculpture/drawing which consisted of a table, book and weight covered entirely in graphite.

jeremy deller: joy in people – the hayward gallery

i’m not sure that there is much to be said about jeremy deller which hasn’t already been said. ever since seeing his procession at manchester international festival in 2009, i have felt a connection with deller’s work – and more importantly the inspiration behind it. here is an artist who is more interested in the people he is making art about that creating some vaunted conceptual piece. this retrospective at the hayward gallery gathered together work from across the artist’s career, from a recreation of the exhibition he staged in his parents house through to the battle of orgreave (which was also shown at the wonderful s1 artspace this year).

stuart roy clarke: homes of football – national football museum

i have loved stuart roy clarke’s photography for a long time. family holidays as a kid tended to head towards the lake district, which for me was always a great things as it meant i could pester my dad to take me to the homes of football gallery in ambleside. kicking things off for the newly manchester-ed national football museum, clarke’s photography more than ever reminds me about why i love football, at a time when my attachment to the top/professional ranks of the game is growing weaker with each passing bout of silliness which is tearing football apart. much like deller’s art revolves around participants, clarke’s photography is about the things, and more importantly the people around football. don’t expect pictures of big name players engaged in prepared dance routines; this is football from the terraces, and for the terrace. a triumph. (oh, and did i mention that the display is soundtracked by british sea power?)

ansel adams: photography from the mountains and sea – national maritime museum

another display of photography, this time from one of the most iconic american photographers of the twentieth century. i think possibly the most affecting images in this exhibition are not the huge waterscapes for which adams is rightly famous, but actually the handful of photographs which were taken by a teenage adams, with a simple box brownie camera. the depth of image which he was capturing even at this stage when he was learning how photography worked is stunning.

richard long and luke fowler – the hepworth wakefield

my final pick of the year, and the second at the hepworth wakefield, includes two artists whose work always inspires me. to have had the chance to see both of them in action whilst installing their work, and get to have a chat with them only acted to confirm how much i love their work. in this display a selection of richard long’s works on paper were installed alongside three large scale floor pieces, one floor to ceiling wall drawing and a prototype grass sculpture. alongside these very physical pieces, luke fowler’s film the poor stockinger, the luddite cropper and the deluded followers of joanna southcott delved into the workers’ education association and the writing of e.p. thompson in and around yorkshire. the same traits of editing, sound and linear camera movement can be seen through this piece and fowler’s hugely well deserved turner prize nominated all divided selves. on face value it isn’t overly clear how well these two artists would complement each other in a gallery space, but the shift between the natural world and evolution of education was actually a real masterstroke.

i am really really excited to let you all know that this week i have been invited to represent the city of sheffield over on the northern spirit theatre company’s ‘a wondrous place’ project. northern spirit is a fantastic company, who are putting together a new work for 2013, and as part of the research for this they have invited some of the best writers from around the north to celebrate where they live, thus entering into a process of finding out what ‘the north’ means as an idea, as a place, and as a community.

i am truly honoured to have been asked to contribute as one of the ‘spirited people with a surprising perspective on places in the north,’ and to be writing alongside folks like natalie bradbury from the shrieking violet, short story writer amy roberts from liverpool and sheffield’s own doodler and writer missy tassles to name but the writers who have come before me – and i know there are great people yet to come! in a very exciting turn of events the whole process was featured on the guardian’s northerner blog last week, and i fully recommend that you head over to the website and check the amazing work that is already up from the past three weeks.

i will be guest curating the website all week, so expect a blend of architecture, music, walking and vague nonsense on a daily basis!

there is something really enjoyable about visiting a new gallery, especially if it means getting to see a city which you have previously seen only from the train. or maybe from the station, as i reckon i’ve drank coffee there before, but that is another unfinished rhetorical conversation for my head. i had wanted to visit nottingham contemporary for a while, even though i didn’t really know that much about it. i had a vague memory of seeing an interesting piece about the gallery on the culture show, but beyond that there was nothing that could guide my steps as i jumped on the train from sheffield.

that big flashy sign up at the top of that page was the first sight i caught of the gallery, and i’ll admit it didn’t exactly set my heart racing – it isn’t a design rich logo now is it? however, this signpost stood at the top of a staircase which led down to the cafe terrace, which on the day i visited was bathed with mid-morning sunshine, the perfect place for a coffee before embarking on the gallery. first impressions were of interest at how the building worked. from this point, at the very bottom of the building and looking up, the gallery appeared to shoot straight up out of the land for three or four storeys, yet i knew full well that following the run of the street that the majority of the building was actually at street level. i love a building that gets you thinking about how it is put together before you’ve even started with it, much like other pieces of gallery as re-gen seem to work (the lowry and imperial war museum north in salford, the hepworth wakefield, the pompidou in paris).

so, a bit about the exterior before we head inside. the building is supposedly situated on the ‘oldest site in nottingham,’ formerly cave dwellings, a saxon fort, mediaeval town hall and victorian train line. seems like a contentious choice of wording, but at least it isn’t claiming a ‘quarter’ title. what is without doubt is that this area of the city was home to the lace trade, which is reflected in a lovely piece of cladding design by the architects caruso st john. the green/grey concrete moments which make up the majority of the exterior walls of the building have been cast imprinted with a lace design, which only becomes more interesting as you get closer to it. a fine start. coupled with the concrete walls, the building is topped off by gold-tinged aluminium towers, which seems a little distracting from the exterior (but come into their own once within the gallery). i spent quite some time walking round this building, up the steps, checking angles of reflection in windows, back down steps, following lines and generally marvelling at what has been achieved with a pretty small footprint.

moving inside (noting that there doesn’t really seem to be a front door when approaching from the train station end of the city, an urban planner’s nightmare surely?) the building blocks of the gallery emerge, and what a surprise they are exposed concrete. which i really like. i’m unapologetic about how much i like concrete as a building material when it is well used, which it really is here. the staircase leading up from the cafe/studio space, past the admin offices up to the gallery/street level is all straight, heavy blocks, and really shows off quite how tall this building is. whereas david chipperfield galleries leave the concrete on show outside, here the structure is used to emphasis the site, reinforcing ideas about how this gallery is fitting into the city. yet the best is still to come.

those aluminium towers that look a bit plonked on from the outside actually provide the stunning lighting for the gallery spaces, tempered through delightful use of angles and colour washes, to create spaces which feel so so full of air and light. admittedly, i was there on one of the sunniest days of the year, so had the kind of experience which the architects dreamed of, but my did it work. that said, these skylights didn’t have to be the focus, and as a flexible use building they can be blocked out when displaying sensitive work, as they are for the alfred kubin display. alongside this natural light from above, both gallery spaces which touch the street feature huge picture frame windows, which place the street within the gallery, and more interestingly the gallery within the street scene.

it is this placing of the gallery within the city which is the unquestionable highlight for me. i’ll admit that my knowledge of nottingham is restricted to robin hood, brian clough, stuart pearce and the mid-90s forest team, alan sillitoe and the pop fest (which i still haven’t been to yet), but i’m guessing that the arrival of a contemporary art gallery which looks out to the city as much as it does at artistic influences was a bit of a shot in the creative arm. with a really interesting exhibition programme, including the current pairing of francis upritchard’s odd figures with kubin’s disturbing images and the ‘star city: the future under communism‘ exhibition of 2010 (which i nearly bought all the postcards from on this visit – stunning design), nottingham contemporary is presenting intellectually challenging work within a fantastic space, which is underpinned by windows and gallery spaces which work to draw the people of the city in. on the way back to the station at the end of my trip i passed back through the gallery, finding the cafe just as busy with people grabbing a local real ale; i really do hope that this is a sign of the place which the gallery sits in the city, a mixed use resource encompassing culture, education and community.

the alfred kubin & francis upritchard exhibitions are on display until 30th september. the gallery is about five minutes walk from nottingham train station. if you are planning a visit, i can also fully endorse a wander to the malt cross, a terrific ale pub in a converted music hall.

standing out as a) the most thought provoking and impressive display and b) the one  that closes on saturday, i would put tom ireland’s notes on western expansion , currently on display at bloc projects, at the top of the list of things to see. ireland’s investigation into the relationship(s) between modernist art and the western space programme of the 20th century as proponents of interrelated aesthetic and ideological values is a wonderfully thought out show. somehow this is the second terrific lunar themed exhibition i have seen this year, following republic of the moon at fact in liverpool, and it holds similar qualities to part of the earlier show in that it places the viewer into a relationship with the space/space. ireland’s triumph at the centre of this experience is a soundpiece which slows beethoven’s moonlight sonata down to fill the time that neil armstrong spent walking on the moon. with this ireland builds a work of brilliant poignancy, which changes all relationships within the gallery space by placing the viewer into an atmosphere of slow but recognisable progress towards a recognised but unrecognisable goal. it is a rarity that i see a show where the physical embodiment of the art take such a back seat, but here the ‘art’ on the ground/walls is there as a placemarker on your journey along the soundscape.

tom ireland, courtesy of bloc projects

hoping down the road from bloc, i cannot even begin to express how much i love the print it exhibition/pop-up artist book shop at site gallery. the entirety of site has been taken over by books, books and more books, and as you may have picked up from reading this blog i am quite a fan of books! the main gallery space sees a collaboration between the artists’ publishing platform copy and the coracle press archive, resulting in a beautiful look at what can be achieved by the medium of the artist book, and some of the best examples i have seen of this in a while. real standouts throughout the exhibition were the work of erica van horn of ireland’s coracle. the standout piece from van horn’s work in my opinion was a series of books detailing the interior of envelopes, before using the medium to explore art history. make sure to check out the related events and talks that copy have planned alongside this display which look fantastic.

print it, courtesy of site gallery

hop through into the smaller gallery space and you will find your wallet trying to dive out of your back pocket, as site have pulled together a collection of the best artists books available in their pop-up shop. i mentally spent around £160 in there after a quick snoop around, with work by simon faithful, john dilnot, robert williams and the ever-impressive sheffield publicity department. it is also wonderfully arranged, using pallets as low budget shelving units, a lovely touch.

print it, courtesy of site gallery

a quick dash across sheffield is well worth risking the sun/howling wind/soaking rain (delete as applicable) is well worth it to get over to bank street arts, where they also have a pair of fantastic displays of artist books presently. clare rogers’ from here you can almost see the sea: a response to living in plymouth is, quite simply, brilliant. rogers uses a variety of printed to media to explore what her hometown of plymouth means to here, what it looks like, why she loves it, why she hates it, and what it feels like to be there. this sounds like an interesting enough project for a visual artist, but here the artist uses words alone to engage with her subject matter, combining ‘photography’ with poetry and book works to create her image of plymouth. i’ve been back to this exhibition twice already, and suspect i will be there again before it closes at the start of september.

clare rogers, courtesy of bank street arts

the second artist book display at bank street at the moment is elisabeth tonnard’s sheffield artist books prize 2011 winning a dialogue in useful phrases. i’ll admit that i found the printed version of this piece far more effective than the soundpiece which has been created using project guttenberg audio files to re-contextualise tonnard’s book. still a really interesting idea, which is creates a great dialogue from abstract phrases.

elisabeth tonnard, courtesy of bank street arts

lastly for this roundup, a train trip over to leeds to see a fantastic new exhibition at blip blip blip, the gallery space within leeds college of art. this week saw the opening of jenny west’s projection, and exhibition which explores the relationship between architectural space and domestic objects through the process of drawing. or, in other words, stunningly detailed and precise drawings of jelly moulds which look better than most architectural designs you see. west has a habit of leaving large amounts of her construction work on show within her work, which for me works brilliantly as the process is given as much of an airing at the product. the relationship between the works on paper and the large scale wall drawing create an interesting comparison of scale and working practices, and if you get over there quickly enough you might still be able to grab one of the beautifully presented essays which accompany the artist’s work.

nb – the below image doesn’t do west’s work anywhere close to justice

jenny west, courtesy of blip blip blip

the fine art display at s1 artspace was the first time that i have seen the gallery space displaying work other than film, and it was fantastic to see the room so animated. with a mixture of sculptural works, painting, photography and film, the display took on a variety of different directions.

the standout pair of works for me came from jason mould and hannah sarah james. both artists’ work took seemed to deal with ideas of negotiation of landscape, though in contrasting manners. mould’s piece the debatable land takes on a richard long-esque quality, mixing a vinyl wall piece of the english-scottish border with a physical border between soil from both sides of the divide. i got a real sense of the importance of place from mould’s work, and was really impressed; i would really like to see more of this artist.

jason mould, the debatable land

hannah sarah james, 0.7

adjacent to mould’s work was hannah sarah james’ wall drawing 0.7, a wall drawing working around four sides of a supporting pillar. using the simplest of ideas, that vertical line, the artist creates undulating contours which spread around the pillar. it is probably a leap to far to suggest that these mountains were the peaks along mould’s border. a terrific placement of two of the best pieces i saw all day.

shifting around the corner from these pieces sarah simmonite’s progression offers another seemingly simple idea, blocks of colour moving from shade to shade, from a light ecru and moving towards muddy brown. it wasn’t the blocks that drew the eye and interest in this piece though; the spaces between the solid slabs danced with variations, a really nice touch to bring a sense of shared progress to the entire work.

sarah simmonite, progression

other standout work from the fine art show came from carole cluer, who reworked the ideas of kintsugi repairs using graphite in place of gold. cluer’s artist book complemented her ideas and plate work to great impact. dominating the entrance to the gallery space, annabel snowden’s parachute asked some interesting questions of the viewer, with the main thing lingering for me being an ongoing problem deciphering whether the parachute was falling towards or anchored by the fantastic print on the gallery floor. lastly, victoria bailey’s macintosh-esque wooden frame supporting punctured paper work worked perfectly this afternoon as light flooded through the miniscule holes, creating a sense of life. the texturing of bailey’s paper offered yet more contours, a theme which i really warmed to throughout the works which appealed most to me in this collection.

victoria bailey

moving on from the art show, i headed (via a swift trip to millenium gallery to partake in their £1 coffee deal) into the unknown for me, jewellery. i honestly can’t give you anything on the technical abilities of any of the artists on show, as i have no real terms of reference with which to describe what i saw. however, i can tell you which two artists really stood out to me as the ones whose work i really enjoyed. luana poerio’s collection hope of spring saw silver flowers arranged into wooden blocks, with lovely allusions to natural forms and window boxes at the same time.

from the natural to the very man-made, emma swailes’ the sea side memories collection was loads of fun. objects inspired by the british coast, with deckchairs and beach huts supporting some really lovely pieces working around aesthetics of the chip fork. ok, so it might not be ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty’, but this work really grabbed me and stood out as something i would want to buy in the future for loved ones.

heading on from the jewellery i attempted to find the (very poorly signposted) architecture display. it must be really frustrating for the students to find that their work is displayed in such a chaotic manner, and indeed nigh on impossible to find. short of a sign on a door saying ‘beware of the leopard‘ it couldn’t have been much more difficult to actually find the 4th year architects work, which only discovered by dint of having looked at the 2nd year display from across the atrium and traced a vague line towards something across the way that looked like it might be more architecture. moan over, but seriously, shouldn’t the architecture department be the best at getting you into a space to see the work?

once the final year projects were found, it was worth the trip. working to a brief of designing an international hub for learning on the dearne valley/river don corridor which showcased environmental features, there were some brilliantly thought out buildings here.

liam gladwin’s building made fantastic use of space, placing the public circulation areas at the heart of the design, yet without impinging on the practical usage of area. alongside a very clean and considered interior, gladwin’s exterior seemed thoroughly planned to at once make a strong statement on its materials whilst also blending into the natural world around it. really impressive stuff.

liam gladwin

just as impressive in my eyes was tony buck’s concept which combined wood frame, glass and local stone with a green roof to create a building of striking qualities which somehow took me straight back to the moorland visitor centre in edale. i’m a massive fan of said building in edale, and someone buck managed to maintain this combination of the natural, great design and a certain softness throughout his project.

tony buck

the creative spark exhibitions run until saturday 23rd june, and i would heartily recommend that you find the time to go and give them a look before the weekend. it is really encouraging to see so much great new work going on in sheffield, and i am honestly looking forward to seeing where all of the artists i’ve spoken about above go next. keep your eyes peeled folks.

as a city which has been torn apart by conflict, it would be impossible to write about berlin and not consider how war has impacted upon the place, and how it is remembered. unsurprisingly there are memorials to the loss of life right across the city, with the spectre of the second world war and ongoing loss of life which resulted from the occupation of berlin displayed with a blunt matter of factness which i think few cities would attempt. berlin knows that it has a lot to remember, and doesn’t hide the fact. here i am going to consider two very different, but just as powerful approaches to memory and the differing traces, footprints and impressions they place into the context of the city.

the soviet war memorial at treptower park, like much of architecture of the former russian side of berlin, is about memory and scale. moving from the weeping russian motherland at one end, through to the gigantic red army soldier at the zenith of the gardens, this is an act of the soviet union states remembering those who fought in the battle of berlin, the role they played in the defeat of facisim, and more importantly acting as a ground on which to celebrate the lives of the 5000 men buried here.

the establishment of soviet strength cries out from each different facet of this monument. the weeping mother represents russia, morning her lost sons; looking on from here the scale begins to strike home. the shattered russian flags, fronted by red army soldiers bowed in reverence, cut perfect lines, furthering the sense of how small the individual is in the face of both the war, and the soviet state.

sixteen stone sarcophagi representing the states of the ussr carry the words of stalin, and in places the great leader manages to sneak in as a soviet worker; even in commemorating her dead the russian state was furthering stalin’s image – any opportunity is a propaganda opportunity. yet of these murals it is the image of lenin above a row of red army troops which is most powerful. the perfectly straight line appear once again, with a sense of perspective enforcing the strength of the succesful soviet army.

however, this all shrinks away in comparison with the twelve metre tall statue of a soviet soldier , holding a child, a sword (which held surprisingly tsarist overtones in my opinion…) and standing atop a broken swastika. the statue purports to represent nikolia masalov, a sergant of the guards who risked german machine gun fire to rescue a three year old german child whose mother was missing. this may be the tale behind the monument, but the unmissable message is that the soviet state is powerful, that you are insignificant in the shadow of it, but that it is also at its heart caring for you. a hugely powerful monument, a fitting memorial of those russians who died to defeat nazism, but steeped in hugely political overtones.

moving across the city, the second memorial i’d like to consider is denkmal für die ermordeten juden europas, which directly translates as the memorial to the murdered jews of europe. located right in the heart of berlin’s district of historic power, just down the road from the reichstag and brandenberg gate, this memorial is at the heart of the city, and in a way could be seen to define how berlin, and possibly germany or indeed europe at large, is seeking to bring a different manner of thought into memorial . scale is once again at play here, though in a hugely different manner to that seen at treptower park.

next to the shining american embassy, and just across the road from the tiergarten, the holocaust memorial appears far more understated in comparison to the soviet memorial. there is no huge statue dominating proceedings. in fact, from the street the 19,000 square metre site appears understated to say the least. 2711 grey concrete blocks, seemingly of minute difference across the vast area seem to lack a real impact. at first glance, other than the fact that a site of such size has been set aside for a memorial site rather than maximised for commercial opportunity, this is a possibly too understated monument.

yet the power of the holocaust memorial is evident as soon as you start to move throughout the maze of grey stelae. starting as low level protrusions, indeed seeming not much more than a series of concrete benches, as you move further into the memorial site the stelae slabs become more and more imposing, as the ground level undulates creating a sense of scale and loss. the concrete blocks vary in height from 20cm up to just short of 5 metres, and as you move further into the maze of monuments to lost life you find an inescapable sense of uneasiness, somewhere between loss, claustrophobia and confusion. where the memorial at treptower park makes its point by placing the viewing in a relationship of awe, here you are forced to face a grid system which appears ordered, but offers no support.

in amongst the concrete labyrinth there is a bunkered ‘place of information’, which i’ll be honest, i didn’t find. that said, i didn’t know it was there until i read about it later. what struck me most about this monument was the sense of peace which is created by the downward slope of the floor, which leaves you standing some way below street level and surrounded by concrete which muffles the city. you are faced with this contemplative silence, whilst also facing the anxieties which the structure itself brings on. i know that this memorial has caused a fair amount of controversy due to its lack of a monument or recognised symbols of grief/remembrance, but the questioning of a system of order, brought about by human design, is massively powerful when considering the lives of those taken away during the holocaust.

having spent the best part of half an hour getting deeper into the monolithic towers of the stelae, the sombre mood was shattered by a group of school children tearing around the memorial screaming and shouting. at the time i was really quite offended by this, they were clearly not respecting what this space was all about. yet after i got back i started to think about this memorial in a different way; the central positioning of this site places it very much in a role as an active role as part of the fabric of the city. would stopping kids from using a public space in the manner that they would naturally not be a tiny tiny tiny baby step vaguely in the direction of the problem that this memorial is here to recognise? the decision not to have an obvious entrance point with directions, signage and rules has been very carefully taken, so the means of use must be openly considered. one thing is for certain, this isn’t the kind of behavior that the imposing red guard soldier would abide…

berlin has always been a city which has interested me. as an undergrad history student with a particular interest in the birth of modern europe, the unification of nineteenth germany was always one of my key interest. berlin has been a city with the weight of modern history place well and truly upon its shoulders, from the rise of fascism, the collapse of hitler’s germany through the escalation of the cold war, up to the unification of germany and the current role of the german government in the future of europe. this is a city which is important.

lets start with the people. the cosmopolitan attitude of the people i encountered was pretty reminiscent of places like barcelona and manchester. bar culture meant that sitting with a beer until whenever you wanted to was pretty easy to achieve, and in the morning/afternoon afterwards nobody would bat that much of an eyelid as you tucked into your first bockwurst of the day. berlin seemed like the kind of place you could set yourself up pretty easily if you wanted to, which was pretty much confirmed by the fact i was staying with a friend who had done just that.

so, onto the city itself. i think big and heavy is the way to describe it best. yes, going in january meant that the oppressive nature of much of the architecture was accentuated by a foreboding winter sky and chilling temperature, but the thing that strikes you as you walk done streets in the east of the city is that this is a city which has no consistency to it at all. berlin is a place which has been torn apart and put back together so many times, by so many different people, that a true sense of architectural identity is pretty much nul.

yet in places where a swathe of one style dominates, you really do get a sense of what different ‘owners’ have tried to do with the place. around the brandenburg gate and the reichstag the influence of western victors is clear in some pretty bland, pretty corporate looking bits of shiney-ness. the real interest is when you hit the former soviet areas.

karl-marx allee is probably the part of berlin which will stick with me most in terms of scale and scope. here is a road which was designed to remind the people of east berlin that they were very very very small, and that the soviet union of which they were a part was really really really big. this grand statement of soviet strength, saw a whole street dominated by huge modernist architecture, with the boulevard being mostly constructed over the 1950s at which point it was still named after stalin.

haus der stastistik

the soviet process of destroying the cult of stalin led to marx’s name being added to this stretch of road in 1961. the huge buildings, housing everyone from workers up to luxury apartments, have mostly been refreshed to reflect their former grandeur – though the haus der stastistik, former home of the stasi, is notable by its emptiness. probably the highlight of the street is a 1960s addition though, the kino international cinema.

yet once you stop looking up and being generally overawed by the size of the city, and the weight of events and history upon it, berlin is really accommodating. the rumours of having to know which unmarked doors to go through to find the best bits are definitely true, and this trip benefited from knowing someone who know where these doors were. great little coffee shop lurk behind curtains, bars playing nondescript (but exactly what was needed) house music are just off staircases that would be better suited to a multi-storey car park.

in terms of culture the place really came up trumps. my own stupid decision to not see enough stuff over the weekend meant that a lot of the galleries i wanted to see were closed on the monday, but visits to both the neues museum, recently reopened after being very thoughtfully restored by david chipperfield, and the hamburger bahnhof were both excellent.

tomas saraceno at hamburger bahnhof

tomas saraceno at hamburger bahnhof

i don’t think enjoyed is the right word to describe the emotion i felt after this trip. under conventional circumstances it would be, but it seems to be a bit remiss to describe a trip in which you’ve spent a good chunk of time crying about the horrors of very recent european history as enjoyable. if you don’t know the place already i would highly recommend berlin.