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“Museums are about things not feelings.” JOAN BAKEWELL, The Bronte Business, BBC 1977 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p027vyvp/the-bronte-business

“…a man may carry his own pyre.” W. G. SEBALD, The Rings of Saturn

The expansion of the research into Market Prices saw the installation become a stage-like repository at HOARD in Leeds where it was presented as a collection of sculptural objects and performance. Through this blog I am now developing text generating from the Market Prices inventory, comprising a code for every unique box, and the objects each one contains. The text is seperated by and corresponds to the individual objects housed in their custom made box, which are made from processed wood, feather board, re-purposed in the studio. I intend carrying all of them to a designated site, where together the boxes, Market Prices, will be restructured to produce a wall, amongst the pine trees. This is the sketch, a continual draft, a breakdown of the inventory and for as long as this blog account remains live, always visible. It will determine that research include digital elements through a method of ritual that traces a circumnavigation of my mothers home. I aim to research the geology of the valleys that comprise this location, distinct and at one time itself a site for excavation, a stone quarry, the very same sandstone in fact mined to build The Rotunda Museum, housing one of the foremost collections of Jurassic geology on the Yorkshire Coast, set up by William Smith whose patron lived in my village. Through this study I hope also to unearth histories relating to the monks trod, which marks the uphill section of the walk I take, and Whitby Abbey, St Hilda’s cell here and the wider implications her presence in the village had on the community.

The aim is to walk the route, which is roughly three miles, each day but reality demands that I more likely walk three to five times a week. The nurturing that the landscape offers is a motivator, but when I’m not spurred on to action, this reminder of its mental and physical health benefits soon convinces me that the walk in itself is purpose enough. I am also not entirely ignorant of the great tradition of walkers who have or continue to log their journeys poetically and pragmatically and their roles as surveyors of the landscape. Researching how artists have documented effecting aspects of making and valuing work, particularly in a rural setting, could prove revelatory. In my case, I try to take the same route each time but again, depending on weather or, as is more prevalent to putting me off my stroke, activity in the fields, I very occasionally take a shortcut. On every journey I carry a box, or when feeling particularly energetic strap on a number of boxes, which are currently wrapped in black polythene and stored in an outhouse whose roof leaks, a glorious frog practices baritone whilst vermin make temporary homes, to a spot that can be reached having climbed a not too steep summit where I lay it against or atop a compatriot, take an exposure using a film camera and, using the notes app on my phone, make a note of the inventory number, at least. I hope to bear witness to these breathtaking surroundings and log the changes in it, seeing the landscape as a metaphor for transformation, chart distances taken, take the opportunity to map and consult maps, learn about the meanings behind demarcations, why and where boundaries fall, rights of way, as an excavagation of past and present ownership and collective belonging.

“It’s from one of the six lectures on the making of music that Stravinsky wrote at Harvard in the winter of 1939-40. They were published in a book called The Poetics of Music, which, along with Paul Klee’s Thinking Eye became one of my ‘bibles’ in the 1960s, and this particular paragraph struck a very powerful chord: My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have arranged for myself for each one of my undertakings. I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful, the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.’ I think that’s a very beautiful piece, and it became a guiding principle.” BRIDGET RILEY Dialogues on Art

The combination of wood and found objects generating a filing system, heightened by smell and warmth, as is the want of such materials, begs further contextual understanding. Market Prices has the potential for growth and strives towards the advancement and transparency of specific knowledge. The digital oriented research I intend undertaking during and following the construction of a bank of the boxes, a wall of containers, empty but charged, potentially places the value of anonymity into an equation of worth. The intention is to assess each objects’ worth as driven by memory, meaning to me, possibly of no apparent value, it’s use and history, dimensions, scale, intended purpose, connections that can be made and then eventually by financial consideration, by means of a democratic bidding system articulated through electronic and possibly online auction. This would apportion a live value to each object generating a virtual stock exchange based on real value, where one can bid for and be allocated shares in each object, creating an artificial stock exchange. The ‘stock market’ will eventually close, when all objects are sold, that is, if I haven’t sucked up the object whilst vacuuming, or had to re-purpose the object, which is the destiny of wood quite clearly (a larger box was needed as an emergency chicken coop, sawdust was better as a soft bed for said chickens and sometimes, quite simply, kindling is needed!). What do they say about the law of diminishing returns….?

The title purposely uses the word edit, with dual aspirations and intentions: as an edit of the overall project as begun in 2012 and as a continual textual editing process, capitalising on any potential speculations by others, with the hope that the text describing each object will not be definitive. The action and corresponding research aims to feed into an intensely personal understanding of my place in an, as yet indeterminate, history of migration stemming from my Irish, Welsh and Monsterratian ancestry, and the connections that can be made between land and sea.

“Although everybody started his life by inserting himself into the human world through action and speech, nobody is the author or producer of his own life story. In other words, the stories, the results of action and speech, reveal and agent, but this agent is not an author or producer. Somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense of the word, namely, its actor and sufferer, but nobody is its author.” Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

The books I hope to read during the time making from this accumulation, this process, include:

Bachelard, G., The Poetics of Space
Benjamin, W., Archive

Bergson, Matter and Memory 
Bonneuil, C.,The Shock of the Anthropocene
Briggs, K. and Russo, L., The Nabokov Papers
Hartley, M. and Ingilby. J., Life in the Moorlands of North-East Yorkshire
Hayes, R.H. and Rutt, J.G., Wade’s Causeway
Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space
Lippard, L., The Lure of the Local
Mercer, K. (ed.), Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers
Penwill, M. Anthony., It Has To Be This Way
Rice, A., Creating Memories Building Identities
Sitwell, E., English Women
Satre, Jean-Paul., Words
Stainiforth, A., Geology of the North York Moors
Walser, R., The Walk

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MP29HW My Wood
This satisfying looking and feeling and smelling piece of wood (8 x 4 x 2 inches) was almost certainly collected on the occasion Maman and I went to hack down a Christmas tree, which we did successfully but with much effort using a less than satisfactory saw, from My Wood. It never was mine. “My Wood” overlooks what was Jade’s Pond (the name was changed once their divorce went through), where I learned to swim, found clay to model with and imagined the plank we needed to cross to gain entry to the island for feeding the “marked” ducks was what protected me from falling foul of the crocodiles in the deep dank swamp below (although I’d swum in the thing and it wasn’t deep!) There was a time when name changes were everything and quite naturally I suggested it be called “My Wood”, meaning Jade’s. It was misinterpreted or perhaps just altered to suit the owner, anyway, it’s been High Wood ever since.

MP116NU/CA The High IMAGINARY GARDEN “the ballet is an institution with which serious minded people have as little to do as possible” / The face of an Angel Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The face of St. Teresa
Making collage in and from books presents the problem of how to show each page outside of the container. The process I continue to develop involves a ritual: I create an aperture in the book, then an image which is often embedded paper (handmade paper with ephemera sandwiched within the fabric of the sheet) is inserted between two leaves of the book, I then collage onto the pages and finally (but not in this instance) pour liquid wax onto each page, to seal the page, let dry and then iron the wax, to ingrain, to even the surface. This was one of the first collage books I made and since submitting them intact for my MA, but unbound, I made these stilt like pillar frames to work through this continuing conundrum of how to display both sides of a page simultaneously. It measures roughly 11 x 9 and a half inches.

MP31 NC Ball
Somehow in transit I’ve mislaid this treasure. One of those glorious balls that smells so good of artificial and chemical that bounces as high as you can imagine and to catch it would be fluke, the bounce being so fast and thrilling and uncontrollable. Particularly happy that there’s evidence of it in colour. It felt so good between my hands, perfectly shaped for rubbing those pressure points in my palms.

MP183Anc Wood tiles 16 (Misunderstood Dedication retrieved)
Only the shelves remain of this once flimsy double tiered table retrieved from the tip (in the good ole days when you could buy tat from the tip). I repurposed the table, afixing tiles on the shelves. The two dozen or so tiles were also bought from the tip, they were yellow and blue and I painted on them with tile paints. If there was a theme to them at all it was porn, sex as entertainment, that was doused in my own anxieties, in response a hen night male striptease/lap dance experience (mingled with the recollections of “dancing” with a male stripper on Ladies Day – Boxing Day for those unaccoustomed to Nothern rites – that haunts me) and a television programme, now vague in my memory about the porn industry. Around this time I’d invested in that intriguing testimony to the commitment of the artist to subject and spectacle, Carnival Strippers, by Susan Meiselas which comes with an audio cd, accounts by the performing girls. I later burnt the tiles and the table structure. Fragments of the tiles remain but have not been archived here.
MP73CA Sp tile purple t crossed legs
I’m pretty desperate to make a series of tiles like this, not necessarily all self portraits but it’s a great size (6 and a half inches squared), a great exercise too, that is containing an image in a prescribed size. I’ve the clay (if it hasn’t dried up) but it’s the method, getting the procedure right, that alludes me. I’m one for reducing waste if I can avoid it and if I’m going to do it I want to do it right. Must seek advice. I’ve also got the glazes. The image was taken from a series of photographs I’d taken as a response to the London riots of 2011 which I found, like many others, affecting.

MP205CA
? Sawdust

MP118SB FREE GIFT TIGER TOKEN
Value and worth. Rewards systems are fascinating. They bamboozle and diminish the impulse to ask questions about that which is offering the reward. Also, I remember that the prize, the object that one was collecting for, always seemed out of reach and with almost instant resignation it became more about seeing the accumulation of paper tokens than about collecting them for something desirous.

MP185CA Long cylindrical plastic wrapping
Flat, the wrapper measures approx. 32 inches long and 3 and a bit inches wide. I wonder did this sheath protect a roll of paper? One thing for certain is that this plastic contained but the object in housed is for now invisible to both eye and memory.
I want to set up a Twitter account, the handle will be something like RecycleNightmare: the majority of recycling symbols strike me as utterly meaningless, the “bullshit baffles brains” approach. The Twitter account will post pictures, tagging the consumer provider accounts, enquiring if this or that organic or healthy product, in particular, is recyclable, because it’s never really very clear. Targeting the healthy option accounts because is it not a falsity if the health of the environment suffers? High horse. Yes. But whose responsibility is this plastic hell?

MP108MD Paper 2-12 JM
There is something so inherently therapeutic about making paper. I must have been five or so when I first made paper and it wasn’t until I was studying for my MA that I returned to it, all the time in between harkingfor a return of that feeling, splashing about in water and the promise of these magical results. This particular sheet of paper is made from daphne pulp and is roughly A5 size and its strong, but porous, with great tension and texture. One of the processes i continue to craft involves transferring a print from the paper I make with ash (burnt work) paper onto plain paper, as this sheet once was. Despite the conditions this sheet of paper has and continues to undergo, a faint print from ash paper remains visible, the glimmer of a constellation.

MP196D
With great diligence I inventoried articles in alphabetical order (see inventory below) but, beyond the laws of all reason, I’ve lost D. In time I will re-entry, but for now a glimpse into D will suffice. NB these articles were collected over a maybe a decade with Maman helpfully, as obsessively as I, extracting any articles on art and history from the papers that were then delivered daily to the house. Dali, Durack, Dworkin, Miles Davis, Terence Donavan, Dulwich Picture Gallery (double entry with Sir John Soane), Patrick Demarchelier, The Darkness, Jeremy Deller, Faye Dunaway, Dizzie Rascal, Dürer, Duccio, Degas, Duchamp, Van Dyck, David, Richard Deacon, Jim Dine, Roald Dahl. Delacroix, Debuffet. The papers range to a maximum broadsheet size.

MP119SB Q8 stamp
Sadly I’m inclined to think I’ve vacuumed this up! After decades of keeping this teeny piece of paper (3 and a half by 2 and a half inches), posturing as something of value (once), safe. This process, this Market Prices edit, requires a better and safer system for the preservation of the collection. There was an account at the garage in a nearby village which sold diesel offering green shield stamps and then Q8 stamps. Piles of them would litter the glove compartment, all compartments in the vehicles. This continued obsession with points – scoring, keeping, the exchange of – demands more from me and it is my intention that this passage prompts a longer entry.

MP14CA Misunderstood Dedication green plastic wrapped scroll
What a perfect batch of ash pulp this was made from, the pleasant smell that issues from it, occasionally, and softly. The plastic is jarring against the compostable, organic material it encloses. Once a perfect envelope, I untied it and now it doesn’t quite wrap up again as pleasantly as it did. The green plastic was a folder, bought at Smiths or Rymans or some stationary outlet like that. And the plastic is coarse somehow brittle and, as is the wont of my expectations, stuffing ephemera to the point of popping, overuse, it split it sides and therefore it’s function as a protective case was made redundant. But as a covering for the stitched together scroll, as an artwork, it’s ideal. Sculptural, but still offering the promise that it can be read, especially now it is open slightly, and with sensitivity the invitation to touch, glimpse, smell is on offer. It measures, altogether as described, 19 x 9 x 2.

MP68C Brooch
Another victim of a washing machine disaster, this exquisite floral motif Bakelite or maybe glass mosaic brooch, purchased in Cuba measures almost 2 and a half inches by 1 and a half. There, I sauntered, taking photos of everyone and everything I encountered, a flaneur of sorts, alone and content and joyous and accepted and included and beyond happy amongst people vibrant and accepting and joyous and inclusive.

MP182RT Aunty Marjorie’s sock
We never met, Aunty Marjorie and I. We’d write to each other often, before she died of that which travelled in her letters, a sweet aroma of friendly ash, comforting and homely. Her letters were an embrace, I can feel it now as I write, so warm, so loving and caring and encouraging. How I loved her, love her still and to never have kissed her cheek or held her hand but still, I can feel her. She was artistic, crafty, knitted these wonderful socks (19 x 4 and a half inches) and a sweater to match. Now only this sock remains – whose house DID I leave that jumper in and where is the accompanying sock? She used such fine, robust and stylish wool. How interesting, in retrospect, that the inventory code for this finishes with RT, which indicates that I firmly believed that Aunty Marjorie a staunch member of the Rainbow Tribe.

MP217NC Branch
It points to something or other, this brittle precision-cut specimen, measuring approx.17 inches in length, 2 inches wide at the so called ‘trunk’. Who cut this branch? Did I? And where did I pick it up from? I fancied it very obviously. I later nailed into it to create a holder for spools of cotton. This didn’t work too effectively.

MP258?

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“Photography is the inventory of mortality” SUSAN SONTAG, On Photography

Inventory

* Amateur Photographer; The Crack; GNER magazine; The Telegraph; The Sunday Telegraph; The Sunday Times; The Guardian, The Observer, numerous photocopies from books 1996 – 2010