So she said if you know anyone in your network who’d like a studio as artist in residence and I said I am the network and I’ll take it . So I did and thought I’d carry some of my peers along. The weeding and seeding was hard. After a fortnight I knocked the community embrace on the head and carried on solo in my wee house of a studio with no room to swing a cat. I’d already complained about the huge step into the secure by entry codes and cameras building but failed to mention the steep fifteen or so steps to the actual compartments. Hey ho. I’m old and infirm by the day but good there’s a spacious loo and a student-tyoe kitchen My labelled tea mug is missing presumed to be housing a vegan boiled dandelion leaf somewhere.
So I’ve organised three projects over the three months I’ve signed for and completed a side line called “Gaza Bride 2024” which is a sad and powerful installation but too political for some unlike an unmade period and fag-stained Emin bed. The work in progress is a celebration of my peers and as I forced into someone’s mind yesterday “It’s not stereotypes of old people copied from stock photos of (white) oaps but cut-outs of ourselves as the dynamic go-getters, noisy vocal white brown and yellow(?) could be chums and don’t stick them on the cardboard canvas in the air. We don’t fly yet but ground the feet at the base painted there as a guide . The concept is my way of chivvying people along, including them and expanding experiences the first being in the know about artists’ residencies.
Solo now, sacked off those who wanted workshops or just a nose and got back to working in a windowless cell, cuppa going cold but painting successfully my vision.
I can only manage two hours at a time and that is is no time at all so I structure the tasks so that I get maximum done with an eye on the clock and a rush to lock up and catch my first bus before the hoards of school children descend from their learning hubs to the bus stop full of someone else’s muck. Hoards of them all in black and carrying black turtles on their young backs. They have to get home too and are ignorant of me needing a seat but that’s been the way for decades. Just kids.
I brought some art work home as certainly Easter holidays will encourage me not to fiddle away in a studio far from home.
it’s just a room, a partitioned square but for three months it’s mine and I’m happy to sign my name with underneath “Artist in Residence @ so and so
This year marks 75 years since the Windrush ship arrived in Tilbury Docks. It’s a history of all of us. Last night the first episode of Sir Lenny Henry’s tv play “Three Little Birds” aired on ITV. Coincidentally it’s Black History Month.
For me it’s a refreshing honest witty tragic clever Sunday night viewing and a slice of Henry’s life.
Anyone in the UK who is not knowledgeable about Windrush and subsequently the Scandal lives under a rock. X was on embers last night with the haters in moaning about wrong Jamaican accents, the astounded lauding costumes and the ignorami wondering what was going on in 1957 and in 1948 maybe..
I have marked the annual anniversary big time and the years previous by written word or with textiles and paintings on canvas and cardboard.
No one cared. I was unnoticed and unpromoted by hustling bustling curators unaware of the significance or the ones waiting for someone more suitable to champion Black History Month
Only one person I know and who is an artist herself went along to view my work in off the beaten track galleries. Others may have schlepped along but kept it quiet .
Here are some of my exhibits.
Like “Three Little Birds” they’re not documentaries.
Northern Soul is apparently going through a revival: DJ Badger has a regular You Tube presentation from his booth and a couple of months ago the BBC Proms featured amazingly a whole evening celebrating Northern Soul. It was marvellous.
I want to examine why I rate well Northern Soul and why it’s playing loud currently and to whom. No easy task but in doing this amateur project by myself I salute all the promoters, musicians and dancers.
Northern Soul belongs to the UK Northerners most of all who in 1967-1974 loved US R&B and Motown but in the main rejected the music industry mainstream chart choices. Most of the R&B and Motown singers were /are Black whereas the fans were according to all the footage UK White and my observations dictate it is still so.
Title “Living the Dream” .
To explore the sentiment and messages in the lyrics of the fans’ beloved songs I studied the vocabulary used by the lyric-writers, its interpretation by the singers and whether the language used was matched to both men and women artistes or whether there was a difference. I was particularly interested in the role of women in the musical expression as the era, late sixties and early seventies, compares significantly with the role of women in music genres now and specifically Hip- hop which produces a multitude of women producers and singers singing their own compositions.
All my findings and descriptions are copywrited.
I needed also to examine why I like Northern Soul.
I’d answer questions about why I find it sad and what makes me an outsider as a fan and why I always analyse the songs.
The easiest way to get inside the music was to study the words and how they might reveal the role of men in the heterosexual relationship and that of women and whether there were a difference: What social mores influence and shape how lyricists employ words to produce scenes and moods.
Never once are the words sexually explicit and neither are there suggestions of sex either through slang or words assigned to private personal domains. The 1960s sexual revolution of the western world was in its primacy and had its foundations in metropoli. The music industry was doggedly male and chauvinistic and it was that obstinacy and that control which kept the music charts as an emblem of respectability for the masses, the money-spending public. Northern Soul fans would never conform to the mainstream market and be dictated to about what they should embrace. There was a lucrative transatlantic trade of vinyl records from America straight into the UK’s northern town shops where avid enthusiasts were waiting to covet the latest songs describing their dreams in a fast changing world of rights, wars, protests and youth independence .
What are the words used repeatedly on the Soul lyrics? Well, the very American word for the love interest; ” Baby” is what. And with its add-ons “sweet baby, pretty baby” and ‘sugar baby”. The description of a grown woman from a suitor’s mouth confirms the song is American and full of yearning soul. It also reveals the contract between a man and a woman in those days that the man moulds a girl-child because he sees her as needing his comfort and guidance. It’s reflected back by a woman calling a man her ” sugar-baby” with its mothering message and the alluding to ‘sugar-daddy’, the man ready to provide all in return for sex. The roles are defined as in the late sixties where the man provides while the woman succumbs and gives her everything to her husband or lover. The romantic dream is clear. The ideal world, the stuff of fairy tales is set: Man rescues woman from single hood and woman is taught no other path than that she needs to be in a relationship to be respectable. The word “partnership” between a couple is not known in those times .
It is more usual to hear men singers and their phrases are littered with ” I need you, want you, please me, you understand me, relieve my loneliness, call my name, everything I do for you, I’ll pull you in.” It’s like ‘Married At First Sight” wedding vows. They are over-used phrases drumming home what romance is and it’s the dream of everything in place following a packaged prescription to keep everything stable amidst the confusion of the transition from adolescence to young marriage where unfaithfulness is the threat and the destroyer. The lyrics keep a societal order. The order is transmitted through the male voice and there is no alternative for the female. Northern Soul is man-led.
The sadness about the state of the lives of men and women in the late sixties is exposed. The famous Jimmy Ruffin sings just audibly about a recent love where he has “sweet memories” through the “smell of her fragrance”. That’s sad. Even more famous Paul Anka sings to a woman. about the pair of them finding a world for the both of them ” full of dreams and fantasy”. The dream is sold. Chuck Jackson is bravely lyricising about she being the only one for him “over the whole wide world”. By that phrase Cinderella in her white tights, mini-skirt and Panstik is swooning never expecting that by the eighties she’ll be divorced statistically.
The women pathetic by 2023 standards wail about infidelity and question how they were entangled with men they don’t believe in and Lee sings about “I feel him slipping away” and “I think I’m dying ” and ” missing his tender touch” whilst Lisa Stansfield quietly sings about not being able to control herself so she’s embarrassed about non-reciprocated love. Lee concludes that her escapee is a “sweet talking guy ” and she can’t understand why she loves him when she doesn’t believe him. Hook, line and sinkered.
All this from a random selection off greatest hits at You Tube under “Northern Sounds”.
I see the woman as victim but there are plenty of men spouting their disappointments too.
There is hearty sadness and it’s not just the words. The singers deliver angst and tears .
Living the dream is no easy task.
Themes of lost love and hope in love and love by distance are common. Less are the success stories. Do the dancers need melancholy to get passion into their moves? The dancing is a solo energetic experience to a thud thud fast beat and the music is in major key. The men and women dance to the music and in most cases all the words are clear so that people can mouth along to all the repetition. The scene is infected with the baring of souls through the music and through the desire to be in the successful version of the dream of stability and trust and finding a soul-mate for the forever .
Norhern Soul may be having a revival and it’s because people of 65 and better have protected memories of a past life. They were different people then absorbed into the norms . It’s good to reminisce to let yourself know you mapped a life. it’s great to share good memories and music.
It’s Black History Month and every year since before time I have marked it in various ways with shared projects and art exhibitions. In September I asked an art centre where I’ve held many solo art exhibitions for free if I could go ahead for October. After many silly emails from the new volunteer staff employed since the quitting of two lead staff, I was finally advised after having delivered my canvases with two days’ notice on September 28th that before my canvases could be exhibited the wall needed a good fresh paint lick.
I waited for three days checked the venue’s Facebook Page to see if they’d promoted my exhibition (as if!) and read a post about a community Black History Month art exhibition . Gob-smacked I contacted the venue to see how was my new painted wall. It was confirmed that I had no longer a solo art exhibition and I’d seen that the promotional banner for the upcoming exhibition stated it was a black artists’ gig. I asked when that was all decided, when was the call out for submissions and was I ever to be informed. The answer is absent.
I arranged to collect my work after the weekend because the venue is shut then. I had to get through the weekend steaming . I was exiting on principle that I had been insulted and disrespected: I was to be billed, nameless, but as the other, “showcasing minorities.”
The staff knew I was not happy for I stated that clearly
What a nasty experience. The volunteer should be sacked if only for using 1986 language for a Black History Month she hadn’t a clue about.
This year alone three venues have disrespected me as an artist; one by ignoring my emails and another, by leaving my work in the rain. The fourth one had a manager who hung my work upside down.
But I continue begging for wall space, scraping low in curtsey and being sweet to rude agents.. I would love to print the venue’s names but it’s a big machine I’m suing.
The thing is that the other side’ s players haven’t the time to consider how they damaged a member of the community in their rush to court the community they want to impress. They lied. They moved on.
For about three years now I’ve been doing desk-top primary research into the identities and lives of the women married off to rich slave-owners during the industrial human trafficking in the C17th-19th. In British and other historical documents women are overlooked in the main and on purpose. My message is that those who shared the bed legally with the criminal was complicit in the crime and benefitted greatly.
I have joined many projects about many male slavers but always gone one page deeper to find out about the “spouse”, the woman more than likely from a wealthy background, capable of producing heirs and finding out how they spent their days or in the case of benefactoresses how they distributed charity and defended their statuses.
I could find photographs of the paintings of some of those women born into peerages on the National Portrait Gallery website and often add information. I created RAGWORKS wall-hangings of slavers’ wives knowing they would never be hung in public places as they are “too contentious”. I heard snippets about people i knew or saw on documentaries and dug deep.
It is overwhelming work especially when since Floyd’s murder much more research has been done by universities and television documentary-makers about ‘the plantation owners’ , ‘the merchants’, ‘the farmers’, the slave-owning men. I keep to what infects my knowledge so after I spoke recently under a shop awning to escape the downpour with an octogenarian Barbadian I was able to research the women in his personal history.
This was stated by some renowned and up there white guy in art and installations when he spoke with gusto at a recent Mayor of London endorsed open conference called “People Make Places” all about how the large UK galleries and museums must include the people in designs and accessibility to the venues. That is a plan to include the non-elite into hallowed places. I joined in via Zoom as spectator as there could be no other way and because the now leaving director at Rosetta Arts and Gus of East Bank V&A were on the panel. As EastBank Seniors’ owner I persist in getting the marginalised Londoners into the Tates,V&A etc etc for free.
No-one on the panel challenged white man. I gasped and smiled and waited.
There is no way that the statement can be duscussed fully, publicly, and honestly. Too many boats will be rocked. Too many hearts will be broken. Many Trustafarians will have their tails between their legs.
Community artists are rarely labelled as artists except by themselves. One way into a means of reinforcing one’s identity is to go along to art workshops, be guided by a professional, produce some fine art that isn’t but is lauded as “Brilliant!” and have oneself praised mostly blatantly condescendingly with “Well done!” then pay for the framing and join an art group willing to do an end-of-term exhibition in a multi-use council owned cubby-hole. Noone will ever say the art is bad or lacking greatness but the cubby-hole using public whilst fixing their IT cables may look upon the walls and clock “Oh, that’s art”.
Are warm places or warm spaces just sticking plasters as in the mode of “Bread and Circuses? The current Mayor of London decreed that London boroughs could look after the poor and struggling by providing warm venues usually churches, synagogues and libraries where the ‘community’ can sit together, be warm for ninety minutes on some days of the week but not weekends and not only be warm but also be happy.
I heard someone yesterday being as cynical and as curious as I about the motives of our borough council in dishing out money in flurries to the disadvantaged. Before in the days when poor people were in debt to the energy companies the borough council leaders cared not a fig. It’s easy to let the volunteer brigade take over responsibility for anything and everything also known in days gone by as The Big Society.
Over the past month I’ve been to the newly set-up warm places on bus routes near me: No point leaving my warmish kitchen to travel across the borough to sit with well-turned out pensioners who live in Victorian houses worth three quarters of a million and rising and who reach our mutual destination by Uber. Only on telly do I see the uncombed slipper-footed old people and flip-flop sporting young mums with their blond children sipping tea from quaint tea-cups dished up by matrons.
One local library was transformed into a lounge and for the news coverage the rent a-crowd moved in looking very well -heeled. I am not saying one has to be poor, look poor or identify as poor to get the benefits of public heat and tea. But I do wonder where the suffering masses are. They may well be cuddling their pride in mind your own business grunts.
I manage a seniors’ group so went to do reccies. I invited my peers. The most honest and only response was “Fortunately I don’t need a warm space. I don’t drink tea. ” Fair do’s
I always suggested to myself that warm spaces need a focal point not just a seat and a place-mat because only the most extrovert or the most cumudgeon of folk could ever slide into a room of strangers carrying the baggage of coming from a cold and beverage-less home.
it came to pass that activities popped up; art, music, yoga etc yet even the punters are in the know about funding expiry dates and scout around for the warm place that is most beneficial for enhancing their skills.
See how it all pans out. Feedback forms have been filled out all over the shop.
Or is it “Warm Spaces”? Whatever the title it’s a do-good Borough Council response to a national Tory government neglect of its governing duties as in feed, house and protect your nation. We are in a food and energy crisis so we have food banks or Pantries as some Conservative hype would have them called and places to sit in the warm for a couple of hours to save on the central or other electrically controlled heating you dare to switch on indoors.
Add in that many people are too proud to admit their poverty and that besides lack of advertising is why I was perhaps the only person to really examine what was going on.
A local councillor did turn up as in rent a crowd and one of my age-group dropped off second hand toys.
Blissfully the welcome was wonderful and the venue very interesting as in historical although freezing cold in the corridors. The warm-up room was cosy toasty.
Twas the best of times; twas the worst of times.
This particular space/place is open for two hours once a week. Did you know that the Borough will fund you to open your living room? That’s what I heard.
Being a proper cynic I am watching how things pan out. I don’t know anyone who even thinks of using a once a week for two hours to keep warm place but I promote it in my quest to motivate my peers to socialise after the trauma of lockdowns and to benefit from a local Labour borough’s stance on managing a Tory mismanagement of more than a decade. I promote and advertise the efforts even though the Town Hall has colossal machinery to self-serve.
My fingers are cold now on the keyboard.
If foodbanks can be food pantries, what then can warm places be in flowery terms? Nests?
EastBank Seniors is the November 2021 name given post the official Pandemic ending to Up Your Street, the enterprise to share free activities for seniors around The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park which under any name old or new has been active for nigh on sixteen years without funding but with an award for services to Londoners.
Subscribed seniors to Up Your Street stopped communicating with me for over two years with one person holding the silence record from July 2019. I heard how Covid and its fears changed people’s behaviour and that’s why I should never hear a dicky- bird as though isolation for me was a godsend and human contact was a luxury. Nonsense. I was very disappointed. Rightly so.
I chose to consider that post the Pandemic, as we kid ourselves, people were two years older, less wanting to be mobile, not wanting to mix and maybe wanted to get out there locally first. We all live near EastBank in the QEOP and we are loved by the V&A staff and so as the new V& A is almost ready at the Park the new name EastBank Seniors suits, we being the local customers.
Well four Christmas cards this year from the couple of hundred subscribers is not all I want for Christmas.
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