Image courtesey of Rob Nunns
Within this exhibition is basically my full year’s expenditure of energy that didn’t otherwise go into earning a wage, maintaining social bonds, our down the plug hole mixed with alcohol. So obviously it’s something I deem worth sharing, alongside the blogpost cover the entire An Unofficial Alumni exhibition.
The crucial work for this exhibition was my Psychogeographical account of an area I still see worth describing as the West Riding of Yorkshire (because the base point for most of my 29 years living here is more or less on the border between South and West Yorkshire, to cover just one of the counties would be insufficient to my experience of the landscape I inhabit the most). Having come back from London, after only 3 months, after failing to manage the pressures of doing a masters, whilst supporting myself financially, it was essential that I rebuilt things, from what largely felt like a wreckage, developing ideas that were at least thrown my way down there, and using them ‘back home’.
This isn’t to make out the 3 large drawings I put in this show mean any less to me.
The West Riding of Yorkshire: A psychogeographical account.
I aimed to conbine all memories/experiences from a year of walking/train/bus and car journeys through 4 areas that span the old West Riding of Yorkshire. It has culminated from years of wandering and musing around an area loosely centered around Leeds, Wakefield, Barnsley and Sheffield. I’m trying to show what inhabiting these places /walking through these human landscapes feels like. All too often I find reality is massively cropped to take the more picturesque; but I’m also trying to show that the issues the world faces today can be observed on a local level as much as in any international city.
I have chosen this area because it is a landscape I know better than any other.
(I intended the map to be a culmination of all the ‘Mind Maps’ I have made of this area during the past 7 months. I wished to exhibit it using objects such as mesh fencing which, whilst being largely ignored as we make our way through our day, feature very heavily in the urban/suburban landscape)
I’ve found this project deeply helpful. I look back on what I have written and the landscape reveals its true identity to me; something an A-Z or Google map could never do. It also made me realise that there is potentially something to be gained conceptually from any walk. Not just a walk through the most tourist-friendly spots on earth.
But I must ask myself why do this here and why now? Well, disparate issues seem to have come to a head and collided; personal reasons, such as memories, lost dreams, a coming of age that are all embedded in this landscape, are becoming entwined with deep concern about the changes to the world happening at the moment; an increase in poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and recent weather patterns that go far to suggest we are amidst a rapid transformation of the Earth’s climate. These changes are very noticable at a local level.
John B Ledger 