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‘The Imposition of Conformity’ by Sheffield-based artist John Wilkinson

So this year has begun with me working with a group of artists on an exciting project which, at least in my life, promises to be something quite special.

Fighting For Crumbs (Art in Shadow of Neoliberal Britain) will be taking place at the Wakefield Redshed, and the Sheffield-based Gage gallery between 8-14 August 2016. A event centering around a film and an exhibition, it will also include talks and performances at both venues.

We need all the support you have to make this project be as special as it promises to be!

Please find the Crowdfunder located below.

https://www.indiegogo.com/project/fighting-for-crumbs-fundraiser/embedded

Here’s a little about what Fighting For Crumbs is all about…

In November of 2015, the group the Sleaford Mods starred in an independent film examining the lives and homes of the majority that were being systemically ignored in this brutally austere but paradoxically aspirational age of David Cameron. ‘Invisible Britain’ was screened nationally, yet it seemed to focus much of its energy on towns once at the centre of the Yorkshire mining heartlands.

2016 marks the 50th birthday of The Redshed, also known as The Labour club. Situated in the heart of the Yorkshire city of Wakefield, the place is somewhat unique, and has defiantly resisted the capitalist forces that have penetrated nearly everything else around it. A year-long line-up of events are now marking this anniversary.

Sandra Hutchinson, a lifelong supporter of the club, spoke of how The Redshed began at the height of the social and political changes happening in the 1960’s. In-spite of the seismic troubles around the world, it was an age of political optimism, and there was a strong belief that things could be and would be changed.

“THERE IS A PREVAILING SENSE OF PARALYSIS AND DEFEAT ALL ACROSS EX-INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN. AND THIS PARTICULARLY EFFECTS THE YOUNG WHO HAVE NOT KNOWN ANYTHING ELSE” JD TAYLOR

The Invisible Britain documentary addresses this political climate; an age of deep political pessimism. A sense of defeat clings to the streets of our congealed conurbations. A depressed, and broken spirit hangs over us, instructing us to abandon the world we live in and find happiness in loneliness.

The huge support that propelled Jeremy Corbyn from relative obscurity to leader of the Labour Party, seemed to be more a WILLING for a return of a political optimism. Wanting it, because it’s not here.

Five MORE Years... (2015)

Fighting for Crumbs (Art in the Shadow of Neoliberal Britain) is the stories of artists who are striving for nothing but raw artistic expression at a time when we’re all being forced to strive for ‘crumbs, where wages are low, and the market dictates creativity.

It’s not so much stories of poverty-stricken artists. It’s about artists working within the crumbling remains of the Britain’s post-settlement optimism.

Under the “keep calm and carry on” mantra of Tory rule, more and more artists are feeling pressured to head into more craft-based activities.

Although this is not a critique of the crafts itself, how can an art SAY when it’s trying so hard to SELL?

What value does the truth of artistic expression have in such times? Have we been reduced to fighting for crumbs?

“BROKEN BRITAIN IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT. IT’S ABSOLUTELY SMASHED TO PIECES” INVISIBLE BRITAIN, 2O15

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/fighting-for-crumbs-fundraiser/x/13528122#/

The Capacity to Care

The Capacity to Care, 2016, A4, ink on paper


At a time controversially close to the event itself, it was said that the 9/11 terror event was ‘the last shock of the new‘, as the world spent a week in perpetual shock as the media horror show was melted into our brains like napalm.

24/7 rolling news was a new thing in 2001 (well, it was to me, here in the UK, anyway), and I remember for the following weeks my heart stopping every time I saw the words ‘breaking news’ appear on a news screen on a TV in a shop window. I wasn’t aware that the whole structure of a 24/7, unending news service was to shock, or interrupt us in our ‘always on’ 24/7 lives, that lack clear boundaries between work, leisure, the physical and virtual – the life we would increasingly live in the following 15 years.

The Internet was a chore in 2001, which required enthusiasm for Computers. But just around the corner we had Broadband and Smartphone technologies, which would soon glue our fingertips to an unending rolling news of personal, national, and international events.

I can honestly say I’ve seen news about pretty seismic terrorist attacks, and instantly forgot about them, because of the noise in my head as a stream of things grapple for my care and commitment. In fact I sometimes wonder if the draping of your Facebook profile with the colours of a country that has just endured a terror attack isn’t so much about blindly following what everyone else does, but is more about how we wished we had the capacity to care about the awful things that happen to others in our cruel world, but simply don’t.

This isn’t also to go in the politics of the political economy that is behind this techno-structure; the rule of market individualism has strengthened in our ‘always on’ times, making life feel unbearably competitive. We want to care. Most ‘millennial’s’ (especially) have been told so much of the horrors of the 20th century, that don’t bear repeating, but being ‘always on’, the deluge of shocks has clearly desensitized us. Anxiety hasn’t been diminished by this desensitization, we remain as bored of this world as much as we are anxious within it. Nobody likes to feel numb to things that should require our humanity. It’s this desire for our own humanity, that reflects a deeper desire for different kind of world.

The Redshed, Wakefield

Here is a selection of my works on display at the Redshed (the Wakefield Labour Club). Although these works are being taken down today, they were displayed as a ‘taster’ for a larger, quite exciting event, that I am involved in staging later in the year. So please stay tuned in as there will be posts about it coming soon…

2016 is the 50th anniversary of the Redshed, and a years’ worth of events are currently ongoing to mark this, and to celebrate how it has remained a politically tuned in, politically active place right through to the present. The social mood, the political climate, was fundamentally different to the mood now, in 2016.

I was asked by friends closely involved with the club to put on a show of my work. I didn’t simply want to put a few pictures up, I wanted to stage an event that looked at the reasons my work is like it is by looking at today’s political climate, the climate my generation, and younger, have grown up within. And in doing this I have asked others’, whom I believe tell a somewhat similar story, to be involved.

More news coming soon about this event…!

Not For a Long Long Time

Actions from another time


If the so-called ‘age of austerity’ had begun by this point, I was only just able to taste it on my tongue. A claustrophobia (or an intensified version of what came previous) specific to this age ensued. And I hope I’ve already stressed on this blog how it feels that the gravest of issues threatening the basics needed to have a habitable planet seem to have been pushed further from grasp by a social climate that has necessitated an economically-debunked, ecologically-disastrous unhappy selfishness. What I mean is that just when all logic pointed us one way, the ruling agenda has hurtled us into a more fucking messed up take on all that came before.

And what I’m really talking about is that back in 2009, 2010, the issues that really ought to mean the most to me did mean the most to me, before I got embroiled in this day in day out self-preservation battle; one I foolishly didn’t anticipate due to a conviction that just ‘doing my own thing’ would suffice as a soul-saver – with no acclimatizing to social norms required for formulaic sexual attraction so necessary. But under all the will to help the world, I was never ‘the quiet man’ – always too easily swayed but the things I wished I wasn’t swayed by’. It caught up, and like Canute I just stood there.


Where did all the Caring go?

But that doesn’t mean I won’t prise out the courage to care again; I’m still inhaling and exhaling on this planet, and I still rest my words around the argument that it isn’t inevitable for our species to fuck it up, well-and-truly.

Here are some photos of a woodland slowly emerging from the trees I planted down the banking of the A637/ as South and West Yorkshire join together. I planted them over a succession of Wednesday’s in 2009, 2010, 2011, on my way to pick up my wage from my nearby workplace. I must have planted well over 50 trees (mainly oak) that are still growing.

I’m not saying my acts of guerrilla tree planting were doing anything more than acting as a gesture that I hoped would be spotted by others. But the very impulse I had to do this in the first place proves a fidelity to a wish that we could steer this defunct, insufficient vessel of western civilisation to a reasonable safe place build anew. And I know that sounds sort of religious, but this was one of many ‘artistic’ actions that stemmed from an initially-teenage inability to deal with the nihilism of accepting a world where we couldn’t save ourselves, and where the only alternative was to ‘make sure you have a good time before you turn the lights out’ – an offensive philosophy to anyone who finds/found something of contemporary life intolerable.

But, regardless of all that, these photos here show a bunch of trees that may grow into a woodland. Something my younger self should be angry about his older self not considering enough!

‘Soul Searching’ – exhibition


Although Dewsbury has always been a nearby town, the exhibition I was part of allowed me to discover parts to it I hadn’t seen before, as I climbed up the hill from the train station up to Crow Nest Park. I got a view that stretched back over to Woolley Edge, reminding me of the strangeness in how the industrial towns of West/South Yorks fold into different valleys from where transport connections and communication are almost non-existent in relation to their general proximity.

The exhibition is called Soul Searching and is…

An exhibition of mental health related artwork, on display in the 2nd floor galleries at Dewsbury Museum throughout the first quarter of the year.

The exhibition has been curated by Mark Milnes, of Creative Arts Hub. From a large number of submissions received via curatorspace and by email, we have selected a wide range of approaches to the subject. Work has come in from across the country; and we also have artwork from Canada (Emei Ma, nascentscienceart.org), and from Austria (Klaus Pinter).

The work is broad in scope, some of it exploring the dark recesses of the mind; others focusing on the transformative power of art, used as a means to overcome mental health problems. Featuring work from individual practitioners, and from organisations – including Women Centre Kirklees and Calderdale, Hoot Creative Arts & Glenside Hospital Museum (Bristol), the exhibition offers a serious exploration of a challenging subject which visitors will find to be raw and thought -provoking, and equally positive and energising.