Recent mapmaking. (2014 so far, through maps)

I’ve begun including a few photographs within my (what I still reluctantly call -as I’ve not found a better word for them yet) psychogeographical maps.

13th May 2012

“Street Art-clad entrance into Victorian storm tunnels, before they descend under central Leeds. Perhaps the element of urban decay is what prompts us to talk about the rise of capital flight from urban areas in the future, alongside the rise of ‘disaster capitalism.”


24 June 2014

“Passing homeless person on Division Street. Dave says there was a program on TV recently confirming what I have thought: that [cases of] homelessness has exploded in Sheffield. I never used to notice it 4 years ago. Now it feels like a city close to a social time-bomb.



8 July 2014

“Trees growing from disused railway line momentarily give me impression of a city abandoned by humans, and lush plant life taking over”


15 July 2014

“Aspirational poster of good-looking couple pillow-fighting next to private apartments. I always find this advert offensive, even as its believability fades as it gets bleached by the sun.”


5 August 2014

“Listening to the Louder Than Bombs compilation, The Smiths, in roads/landscapes akin to the ones I used to walk/cycle through whilst I was in my early adulthood. It reminds me of how, despite it being a difficult time, I still had hope for life/the future.”

11 August 2014

“Head to Baby Jupiter, a pub [I frequented] often in the early recession days. Near-past friendship groups. There’s a little glass jar on the bar; “help us from going bust”. This is the most ‘Retromania’ bar I can ever imagine. Yet, right now it feels like a comfort blanket, immune from time”

12 August 2014

“The long urban walk begins to [blend together] with my long urban walks in South East London. I think about how Manchester is portrayed as ‘Coronation Street’, but is experientially very akin to gritty South London.”


17 August 2014

“Two very tall policemen surround a poor-looking, possibly malnourished teenage male, outside [the train] station. Whatever he’s done, he now looks noticeably scared. A nearby person says “haven’t they got anything better to do than to pick on a boy?”



18 August 2014

“Barnsley library now literally one big heap of rubble. What a waste. It almost looks like a dark monolithic construction. From here [viewed on Shambles street] it is placed right in front of the town hall – it almost looks like an attempt to rebuild Barnsley’s past landscape of spoil heaps.”

Non-Stop Inertia: A Stuck Record (performance)

Interruption encouragement!

Artists intervention at Leeds Art Gallery this Friday (18th July) from 1-2pm. Artist John Wright and I will be performing a philosophical debate. Visitors are encouraged to interrupt.

Here’s a piece of writing I have made regarding my take on the performance Non-Stop Inertia: A Stuck Record:

Non-Stop Inertia is a performance piece named after an Ivor Southwood book of the same name. Southwood’s book takes an comphrensive look into the situation of the “deep paralysis of thought and action” caused by the “ideologically constructed” landscape of precarity. This affects mainly the younger generation of workers, but it is increasingly dragging even more people into a role that the economist Guy Standing calls that of the ‘Precariat‘, replacing the older term for the working class, the proletariat.

But Non-Stop Inertia is also a psychological state as much as an economic one. The “deep paralysis of thought” is basically what anthropologist David Graeber is saying when he argues “neoliberalism [the ruling economical dogma of the present reality] is a war against the imagination”. The stop, start and (finally) exhaustive effect of what Jodi Dean calls ‘communicative capitalism’, that in the age of cyberspace communication extends into all realms of waking (and sleeping) life, is arguably the neoliberal model par excellence.

The little red Facebook notifications, the vibrating phone are more than analogous with violent rashes/itches that produce an inescapable mania over the body. No wonder, as J.D.Taylor shows in her essay ‘Spent: capitalism’s growing problem with anxiety’, that cases of compulsive/anxiety disorders have shown to have spiraled upwards since we entered an intensified stage of neoliberal ‘race to the bottom’ from 2009 onwards. The immensely informative book Alone Together by Psychologist Sherry Turkle, about the predicament and consequences of being “always on” in a world dominated by cyberspace technologies, misses a crucial causal factor in the becoming of this cold turkey-like dependency, and cyberspace’s mushrooming presence in our lives: that the social landscape which has been so ripe for it to flourish in is (at least, in part) ideologically constructed. What Standing and Southwood refer to as the ‘global precariat’ is the necessary 24/7/”always on” agent that makes cyberspace the teaming immaterial beehive that it is.

I [John Ledger] originally undertook this performance as part of an umbrella of artistic events under the name Pandemic, based in Sheffield in the autumn of 2011. Pandemic began just as anti-austerity direct action groups and Occupy movements were asking questions, and demanding accountability in Sheffield around the world. Its aim was to create other spaces for interpreting and expressing a desire for the possibility of ‘another world’, that supported but also provided an alternative to the more direct aforementioned methods. Since then the speed, quantity of information on cyberspace, and our dependency on it, seems to have sped up so much, in just 3 years, alongside the feelings of unpredictability in our lives, that spaces for such contemplation feel ever-more compromised. This makes Non-Stop Inertia, and our performance concept, increasingly relevant.

The performance attempts to mirror this ‘paralysis’, to illustrate just how the ability to understand the social reality we are amidst is continuously broken up. With this performance being in a gallery institution, the predicament of the gallery worker (out of all service industry workers) seemed most appropriate. Compared to many service industry jobs, it is surely a far more pleasant working environment. Yet, because a gallery is an environment that has evolved over time to be a space for contemplation and an absorbing of different ideas, the gallery worker (who remains there all day) is psychologically ambushed by contemplation, (over)thinking. Yet the job requires a standard spiel to be given out to every visitor who enters the gallery. The environmentally-enforced contemplation is continuously interrupted and sent back to square one. Indeed, visitors subjected to more than one of spiels given out often say “you sound like a stuck record“. For such a relaxing environment, one’s head can often feel like a crushed tin can by the end of the day. Due to this I felt this predicament in itself was almost an analogy for the wider state of Non-Stop Inertia.

Below is the sign showing suggested interruptions for visitors to make on Friday:

Five Years Drowning (exhibition @ Chapel Walk, Sheffield)

…Attempting a cognitive mapping of chaos…speeding of information causing its very disintegration…a proliferation of incomprehension…a deluge of auto-suggestions against the panic attacks of rare clear perception…being brayed between mumbo-jumbo-unreality and the biggest ever threats to humanity…underneath it all an cracking of skin and an aging of bones #CanIHaveSomeTimeAlone? Five Years Drowning.

The exhibition runs until Wednesday 2nd July

Pre-2008-Crash Time-Capsules

The Sad but necessary demolition of some older pieces of work.

Although I wouldn’t really call these pieces of work sculpture – they were more accompaniments to my drawings, mounds rising up to slightly obscure the pieces I was showcasing/like a weight on a stressed chest that won’t go away (guilt of being part of/wedded into the trappings of a destructively consumptive society) – they certainly shared the demand for storage space that sculpture demands. Unfortunately for most of us, such space just isn’t available (I genuinely believe the main difference between sculptors and painters/drawing-based artists, is that access to ample of space to expand into to is a necessity before you even begin to contemplate being a sculptor).

These pieces of work were made in 2008, and became crammed into a shed with other works. The began to get damaged, but they were beginning to damage other, less damaged works. So, to save those works, I decided that these works would have to be demolished. They were originally part of an installation called ‘The Healing Process’ which I exhibited in the fall of 2008 (healing, as a coming to terms with things, a gradual greening over of scars on the landscape I grew up in, reflecting a hope for a gradual healing over of psychological scars I’d carried with me for some years). Yet I made them from waste and fly-tipped material (largely non-recyclable, except for the newspaper used for Papier-Mache) in the summer of 2008, before it became aware to everybody that we were amidst a huge financial crisis.

Largely because I am overly concerned with the notion that time as become (even further) out of joint since then I was quite keen to document all that stuff that hasn’t seen light of day since summer 2008. The pre 2008-crash point feels like another epoch whilst it still only seems like yesterday, amidst the austerity-age logic, and superstitiously-embedded faith that things will ‘return to normal’, our experience of time is spinning on a stuck broken record. This meant that it felt weirdly like uncovering relics to a world only 5 minutes past.

Demolishing them, kind of also felt like knocking down old buildings with the interior of somewhere once lived-in in full sight. Truth be told, the items, even the shards of newspaper stories bear no real difference to what they would look like now, it isn’t as if the world of seeming permanent austerity looks that different – yet something is different, and opening up these soon to be destroyed pieces of work made me think of this difference.

I’ve donated a large print of my drawing ‘I Want None of This’ to ‘Going Once, Going Twice, Gone!’, a fundraising event in aid of the Save Devonshire Street Campaign.

When Sheffield Council approved demolition of 162-170 Devonshire Street, home to three of our most prized independent businesses, it didn’t follow the proper planning processes.  We’re raising funds for a judicial review which would overturn the planning decision – http://savedevstreet.org.uk/

There will be a selection of artworks from a large number of artists who wish to help the cause. The works can be bid on in aide of fundraising for the campaign. The event will be held at Moor Theatre Delicatessen, The Moor, Sheffield. Friday 26th June. 7pm. Eventbrite tickets are available here https://www.facebook.com/events/388205214700948/

Thurlstone Moor, May 2014 (John Ledger, Michael Hill – part of West Riding of Yorkshire: A Psychogeographical Account)

eaufitul emptiness: our (mild) equivalent to the US deserts, empty, barren, ‘lifeless, open space, where objects take on a monolithic presence. A place of long straight roads that exhaust a mind put into turmoil by the world down below.

Some of these monolithic objects take on a lunar-like feel. The desert and the moon have a huge connection, both in space stations and being frontiers. There is a frontier feel up here, often. Though we may not register it as being so. Escaping to a barren land, that requires no emotion from, this world below

“Climbing up to The Moon” – Eels – a song from my early 20’s

Just The Noise… solo exhibition

It’s been really good for me to get the main chunk of my work (with the exception of the installations from previous shows) into one big space. But it was especially good to show smaller works next to the larger ones, as I feel doing this helped map out the last 5 years quite well. I did an interview with Alternative Barnsley explaining the motives behind staging this comprehensive account of the past of years of marking work.

The exhibition is on until Thursday @Gage Gallery, KIAC, The Lion Works, 40 Ball Street, Kelham Island, Sheffield, S3 8DB

10-4PM.