Historicide/”Who made the monster?”

I admit this new drawing isn’t a cause for personal celebration. It’s a completion of a series of works spanning the last few years, that I wish to see the end of now, begging for a closure of a wound through which the works have spoken.

I once thought this was just self-dislike, but it’s much more; it’s a kind of self-monsterising, that I have had from at least my late teens. I have internalised not only assertions that I am insufficient for the world I must act in, but that I’m also going to do something horrible one day, humiliate and discredit myself in front of an unforgiving crowd. The sad fact is that on the level of self-humiliation and self-destruction this self-demonising has achieved its aims over the last few years.

There’s often the urge to get there before ‘they’ get there. But that urge has been created by the self-monsterisers, the inner ‘they’, who say they will protect me from the external ‘they’. But it’s the inner ‘they’ who have already convinced me to behave in ways that will ‘ruin myself’. My inner enemies are often far louder than any supportive or level-headed voice. They convince me that all the horrible presentations of criminals we see in newspapers are coming for me too. 

I have all too often been able to see through the perpetrators eyes more than the victim (s). What I have found is my inability to separate inner and outer, and to find a distinction between autonomy and being a meat puppet to external influences that will do what they will with me.

I often don’t feel I have control. And I fear the future, because I do not know how to find peace, and outrunning inner demons gets harder by the year.

The necessary arrogance in light of this was to think I could burn the oil so intensely that I could slip out of the system, be airlifted out of the ‘austericide’, and be safe from the fate awaiting a lowly man of little self-worth.

I have felt that I have had no choice but to ‘plough my own furrow’ with the art, even as life has passed me by, even as my ability to do this has got so hard and so unpleasant that my work has become incapable of anything but an introspection of this private unpleasantness.

The worst thing one can do is strive when they know they can’t do it anymore. When they keep on doing it because they feel that have no option, trying to pretend each time that there will be no more future articulations of the collateral damage further down the line.

Over the last few years it’s felt like the oxygen can’t get into my lungs fast and thick enough.

There is the truth that I’ve internalised some very unpleasant ideas about who I am, but there’s also an abstract structure of feeling, where life is collectively becoming more brutal – the internal and external diseases combining forces.

‘Historicide’ is the triumph of trauma as the collective understanding of reality through which a society reproduces itself, in the wake of what felt like viral blossoming of something different, almost Millenarian in its nature. It flopped into the mud under the murder of social progress, which has been cut down at the every chance; a reproduction of Victorian-style horrors for the many, and scapegoating for a convenient number of that majority, as their slow suffocation manifests into madness.

Brutal life is the option for the new allegiance of the powerful and reactionary, as we go through both the long unravelling of colonial privileges and capitalism itself. Their austericide sees no means to an end with the demonised ‘chavs’ it went for first.

There is a suffering caused by chasing a quality of life that’s long gone, which was always a dream, a new gold 90s dream of peace and safety. A promise to be released from history, and especially from the return of the horrors of the past. I am haunted by this dream, I remember a moment aged 9, in 1993, stood on a Cornish beach, where everything felt like it was going to be OK.

I earnestly believed that we were on a verge of a critical mass in the 2010s; the increasingly collective awareness of mental illness, global economic and climate injustice, and an emerging gender fluidity that if anything seemed like a shared willingness to circumvent the physical social barriers holding us in the past. It was naive, but it felt necessary to be scooped to safety by a rescue boat for another kind of 21st century. Life has felt unmanageably heavy since the pandemic, since the cost of living crisis, since Ukraine and Gaza, since the failure of this naive rush towards a different future proved an impossible dream for a world stuck in its traumas.

In all truth, I’m quite a bit fucked, with no idea how to stop becoming increasingly fucked. I’ve tried to step away from art many times in recent years. In truth, I want peace with myself. But cannot currently find it, as I encounter reality as a brutal thing, that I don’t know how to stop internalising, and letting it become me.

YSP: a requiem for a dream

Yorkshire Sculpture Park: the citizen’s park that never was

The following views are about an insider, albeit of no particular significance to the organisation, who wasn’t disgruntled, but who lamented and mused from the gallery benches over what this place could have been.

I spoke recently to a friend about how travelling by a city metro system feels so much better than bus travel, because the former has the ability to make you feel like a citizen, whereas the latter can often you feel like a pleb trapped in urban serfdom.

It’s like we can understand how we are treat as part of a society by how the design of architecture and infrastructure makes us feel. How things are designed impacts how we have to travel and exist within urban and suburban space – and we may, through emotional response, find ourselves feeling these questions:

Do I feel truly welcomed here?

Do I feel valued?

Do I feel part of something bigger than myself?

I suspect if you silently answered “no” to the last question, you are not alone…although you also are. Herein lies a problem.

Admittedly I dont actually want to talk about cities. I want to talk about the urban in the non-urban. And one place in particular that has had a big impact on a big part of my life. A ‘citizen’s park’ that never was: the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Something has been confirmed in the news this week that more or less finalises a sort of long death of a dream. A dream that may have only been held by those who still felt it and thought on it: a dream of social democratic progress, you could say.

But for myself and a few other friends I met whilst working there, its locus became one specific place.

It was announced that an exclusive private members club, which began in 1980s Soho is going to open another venue. This venue will be in the former Bretton hall college campus, which hasn’t been in use since Tony Blair was Prime Minister. Although not owned by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, it is in the core of the landscape and is inseparable from it.

I started working at ‘YSP’ as a gallery attendant aged 23. This was just 3 months after the university campus on these grounds had been closed by the University of Leeds. I initially found a very laid back, relaxed place, only interrupted by the countless amount of visitors wanting to see the Andy Goldsworthy exhibition.

Once the Goldsworthy show had gone, I found myself in a situation that I still mourn as it could never occur again. I was naive, but bursting with creative ambition, and utilising a unique but unintended opportunity to literally get paid whilst sat reading books, and developing my creative ideas, inside an artistic environment (where I probably got more of a university education than I got doing a Bachelors in arts degree in my home town) I began to form a strong bond with a place that was still only technically 3 miles from where I grew up.

I could walk to the Sculpture Park in 45 minutes from my home on the outskirts of Barnsley. As the place slowly began take up a pivotal place in a mental map I was slowly building for a post-industrial Yorkshire and its unrealised potentials, the park no longer ended at its official border, and bled into the respective West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire conurbations at either side of it.

Although this may sound ridiculous, a naive fantasist’s thinking within the REAL we exist in, I began to envisage myself within a “municipally owned” landscape: a ‘citizen’s park’ for a somewhat-urbanised population that disjointedly existed either side of this one of many pockets of lush greenery within post-industrial Yorkshire.

But I believe there is good reasons as to why I felt like this.

Working here, where I felt heavily judged for not doing anything ‘proper’, I had enough grey-space time to read about something that I was all around me here, emanating in particular from the derelict architecture of the college campus: ‘lost futures’.

The Yorkshire Sculpture Park began as land laid to waste by the Normans, and was then given to a family called the Dronsfields around the 13 century. Over the late middle ages it became owned by the wealthy Wentworth Family, under which most of the construction of the present day hall and the landscaping of the pleasure park (in the style of Lance Capability Brown) was done in the late 18th century. A rich family who had all the ‘mod con’ features for a rich family in the emerging colonial super power of Great Britain, the estate family name became Beaumont at some point in the 1800s.

However, by the 20th century things were changing, and after being taken over by the War Office during the Second World War, it then became a teacher training and arts college. For the first time this park and many parks like it up and down the land, had a more social democratic feel to them.

The idea for the sculpture park was conceived inside the house (Bretton Hall) which was now surrounded by Post-War architecture for student residence and facilities.

Peter Murray, who was teaching art at the campus, thought up the idea for a ‘European style sculpture park’ in 1977 whilst the dreams of post-war social democracy were still yet to be ultimately defeated by Thatcherism.

Murray wanted it to be a park for Modern sculpture, and with two of the leading 20th century sculptors coming from the region (Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore) it must have felt like the ideal place to build, what I believe was at heart, a Modernist Dream.

Murray envisaged “a gallery without walls”. And only those who stubbornly refuse to extrapolate this beyond the literal idea of a building, can deny that this was an ambitious iteration of the earlier 20th century Modernist impulse to make art a part of everyday life for everybody: the Yorkshire Sculpture Park was born.

By the early 2000s, in a time of much more generous funding towards the arts by a government trying to build a ‘culture industry’ and with funding coming to areas in former coalfields from the EU, YSP became the giant arts venue that it is today.

In 2024, I think it’s fair to say that the sculpture park has not become what was perhaps initially envisaged.

But I think this is because that it was envisaged within a world which is no longer.

….it’s a question of what happens when a dream that becomes reality suddenly finds that reality has altered around that dream.

The Modernist Dreams, and the Social Democratic dreams weren’t identical, but were very compatible, and were thus both already fading into a sealed-off yesterday as Thatcherism and it’s war on the idea of society succeeded by the late 80s. But the YSP continued to grow in a different kind of reality.

By the time of Tory cuts, the YSP was ‘too big to fail’ as staff would often say. But after over 10 years cuts to public funding its founding ethos has been forced to bend beyond recognition. However, during the Pandemic restrictions to the park no longer allowed just anyone to walk into the land, and a flat charge to enter place has remained in place since.

The news about the opening of a ‘Groucho club’ which was set up and frequented by a more ‘arty’ crowd than the image of a ‘private members club’ may give you, might sound exciting to many. And I’m not here to argue against that. But all I see, to use a term used by Mark Fisher and Laura Grace Ford (sorry, can’t recall which one came up with it), is ‘Restoration Capitalism’, the return of what was once promised as accessible to everybody now returned to the property owning class.

As I’ve said, the ‘New Ruins’ of Bretton Hall Campus, were not officially part of the sculpture park. But they are undeniably at the heart of this landscape. They are the centre from which the overall ethos seems to emanate. Whilst it remained recent ruins, the park was haunted by the residue of a post war dream. You could detect traces of something other to a current world in which the purpose of art for everybody is all too often and so easily bastardised into a form of ‘artwashing’ for private endeavours.

This is no fault of the park itself; a vision born into a reality where it was forced to bend into something else in order to survive. And in one sense there is nothing wrong with what the sculpture park has become.

It’s true that engagement with art has never been greater; and the contemporary emphasis on public engagement has only good educative intentions.

And as much as I’d enjoy moaning about the survivalist tactics for arts and culture generating some of the most absurd and annoying situations (we once had to stop a wedding photographer taking a photo of the bride and groom drinking champagne next to an exhibition about a starving child in the South Sudanese famine) I know that it’s just venting over a more justifiable case: the longing for a citizen’s park.

Digging Deep – 40 years on since the Miners’ Strike’

Next Saturday I’ll be exhibiting new, old and re-imagined work for the exhibition ‘Digging Deep – 40 years on since the Miners Strike’, which will be held at @artbombuk , Unitarian, 60 Hallgate, Doncaster.

Opening event, Saturday 2nd March 1 – 6 PM, exhibition till 21st April 2024.

Art, Conversation, Music, Film.

A special event and exhibition commemorating the importance of the miner’s efforts and the strike of 1984.

Documenting community cohesion in Doncaster around the strike along with support for the miners from the cultural sector, what can be learned from those involved, in protecting contemporary rights and dignity? 40 years on since wholesale destruction of an industry and interdependent communities how can those experiences help build resilience and look to a better, future Doncaster ?

Art Opening in Shop: Ed Milliband MP and Sally Jameson

Intro/Welcome: Anne-Louise and Mike Stubbs

On the Sofa: Chris Kitchen & Jeffrey Lovell, Sheena Moore and Brenda Nixon, Mick Langhan

Sing-a-long miners songs with Rachel Horne

Music & Words, Jakno, Smizz, Sarah Wimbush, Ian Parks, GSD

DGLAM museums workshop “Handle history! Come along and see some objects from Doncaster Museum, related to the miners’ strike”.

Thank Yous: Rev Tom & Rosie Winterton MP

Film show: Pride + 80’s style food served

Exhibition Artists in ArtBomb Shop: John Ledger, Moira Lovell, Les Monaghan, Andrew Conroy, Katrine Barber & Documentary material: Miners banner, Danielle Ganley, The Miners Campaign Tapes, Miners Benefit Poster, other ephemera.

The Mental Health Strike ’24

On 6 March 2024 the world’s first Mental Health Strike brought normal life to a near-total stand-still.

One after another, people from many walks of life bridged the deep social divides, by publicly declaring that they could no longer maintain good mental health under contemporary work/life conditions.

The Mental Health Strike initially began as a ‘what if’ thought experiment by the artist-led collective ‘The Retro Bar at the end of this universe’. Their rallying callout ‘M.H.S Sunscreen’, was based on the 1999 hit spoken word track ‘Everyone’s got to wear sunscreen’. Unlike 1999, the future can no longer be sold to us. However, M.H.S Sunscreen begs us to believe that a better tomorrow is still possible, and that its revolutionary potential resides in great advances made in Mental Health Awareness. M.H.S Sunscreen ‘24 re-imagines ‘(Everybody’s Free to Wear) Sunscreen’ as ‘therapy’ based around collective care; therapy for a world trying to get out of free-fall.

One person partaking in the strike said that his mental health hasn’t been great for years, but that the push to go “back to normal” in the wake of the near-total halt to the economy during an era-defining pandemic, pushed him both physically and physically into near-total burn-out. He added that this had been a story he had heard from many friends in many different work roles.

“People just can’t do it anymore, you know, how we used to do things. I think there’s many reasons, but I simply think that even though it is very necessary to work every hour, what with the cost of living, etc, many of us can no longer push to strive and achieve in order to survive…We can’t just can’t do it anymore!”.

“That’s why I joined this strike, anyway. And It’s been amazing to find out that so many people secretly felt just like I did”.

Looking back 6 years

The mental health strike. A strike that I posited happened in an alternate reality in late January (the week always desrcibed as the most depressing) in 2018.

We do live in a very different reality now, though. A very unexpected one, still confused and defined by a vague sense of dislocation, after a pandemic nobody could have forseen back then. The geopolitical and national political climate seem far worse, partly due to confusion and dislocation within which they operate.

The Mental Health Strike was a ‘what if’ event – just a small project for an interim show as a mature Ma student in Leeds.

What if there was a collective consensus that contemporary reality, in all the variable life positions one may find themselves in, was becoming totally incompatible with living mentally well? Well, this was the seed, the interstition I was playfully trying to plant.

The installation I created was centred around The audio piece ‘M.H.S Sunscreen ’18’, which I created with friend, fellow-artist-led collective member, and music composer Ben Parker.

It was thematically based on Baz Lurhmann’s unexpected 1999 pop song hit ‘Everybody’s got to wear sunscreen’, which hit a nerve, perhaps because it presciently spotted something that would the so defining of the imminent next century, the rise of mental ill-health, emotional distress as a great social problem.

Because it wasn’t a big project I neglect to see it as one of the best projects I’ve worked on. Not only that, but this project kicked started possibly one of the most fruitful times I’ve had artistically. So I look back 6 years to see how I wish to proceed this year: that the faith that emanates from this project is not a done deal. It’s time to believe things can work out well once more.

Near desert…

Langsett remains weird. An intrusion of the outside. Dream-like, in that all our dreams are breached by that which shouldn’t be there.

Nor should I… be here, ‘down there’.

I’m lost.

That horizon line that greats you as you ascend the first set of hills, with its weirdly rhythmical monotony, calls you forward…

Yet it cannot prepare the familiar to be easily breached, upon this fine line cut by the east/west trunk road and the reservoir walk that struggles to be itself underneath the heft of the Weird, uncaringly jotting out of its allocated zone.

This breach brings coastal nightmares onto water placed into the seemingly safe centre-land, gesturing to the great wildernesses of land and of sea alike, stalking our dreams with apocalyptic advancements.

For even though it is a place made austere by many human hands, it is never convincingly clasped from an amoral wilderness that annexes the plantation pines and 20th century pylons, which line up as marker points to the exodus sought through it.

What was once a wildwood has long since been a desert.

And a desert it must be, for it is the desert I seek.

… a nothing space with no more anything.

No more signs, fooling us into thinking all those ‘down there’ things. A place where gluttonous demands make mere meat of us, as we wrestle and twist unable to shirk the shape we assumed long ago at some fateful point, as options in life become harder to graft out of the setting stone of misplaced middle age.

There’s a black hole of comprehension in which 2000 became 2024, in which 16 became 40. Wondering how you managed to fuck up so embrassingly. To have allowed yourself to be spat out so easily. Back into your parents house, the four walls of a life humiliatingly trapped in teenage chains.

Even as I know more than ever that such admissions don’t bring saviour, and that the impetus for change is at red alert, as I twist and turn it’s still the same things reflected and inflected in the daily reconstitution of self-hood.  This Now consists of a daily dog fight, objectless lunges at a self-worth-sucking atmosphere, as ones eyes meet those of others in an internal contest for respect from ones inner critics.

But they, the inner critics, lose their hold up here, as the signage they utilise gives way to nothingness.

The wish to get lost up here is merely a logical response to how it feels down there.

Here is the site where elemental truth can speak clearly. Right here. About the great tragedy that befell our age, where soft Millennial promises mutated into a mute horror of which no polite voice dare speak.

That something has happened which may never be classifiable. Generations dislodged, like dislocated limbs. But yet a loose skin conceals the damage, leaving it to simmer in internal violence.

We all look the other way, only revealing our permanent stretch marks – the indelible stains of trying to hide collective trauma. But skin artificially held up in suspense flops to its death here, as the increasingly desperate displays of opulence, that overpower you and push you in a lowly road-side ditch, can now do one, and fuck off for an hour or two.

You can even laugh along with the hostile gale, as a shiny white Audi, a mere stand-in for a seemingly infinite amount of status cars that have poured into our hearts, forming part of the tapestry of 15 years of collective trauma, tries and fails to assert its power here.

As the near dark sets in, the landscape hunts you back to your place of safety. Stalking your imagination with un-belonging intrusions, as if it were a dream.

Evening beckons. Tomorrow will be hard, as life gets privately more painful, perhaps for all of us – but yet nobody is letting up.

The dark peak horizon which Langsett assertively unveils keeps calling, because it promises retreat to a place where you can’t possibly be lost because there is nothing to be lost in. A place where you can’t possibly be ashamed, because the social is withered to its bone up here.

Down there, one can only do their best to fight their shame. And this is me, here, doing that now, in real time.

Only in absence

During the course of my life I’ve realised that I can only reach out and embrace something’s presence/my presence in its total absence.

An inability to be at ease with the living, to do what the living do, as led me to be a living ghost, who in turn chases other ghosts.

I’ve developed a bipolar relationship with life below. Because only when I try to escape it, fleeing towards the barren landscape that hangs above it, can I imagine what it could be like to truly embrace it.

I find ‘down there’ so claustrophobic I don’t think I ever really breathe properly until I leave.

I see all the invisible walls that solder down informal social scripts, because I feel them, as if they were enclosing my lungs.

On a busy Saturday, when the faces, the couples, all come out to play – coupling together in cynically predictable synchronicity – I have an overwhelming feeling of being trapped on the set of a soap opera shoot, with no role, no reason to be there, but there nonetheless, ashamed of every manoeuvre.

There’s nowhere to hide.

I always try to find a seat at the back of the room, to be out of shot, to avoid being noticed as being part of no part.

But it’s too late now. The energy it took to be in constant flight has now gone.

Up here no big Other is doing the background shame-work that clings so heavily and convincingly – a constant reminder of some fateful wrong turn you made all those years back.

Once you stand still and the rustling of your coat stops mimicking the chattering murmurs of inner critics, you realise the only person following you is you.

And that is what up here promises to rid you of: a place where there is no objectifiable self to interrogate.

This landscape with all its near-deadness, at least allows for reprieve from the white noise of the ‘down there’, where the dead-end you’re deep down cannot be reckoned with due to the swarm of emotional auto-corrections attacking your senses.

How do you truthfully find that long-sought-after road back ‘home’ under the daily invasion of micro-instructions, all designed to see fault in your every mortal breath, and adapt you to an alien operating system?

The instructions clash with the body’s resistance and gradually fuck it up. The body that desires only one thing, to escape – its inherent rejection of the commands to be stretched and bent into another smiling face in the corporate blob.

It could never fit anyway. Ones fecklessness and ineptitude would ooze out into the light of day like a spate of teenage acne prolonged until death. A life spent perplexed and distressed at the lack of cracks appearing in anyone else’s face.

For all self-corporatism is now geared towards being competent. To show that none of this horror you are forced to inhale, no dead homeless, no holocaust, no amount of pornification under a dying sky, affects you in the slightest.

Once the half-light sets in you find yourself in the half-world of another place.

There’s a willingness for it, for the unknown, for a doorway to take you outside the realms of the familiar that usher you back into your shame-state. Just the need to find something outside that can re-enchant you out of this half-role in this half-life.

The dry stone walls are draped like prehistoric backbones, like warnings of a lost world, ready to slowly sliver off the beaten hills, as the fading light melts your solid perceptions. The peat, so deep to swallow all stones, would never spare your rediscovery.

Nothing up here eludes to warm reassurances. Mammalian comforts are literally worn to the bone by prehistoric energies that are always everywhere, in the shadows, waiting for us to fuck up our safe-houses.

But up here death is liberated from the humiliating robe that sticks to it down there, where it must now subsist under the white hole of eternal youth, spewing out endless denials of mortality. 

It’s all shadowplay; necessary play-acting with the shapes that one cannot be present with down there.

Monochrome takes on works from the last 10 years.

Around ten years ago it began to become seem necessary to introduce elements of colour variation into my drawings. Before this time they nearly entirely monochrome.

I lost sight of the qualities of Monochrome, that colour can often compete with the context. Sometimes this works really well, but sometimes it doesn’t, and I guess there’s no real way of knowing beforehand.

But I have enjoyed turning these drawings into black and white, I feel like it’s both given a new life, and given me a new idea of maybe a way to go forwards as a new year begins.