ARTSPACE / STILL WATERS

Jim was back in the cottage today doing more lighting and motion tests and building further figures. He's looking at a cast of 4 or 5, and another took his place in Alex's set today...clothes and clay will follow, We had a steady flow of visitors to see Iain (below) and us and look around the building.  These sessions are a great way of  letting people into Jim's process and establishing the cottage as a place where interesting stuff goes on...it;s a great curiosity for many, and children in particular like the scale and other-worldly time capsule  feel. And it's a nice place to work. It's  been a good day. Here's the results of the test...limbs, clay hands and face working nicely... https://drive.google.com/file/d/1stqCMrb2msp55TjiGEziwPyzSDmruZV-/view?usp=sharing  

Int. Pub Room. Alex's set for Jim's animation, by the light of a mobile phone.  This is modelled on the Lots pub AKA The Askam Hotel, and is the location for a pivotal scene in Jim's  family drama. The last set photo shows the smaller exterior model, and after that we see Jim and Alex planning with aid of tinfoil figures and a pub table. We will be at the Cottage on tuesday to do more building and tests, and maybe some music, so keep an eye out for a poster. E xt.

  Alex Blackmore's Askam map, unlabelled, in advance of a bit of research / elicited evidence gathering. Space Foraging. "the rigid memorialisation of the past can inhibit conceptualisations of place that emphasise change and flux, potentially making it more difficult for people to accept and adjust to current and future change."  (Mining Memories, Rebecca Wheeler. Exeter 2014 ) Thus no place is static but partakes continuously of its own change by recalling its past and projecting its future ..  The lack of any formal heritage site here suggests an absence of any hierarchy of evidencing. T here is more than one narrative here, not just one materiality, not just the human experience.   Land has agency. It has its own story, evoking and remembering the past , and our actions within it.  Walking, engaging, talking within a place makes it a conduit for  vernacular histories. The landscape - shifting, familiar, accessible, dangerous - transmits nuance and intri...

Photographer Lindsay Ward is visiting Askam and the ponds and the estuary, gathering images for an exhibition....here is a selection from her latest visit ... Following our field trip to The Ponds with Kev Alexander in February I made a note to return just as the green starts to make a froth on the trees, altering the light and vistas. Cue a sunny Sunday, end of April, my family accompanying me.  A funny thing really, having been introduced to the landscape by Kev, I found myself retelling some of his stories of industrial history and local kids' den building exploits. Borrowing his lore to explain the slopes, scarps and waters to my family while they were exploring it and adding their/own own family history to the place. The wild garlic was in full leaf, softening the hard edges seen in February, and the creep of greening plants and trees created a sense of a landscape re-wilding. Looking forward to a sunset visit in coming weeks, to see what the lengthening shadows prod...

 Jim's armature greets its public yesterday afternoon at the Sir John Barrow Cottage...click to view...

  This will become one of Jim's characters in his animation piece...it looks a bit Robocop right now, but soon it will be clad in capok, clay and fabric. It was assembled limb by limb in the cottage today, and, as you see below,  had its hands cured by scalding with water, making sure the plastic that surrounds each finger is tight and pliable. Next, motion tests...we'll be back. Hoho. I was in Askam yesterday , to meet Historian Janice Cummings and get some photos of The Lots pub  AKA The Askam Hotel interior, where a scene from Jim's piece is set. More about that later. I shot some video and recorded some sound overlooking the estuary and then went to the school to meet Mrs Morgan to discuss dates for our schools project Scroll down for a photo of poet and novelist Caroline Gilfillan who visited today and brought along Anya Pearson, a descendent of Sir John Barrow, for her first visit to her ancestors' birthplace. Happily, our pal Historian Iain McNicol was with is at...

Excellent day at the cottage today. Jim cut the bones for his animation figures,we built some sketches for sets and ran some lighting experiments using his nifty Wowstar LED rig, which looks like a kebab shop fly killer and offers a range of really useful lighting states, ideal for working in the cottage.  We had some visitors who left with Soft Drive and Ulverston Brewery books and the sound of pond life in their ears from my hydrophone recordings.  More pics below.... Next, we hand over the sketches and photos to Alex, who will build a more substantial version of what will be Jim's Pub int/ext, and Jim bolts his figure together and puts clay on the bones. .