ARTSPACE / STILL WATERS

Interesting week, eh? We went to Askam on thursday to record some footage with which to frame Jim's piece...here we are outside Kev Alexander's shed and at the end of his street. We recorded two sequences with Kev that we hope will show the world of the story, while he filled the shed with stories and petrol fumes. Elsewhere, we've had the ok to use a recording by The Magic Toyshop, one of the best bands to come out of Furness in my time here. The song is an edited versh of King Of Space by Rob Kavanagh, from an acoustic session, and features the great Phil Birkett as singer. Many thanks to Rob and to Jamie Bosanko for supplying a file.  And on friday we were at the Laurel and Hardy Museum with Tony Lidington, for his marvellous lecture on Performative Science and quackery. We had a very good audience including lots of old friends, and raised a very decent bit of money for Furness Refugee Support.   Thank you, one and all. We'll be posting Tony's script, but for now...

Photos: Jim's Ealingy grotesques, during a closed session at the cottage and our family workshops in Askam the other week.  It's been a good few days for Still Waters, what's emerging is a sort of aphoristic rumination on the way a place can tell its own story, with Jim and his cousin Kev at the centre of it, telling theirs.   The rest of us work at a remove, responding to what we find, what we are told and shown.     Askam's history is in the hands of people that know it and live it. We are interested in how stories within it get told, through anecdote, folk processes, and in the role of formal and personal archives.    Story, like land, is fluid and shifting. It shifts with every visit and every telling. Jim and Kev's versions of this unruly ragged slice of family history dip into official versions and family lore, and  each carries  their own fingermarks , along with the discrepancies and shifts in tone that result from any process of repr...

We moved into Askam Community Centre for a couple of days, with a bag of paper, fabric and other recyclables from the Scrap Store. The idea was  to make maps of parts of the village with local children and their families, to introduce ourselves and the Still Waters project and find a few people who might like to help out with the next bit. We worked from photographs, Alex's sketchmap and the children's own knowledge of Askam.  Jim's animation and Lindsay's photographs ran on a loop, and it was good to hear our visitors point out the same paths and tracks that we've been exploring, and hearing their stories overlap ours. The Community Centre is a beautiful and well-equipped former school building, run by volunteers and used by youth groups and others. We'll  be back with our exhibition, which is likely to consist of a screening and Lindsay's photographs.  The work from this weekend will be in there too.   We asked a few  Askamites to record their walks ...

  Click here  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ycr4TLYyotGVlGACkASzzl8kCLCrGB4X/view?usp=sharing to see a short test sequence shot by Jim last week in the Sir John Barrow cottage.  It's a grey day. Black Combe is in the distance.  You see the Alexander family members planting their stakes and nets in the estuary. They work steadily, with concentration; they've done this many times.  Appropriately, Jim's mum and dad have been involved in the process, making props and costumes.  More will follow. We are in Askam this weekend, Alex, Jim and me are running craft workshops for families in the Community Centre, building collage maps of parts of the village   We will have this clip with us and some of Lindsay's Askam photographs, which will be on display in the cottage on fridays and sundays for the next few weeks. Be sure to visit, it's a beautiful show, Here's a sample.  

  A busy and varied sunday at the Cottage, with visitors seeing  Lindsay Ward's exhibition of Askam photographs  and watching animator James Alexander at work on his film. Lindsay is presenting a sample from several months of visits to the ponds and the estuary. The show will be on display in the cottage for the next few months, and more will be exhibited in Askam Community Centre at the end of the Still Waters project Lindsay's pictures look at the remains of  the mining buildings alongside the ponds and overgrowth that have gradually encroached on the spaces between them. They capture moments in the life of land catching its breath over decades. We see r eflections and shadows, surfaces and skylines; all is still, all is active.  Historian Iain McNicol opens the cottage on fridays and sundays. Come and see. Jim's story is of a moment in the social history of the village. His family are as much a part of Askam as the trees, the pier and the tides. The story con...

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.