Food For Thought - Follow Your Heart

 

I had expected that my journey to Humberstone to research the Fitties would encourage me to interrogate their aesthetic qualities. Aesthetics in life and within philosophical discourse are like the Cleethorpes mud; a sticky subject, somewhere to lose your way, to get stuck into.  For now, in this moment, it is enough to  say that aesthetics is just a word that describes how the appearance of things makes you feel. In the future and for most people who self-identify as artist, this definition will prove inadequate. I anticipated my trip would nurture my sensibilities and help me make a newsense. I wanted to discover why these ramshackle dwellings wear their aesthetic weight with such surety in our uncertain times. They are clad in many materials from rusted steel panels to fake stone, to the architects' ceder planks fixed with bronze nails. As I wander around in the rain I become interested in what this cladding covers over.

I was initially drawn through nostalgia to the earliest manifestations, the ones built in the1920's with lichen covered corrugated asbestos roofs. The uneven internal flooring where one room extends into another. The buildings are written through with the visible inscriptions of their extensions and repairs.   Before I got there I was riddled with preconceptions, I clearly had an idea of why I liked the Fitties that was built on abstraction. To write can be to 'put simply', but prose are rarely adequate when it comes to feelings that come from under the surface of things. 

I sat on a double seater settee in front of a two bar electric fire and read the history of the Fitties by Alan Dowling. A photocopy of the 2001 edition neatly bound in a black plastic A4 ring binder.  The book is necessarily chronological and provides a context by describing the national picture a snapshot of the state of things.  The lack of housing after the First World War, the desire to return to a more natural relationship with the world, the short lived quests for a utopian way of life that slotted neatly between both of the wars to end all wars. This was the time of the plotlands, the years before 1948 when town and country planning would regulate, legislate and police all building projects.  I am conflicted; on the one hand I'm pleased that people were not allowed to build small strange bricolaged sheds everywhere and to shit willy nilly in the woods.  On the other hand, I am intoxicated by these places and the times when people were allowed to build these shanty towns of idiosyncratic self-expression and Arcadian dreams. They stop me in my tracks. 

I thought I would be immersed in the textures of flaking paint lifted gently by the sea air, the entropy of slow return through the sea's fantastical ability to draw things back to itself. I intended to revel in the homogenized yet disparate reused materials.  Unified through the affectionate kiss of driftwood chic. 

As I walked in the rain past the 320 plots I began to realise that this yearning for  a measure of aesthetic weight was a distraction from the job at hand.   The plotlands are interesting because they hold individual dreams and the potential to build something from nothing. The aesthetic charge is not the seaside's patina on the surface but the very human dreams realised within the dwellings' becoming.  These dreams were built into the fabric of buildings years before they were provided with electricity or running water.   The integrity of the buildings with their reused materials and individualism holds an aesthetic weight yet it is different to what I expected to find.  

It is good in a way as it means I need to find this love of a place, this personal aspiration to make something with what is to hand as best you can.  From cave to hovel to gothic cathedral; any building worth its salt grows from a dream and not a plan.

'The only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention'

 

I picked up my PhD on Thursday and drove straight to the Humberstone Fitties.  The timing of this journey was coincidental yet it stands as an end point that hopefully will lead to a beginning.  Proposition Cottage names my intention to build a new workshop in my garden. The trip to the Fitties marked the start of finding out and a massaging of ideas to create the thinking-making-doing of a new project. This writing of things down is a start to a raveling. Writing art as words is one of things that has changed since graduating, it is a new proposition, a challenge to practice. I write this here to make a point and as a note to self; it is a mark and a reminder. This is text as inscription, the carving of words into an existing surface; it is not a log or a record or an artwork.  It is Ariadne's ball of red thread to follow back through the labyrinth. It will push and pull me through time and space and make the building into a proposition; more than a ramshackle shed in my garden, but not much more. 

 I miss some things about my old house yet most of these are a nostalgia for the past. I miss my old studio as it was a place to make things but it was also a place of identity.  I did not spend much time within its musky sawdust covered walls yet there was always the potential to spend my time lost in making. I could  be on my own with the tools that I have carried with me through most of my life.  My dads Eliot Lucas "big pliers", the homemade lathe, the Oxford stick welder, the Coronet multi purpose woodworking machine with over thirty ways to sever a finger. The making of a new workshop is the building of a pragmatic and practical space within my garden and rebuilding this place within my identity. 

The idea has given me focus.  Initially it was to be a place to make things and gradually it became a thing to make in itself. Like most good ideas and noses it cannot be fully unpicked, something is missed and always remains secret.  I have no memory of how I decided to build a new workspace while keeping Derek Jarmen's Prospect Cottage in mind.   I know that it has something to do with death, austere bleakness and the loneliness of both the intellectual and the long distance runner.  

Prospect cottage delivers an aesthetic weight with enough presence for me to hide behind.  I have speculated on replacing John Donne's poem  'The Sunne Rising'  which Jarmen mounted on the creosote black weather boarding with the more regional E'ee Ba Gum - can your belly touch ya bum?'.  I aim to add my own re-imaginings of Goya's Black paintings. These are the only artworks that have brought me to tears  in a public gallery.  I like the term 'fresco facsimile' it reminds me that the only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention.  The idea of building my own place in the garden to grow old and learn wisdom, to carve out an inner and outer thing of volume is a becoming a desire.  Most interesting things come from desire, something we are told never to give up on.  

I am writing again and as you write you start to think things through.  I find propositions flowing from words,  the ability to be clever clever.  For example, in reality I am building a shed, a simple garden shed  in which to potter and repair. Yet is it a place to shed anxiety about an inability to move forward, to shed  fears of losing an identity built on Oxford ark welders, my Dad's big pliers and to surround myself with long-saved materials that were bound to come in handy. 

Prospect cottage has become Proposition Cottage as to make a copy is not the intention I desire.  It is too cheap and literal to sustain a movement and a shedding.  However there is something about the black weatherboard and yellow windows that I cannot shrug off.  Jarmen's death made us all sad, we sat through the hour and a half of Blue and despaired at the oracular degeneration of one of our visionaries. Derek Jarmen, like John Berger and Ruskin are guides and seers, their words and works nourish and guide yet their main contribution is to continually challenge artists to think and feel and make things both identities and worlds.