Drawing Place: A Talk with Drawing Projects UK

What a pleasure it was to be invited by Anita Taylor of Drawing Projects UK and The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize to take part in an online discussion about drawing place, alongside fellow shortlistee Peter Sutton. The video of the talk, including Peter Sutton’s wonderful talk too, will appear on the Drawing Projects UK soon. I’ll keep you posted.

The following is a transcript of that talk:

“Good evening everybody, I’m really delighted and grateful to be here tonight with Anita and Peter. Thank you for inviting me, Anita.

I am speaking to you from my studio at the end of my garden in Oxford, but I’d like to invite you to join me on an exploration of the wonderful island of Anglesey, a place rich with history, full of the remnants of past ages, fascinating landscapes (natural and manmade) and in particular an old railway line running 17 and a half miles from Gaerwen in the south, up through the middle of the island to the small harbour town of Amlwch on the north coast.  

I first encountered the line, during a family holiday to Anglesey in 2018, and since then it has exerted a powerful fascination for me, to the point that it became the subject of my recently completed MFA in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. Exploration of landscape and industrial history is one of a number of personal interests that I have drawn into my art practise. I also find myself drawn to islands, too. I think it’s to do with that sense of marginality, escape and distancing from the centre; and I enjoy finding stories that are untold or overlooked, perhaps hiding in plain sight.

A little bit of history may be helpful to start with.

The line opened in the 1860s. It lost its passenger services during the “Beeching Cuts” of the 1960s, but freight trains continued to run up until 1992. Since then, it has fallen into disuse, but the tracks and infrastructure remain substantially in place, albeit subject to the passage of time and progressive reclamation by nature. A group of volunteers is now working to clear the line with a view to restoring it to use, advocating for its restoration as part of the current national debate about reopening old railway lines. It is a vibrant, sometimes fractious, debate. The line stands at a crossroads, or perhaps I should say a junction, right now because it has several different potential futures as well as a real sense of history to it.

So whilst on that family holiday in 2018, I was very intrigued see this old line meandering around the contours, settlements and lakes of Anglesey on maps at first, and then glimpsed on the landscape through trees and many weeds. I was struck by this idea that a map is just a snapshot or a representation of a place at a given moment in time. Maps don’t set out to record every  quality of a place, its atmosphere or history, or the ways in which places change over time -  that is not their purpose -  so I started to think about the railway line as existing in time too. It is, or was at the time of the drawing, 156 years old.

I started to think about the railway line as a drawing on a landscape and in time too. But I was always aware, from the very beginning, that my subject was an elusive one. Maps helped me to think about the obvious, literal quality of being a line that is inherent in a railway line , including on a map, and so it seemed to me that a drawing was the perfect way to think further about this.  I also wanted to think about the qualities of time, decay and endurance that I saw as important aspects of the place.

And really that is where the idea for “Timelines” originated.

It was completed in late 2019 and was one of my very first responses to the railway line. I made this drawing at home 200 miles away from Anglesey but this didn’t seem a problem to me because I was really thinking about those aspects of the line that are unseen and intangible.

To make the drawing, I had the idea to use the line’s mapped shape as a sort of motif and to use one line to represent one year in the life of the line from the beginnings of its construction in 1864 through to the present day. There is a strand in my work of the encoding and preserving of information, especially marginal information or information that is at risk of being lost or forgotten. I established a process for that too, a schematic plan on a spreadsheet so I could consistently and progressively move from softer to harder grades of pencil so that I could make the line become fainter as I worked left to right across the paper, to evoke a sense of a narrative of fading away or forgetting that is very apparent in the condition of the line today. I worked steadily ticking each line off on my plan as I went. And when I reached the line for the year 1992, when the trains stopped running, I swapped from a graphite pencil to a plastic stylus, so that I was making an even fainter mark; a trace, if you like, or a register of falling into stillness or silence, perhaps.

I should say also that the drawing is on tracing paper, which I chose for several reasons. Firstly, there was the purely practical reason that it allowed me to trace the line from the OS map. There is also something quite mundane or “low-status” about tracing paper. I felt that worked quite well for this rather unglamorous, overlooked railway line. But more than that, I really enjoy the way tracing paper responds to the pressure of a pencil tip by recording a clear indentation. It also has that quality of translucence, that captures or reflects light, in a different way to standard papers. This helps makes the multiple lines of this drawing create a visible sense of contour so that they appear to coalesce into their own sort of imagined landscape. Perhaps partly because we all recognise the convention of contour lines from maps, the eye reads the drawing as a having a topography of its own.  

Following on from this idea of topography and space, one of the reasons that drawing is so important in my practise is that it opens up a space for thinking, and I think that is true for many drawing artists. The drawing took about four hours so I had plenty of time for reflection as I worked. Thinking and making seem to go hand in hand when I’m drawing, and this was particularly the case for me with “Timelines”. The following are some examples of the thoughts that occurred to me as I worked:

• The idea of systems, regularity and repetition that is typical of a railway line – trains going along the line, tracing and retracing the fixed route of the railway lines. The process of creating this drawing became, I found, a way of enacting something similar by making my own journeys down the line, as a train would, and really helped connect me to it.

• This enabled me to connect to the idea of memory in the drawing – memory of the line and also the memory of my mark-making itself.

• This lead me to thinking about lines are recoding something: grooves on a record, or growth lines in stump of a felled tree, or sound waves which are of course other ways of storing and preserving information. So I found a sense of reverberation, resonance or echoes in the drawing, that made me think more about how the line was perhaps less silent and more resonant than I had first thought. (They could be geological or seismic movements, too – Anglesey is geologically very significant but that’s another story).

Thanks in large part to “Timelines”, all of these things were aspects of the railway line that I went on to explore in other work in the following year or more. I wasn’t consciously planning for these outcomes, but I discovered them in the process of thinking and making put together in the creation of this drawing. (I am a fan of the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes very powerfully in this area, as well as on the subject of lines.)

But I think the drawing also enabled me to connect deeply with what I saw as the qualities of this place that I was exploring – not, here, in the sense of a visual representation of what the railway looks like, (though I have done that in other work) but in a way that connected with my reaction to its intangible, felt and unseen qualities. And when I was able to physically be near or on the line (which of course turned out to be much harder to achieve in 2020 than I expected) I felt able to connect to the railway through the thinking I had done in “Timelines”. And importantly, the line had opened out, if you like, leaving the map and acquiring  a real and rich sense of place, resonance and interest.

If you are interested in finding out a little bit more about my work in response to the Amlwch railway line, please visit my website which is www.markrclay.co.uk There is a gallery there of a my wider body of work including this other drawings but I have also written quite extensively on aspects of the railway line, and my exploration of it, in the blog that is also on the site.

Thank you very much for listening.

Going with the 'Flow" - Modern Art Oxford

Being involved in the online exhibition and collaboration ‘Flow’ at Modern Art Oxford has been both a joy and a revelation to me, particularly at a time when I had more or less written off 2020 as an exhibiting year.

It has been wonderful, too, to have a space in which to connect with other artists, even if this is still severely limited. There is so much to learn and enjoy from being able to talk about art with other artists and I do thank the team at Modern Art Oxford and all the participating curators and artists for bringing us all together and being generous and interested. I feel sure that this is a good source of reflection, development and future ideas for all of us.

The exhibition continues at Modern Art Oxford until 11 October but will continue on their website beyond that date. This blog entry is to pull together all the different strands of my contribution and all the activity around the exhibition as a whole:

You can visit “Flow” at Modern Art Oxford here: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Laura Cumming’s review in The Observer (20 Sept 2020) can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/20/danh-vo-chicxulub-white-cube-bermondsey-review-flow-modern-art-oxford

Video extracts of my interview with Flow Co-Curator Jack Carrera:

"FLOW" - a collaborative online exhibition

The art world is beginning to open up once again after the coronavirus lockdown. I’ve used the time to try and be proactive about what might come after my MFA, and make some proactive applications to competitions and collaborations.

So, I’m especially excited that my drawing “A Crack In The Record” will be a part of a collaborative online exhibition called “Flow”, led by Modern Art Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, and I’m delighted to see it featured in part on MAO’s webpage. The show will open as an online exhibition running from 4 September to 11 October.

Click here to visit the MAO website: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Image: Screengrab from the Modern Art Oxford website, showing details of “A Crack In The Record”. (July 2020)

The title “Flow” refers to the immersive, focused and productive state of mind which many people seek to cultivate as a means of being at their most productive, effective or creative,. It applies equally to sportspeople, those in business or academia, and of course to those in creative or artistic endeavours: musicians, writers, visual artists… the list goes on.

“A Crack in the Record” was the perfect piece to submit to a collaboration such as this, because it sits at the centre of a many of the conceptual and practical ideas in my ongoing MA project, the disused railway line to Amlwch, on Anglesey; and also because it works as a telling visual metaphor of the idea of “creative flow” itself. The process of making a large ink drawing by drawing approximately 150 concentric lines itself also opened up a highly absorbing and reflective space in which I could think deeply about what I was doing, and why, as I worked, and to witness that happening in real time throughout the process of creating this piece, which took place across five days. One has a lot of time to think in five days and it was highly beneficial and rewarding.

I’ll be exploring this more with my collaborative partners during the course of “Flow” and writing some more of my thoughts and experiences here on this blog.

Stay tuned!

Thoughts On Binding

The following is a documentation of some of the thinking and reflection that occurred during a new phase of making, as I continue to build a body of work on the theme of the (disused) Amlwch railway line, on Anglesey. It centres on my use of copper thread as a binding material.

What is binding about?

I think of acts of care, preservation (e.g. Egyptian mummification), of recording and remembrance. A way to “re-member”, as in to put something back together again. At the same time, I think of natural binding: of bindweed and ivy that slowly entwines the Amlwch railway line in a slow, relentless act of reclamation and transformation.

So there is tension here, between:

1. The binding of care and preservation, the human intention to create, to preserve and to restore, to bring dead things back to life, and;

2. The binding of capture, control, the natural intention to change, replace, evolve.  New life growing out of the death of the old.

Is it even possible to reconcile the two in a piece of work, to place them alongside each other as I think is happening on the railway? As Tim Ingold might say, perhaps the making will show me how, might show me how to think by making….

So I take a piece of old sleeper slice and turn it in my hands, The cut edges are ostensibly smooth but I can feel the lines in the surface, both radial and circumferential. There are cracks in the body and at the edges of the wood, some from the time of the growing, and some from the time of the dying (rotting). I continue to turn the wood block over and over and a way of making comes to me from this.

Taking up fine copper thread, I combine it with the process of turning over and over. I follow the edges and contours of the piece of wood until I have bound it, but not obscured it. It seems to me, as I work, that the act of binding expresses a desire to protect and to support this old wood. To stop it coming apart. To “re-member” it:

The process flows on and so my ideas flow on with it. I keep going, taking this further and do something similar for all the remaining fragments from this “end of the sleeper” slice. The copper thread seems also to imply a spirit of reconnection, or restoration, of the wood, to the point before time, decay, and my intervention split it apart.

This end piece of wood brings me in mind of my idea of a piece called “Terminus”. The end. I had previously imagined doing it with a much larger piece of old rotted sleeper, but the coronavirus lockdown prevents me searching for one on the Amlwch railway line itself.

I am not done with this. This idea keeps me, and perhaps by extension this decaying railway, in the present tense. I take up another sleeper slice. What if I worked more closely with the grain and the lines of the wood? Is this a way, even, to bind those two halves of my thoughts on binding together. (Pun absolutely intended.)

It changes the way I do the binding. Not a relatively random reflex as in the previous pieces, but a more considered, exploratory, mindful approach. I too am progressively bound up by the idea and the process. The thread encloses the wood and it encloses me. too, in this repetitive act of making and thinking.

One hour later:

It feels like a mapping (back to my starting point – the OS map of Anglesey), an exploration, a re-discovery even, of the nature of these materials. Not an exact one, but a halting, partial, cautious and even risky one (the thread breaks several times as it catches and stretches). As I wind around the edges, notches and grooves the tightened thread makes tiny, metallic “plink” sounds like the plucking of a harp string at the top of its range.  (I must record these.)

There. There it is. The idea of the “sounding of the line.”

I am so aware, by now, of the reflective and thoughtful nature of what I am now doing. It is slower, and more careful, too.  Perhaps even ritualistic: as in Ancient Egypt, with the mummification of dead pharaohs and their belongings, the act of binding (mummification) is an act of remembering and preserving things that are precious.

I think this railway is precious. And my acts of binding have enabled me to make that tangible.

On Touch

Ideas that can find expression in art can come at any time and in any shape. While out delivering leaflets in my community earlier in the week, wearing protective gloves, I got on a train of thought about how contact and touch is so central to our humanity, even if it is sometimes ambivalent, risky or even dangerous - as it is in the current climate.

It lead me to Emily Dickinson's poem "He touched me, and I lived to know". It seemed a sad but important thought right now. I shall work on this idea further…

Creating space for creativity

In the course of a busy few weeks, both creatively and in other aspects of my life, I’ve been thinking hard about how to make the most of my time. How do I create the best conditions, for me, to enable and nurture my creativity at a time when I really need it?

Set out below is a non-exhaustive, non-definitive set of points. Of course, I’m thinking in terms of my life as an artist, but I think these could well apply elsewhere too:

1. Being part of a team of creative people is just about the best thing you can do to enable your own creativity. And by creative I think I mean, more broadly, a collaborate spirit, a generous approach to sharing and building ideas and projects, and a willingness to laugh and to fail as part of the process.

2. And yet, to counter that, I also see very clearly that I need solitude and time out to reflect and think. I think this is critical too. There are times when you want to "do" and experiment, and other times when you want to reflect, to sit with ideas and let them bubble away on their own. Good things come from that quiet.

3. Following on from that, you can't really "do" creativity. It's like trying to force yourself to go to sleep. You have to allow space for creativity to arise, in my experience, in its own time and its own way. That frequently means finding a balance with all the other things in life. So, often, for me the trick is to notice, record (see below), and then return to those ideas when the time is right.

4. Writing and recording is paramount to my work as an artist, and I am sure that it always will be. Not just so I can remember ideas and/or return to them when I’m ready to move forward, but also as a key part of actively thinking through and around ideas. As an artist this most typically comes about through drafting and sketchbooks, of course, but also blogging, or conversations with trusted friends. As some cleverer soul than me wrote, "writing is a way of thinking and discovering things".

5. At the moment I'm even writing poetry as a way of reflecting and developing ideas. I only do this once in a blue moon and yet I am finding it very valuable. Be open to new ways of thinking and doing and experimenting.

6. Ideas come at weird times and I try to be open to that. Some of my most exciting thoughts have come from dreams or 3am "sitting up in bed" moments. My wife finds this both exasperating and fascinating. One morning she found that I had scribbled "chicken trampoline" on a piece of paper in the dead of night. I still love that drawing.

7. Artists talk a lot about "pushing their practice" which is really just another way of saying "don't accept your first thoughts as your best thoughts". Sometimes they are; and often, they aren't. Being creative sometimes feels like knowing when to push an idea and when to stop, and being comfortable with both modes of working.

8. There are no wrong ideas. Just ideas that haven't yet reached full expression. Some ideas never get that far, and that is OK.

9. The number of ideas that you realised in the past, and which you will continue to look back on with 100% satisfaction in the future, is very small. That is OK too.

10. And of course, there will always be those times when you feel stuck, and short of ideas. I recently read an excellent book by Robert Shore called "Beg, Borrow And Steal: Artists Against Originality". It's a cracking read. The pressure to be original can be an impediment to starting, let alone finishing anything creative. I thoroughly recommend it as a possible way to help you get out of those periods of “stuckness”.

Do let me know if you recognise any of these; or if there are others that are important for your creativity!

On Generosity - Part Two

My thinking about generosity has developed some way since my previous post on the subject. From generosity I have moved to include the idea of a gift; or, more appropriately since my context is a railway line in North Wales, the Welsh language equivalent of gift: “rhodd”, or the even lovelier plural “rhoddion” - “gifts”).

To make these ideas tangible, I have been spending considerable time recently applying copper leaf gilding to some pieces of track ballast stone, borrowed from the Amlwch railway line and which I will return shortly. I have found the process of gilding to be both a thoughtful, quiet and delicate process, and also challenging. This is my first attempt at any sort of gilding, and these small palm-sized stones have not been the easiest surface to work with. All these qualities and experiences make the creation of these little “gifts” all the more fitting for me.

Why copper? It speaks to me of several things: the industrial heritage of Anglesey (especially the extraction of copper, principally from the nearby Parys Mountain copper mine); of memory of the past; and of the process of making protecting and preserving (copper bottoms of ships, or copper sheet roofing, for example).

In what way can these little copper jewels act as gifts? I have turned to poetry to enable me to think further about this. Poetry is an excellent way to distill, crystallise or concentrate your thinking. Having written several pages on the subject of late, and how it can relate to aspects of a disused railway line, I’ve now reached this working draft of my thoughts in poetry form.

I am planning to return the stones (anonymously) to the line as “gifts” to be discovered in the future, perhaps by those working on the line as they clear it. Or perhaps they will disappear and never be seen again. Since entropy, decay and loss is an ultimate and inevitable consequence, even in the context of restoration, that will be OK too. The documentation of the gifts through photographs, and perhaps through this writing too, will be the artwork; at least as far as my MFA show is concerned. This blog post will form a part of it too, perhaps.

I’ve already tested the idea during my recent visit to Anglesey, placing one stone back on the line (temporarily) to test the visual impact of the stones and their resilience to the elements. They have the right kind of scale for my purposes, being variously invisible and visible. The next step will be to clarify my thoughts on the locations for the stones, and documentation of the work. There are seven stones in all, corresponding with the seven stations of the line, but this is just one idea I continue to work on.

On generosity

As I continue to think about my ongoing MFA research at the beginning of my final term (with the final degree show, in June, appearing on the horizon) I am thinking a great deal right now about generosity.

I’m not long back from the first two weeks of a professional placement at the wonderful Oriel Ynys Mon on the island of Anglesey in North Wales. There, the whole team made me feel extremely welcome and gave me a tremendous experience of two weeks of busy changeovers and exhibition installs. I was definitely the oldest work experience person they’ve ever had (!) and I’m very grateful indeed to the whole team for being so generous with their time, trust and knowledge.

But this is not the only example of generosity that I have found on Ynys Mon. Similarly generous to me have been the team at Lein Amlwch, and especially Walter Glyn Davies, for helping me to learn, discover and understand more about the railway line to Amlwch that they are working hard to restore and which is the subject of my MFA work and final show. Not only have they been very generous to me as a visiting artist offering nothing more than curiosity (and no ability to speak Welsh), but also they are being remarkably generous to this old railway line that has not seen a train since 1992.

Restoring a dormant 17-mile railway line is no easy task. “Every single inch”, says Walter Glyn, is “back-breaking and often heart-breaking”. And it’s being done by people who are unpaid volunteers, out in all weathers, and in the face of no small degree of opposition or indifference. Every rock, every weed, every sleeper and every inch of the line will need their generous spirit of optimism , determination and sheer hard work in order to achieve their goal of seeing trains run on the line again.

This makes me think about generosity in terms of my own artistic response, and perhaps of art in general. It’s not generally a word applied to artists, but I find myself asking why not. There are plenty of examples of artists being accused of being appropriative or exploitative of their subject (here’s a very recent example from last month) and I’m very mindful of this.

So how do I reflect the spirit of generosity that I have discovered, in my work and also in my approach? There are some simple principles that I am adhering to:

• Don’t take anything away from the line unless it is of zero (or marginal) use and I have permission. The line belongs to Network Rail, after all, and Lein Amwlch have a license and lease that permits them to work there.

• Return those items wherever possible.

• Don’t seek to impose my own artistic or authorial view on the railway line, its stories and its people. The future of the railway line is not mine to prejudge or predict. Rather, act as witness, collector or reflector of what the line and its people tells me.

• Listen, don’t speak. The last thing the people of Anglesey want or need is another Englishman telling them what to do or think.

• Credit and collaborate. There are good examples of this in art too - Sol Lewitt for example.

I have some practical ideas too… and will share them again soon.

Diolch!
Cheers!