INSTALLATION and EXHIBITION

We've been lucky with the weather. Trips to the beach, trips to the Langdale Valley and barely a drop of rain. By Cumbrian standards anyway. Heres a link to the video from the installation days at Bram Longstaffe's, and a few photographs and posters from the installation and the show at the Cooke's Studios in Barrow.
Thanks to everyone at the Cookes for their help, and to Katherine our work experience student who has worked with Ellie at South Walney and was on hand to help install the work at Bram's. 

https://vimeo.com/141650621

FURTHERMORE...LANGDALE SCHOOL vrs THE MERZBARN WALL, ARTSPACE AT KS2015 and A BIT OF EVALUATION

"We have greatly enjoyed hosting some of ArtSpace Barrow's projects with schoolchildren at Cylinders. Lovely children, lovely teachers, lovely artists."

Celia Larner,  Littoral.

www.facebook.com/MerzmanProject

"Breathtaking...there is so much going on in this amazing project."

"..It enabled all children to contribute and feel like they had achieved. They all thoroughly enjoyed it and were proud of their artwork."

 Dawn Andrews, Vickerstown School.

" This was an excellent project and we would love to work together again..the pp about Schwitters helped contextualise the project and support the children's knowledge about the artists...multi-sensory activities and composing with sound ..this was a new concept and experience that engaged the children.  It was perfect! "

Sally Jenkinson, Head, Langdale School

Further comments to come from our schools after the holidays!

"Breathtaking...there is so much going on in this amazing project."

Exhibition Visitor Cumbria County Councillor Helen Wall, Roosecoat Division, Barrow in Furness.

The project enabled children to be involved with working with professional arts practitioners. Very aspirational!It provided the opportunity to be involved in learning about an artist who had lived and worked in our locality and had worldwide impact and recognition, even visiting his work place! True experiential learning.Children were able to use a variety of mediums for their work which was especially good. There was great pride in the high quality outcomes achieved. Having film evidence of the project and a huge poster have provided a lasting visual memory of our involvement in the project.It was good to see the differing outcomes and experiences of other schools involvement in the project.The Children enjoyed the outdoor presentation of their work to parents and other audiences.
Nancy McKinnell, Head Teacher, South Walney Infants.

One measure of the success of Overground will be the longevity of the relationships established during its time. We returned to the  Merzbarn and Littoral this week to install our project documentation and to help the boys and girls of Langdale School mark the 50th year since Richard Hamilton took the Merzbarn wall to Newcastle's Hatton Gallery by transporting a lifesize image of the piece across the Estate.

Here's the video..

https://vimeo.com/143250802


 It's about 18 months since Overground was conceived and since Amy and I visited the site for recces and discussions with Ian and Celia from Littoral. 
 We were  back at the Merzbarn again in October as guests of Littoral and KS2015 to hear and discuss the plans for the future of the site as a centre for the development of new work.
This feels like the place to say thank you to them, and to all the boys and girls we've worked with, to the staff of our partner schools and the artists and organisations that have contributed to this project. We hope they can continue to work together (with and without us) and that their experience  of the Kurt Schwitters legacy in Elterwater and Ambleside  continues to inspire them.
Love and Thanks
John / Artspace

SOUND PIECES FROM NORTH WALNEY

In advance of pictures and video from our exhibition days, here are the Sound Pieces made by Amy and the North Walney boys and girls. These were played back through radios in the bushes in the wild garden, and from a hidden player in a canoe, and comprise the children's readings of their sound poems, source sounds and audio-pictures of the beach and woods.

https://soundcloud.com/artspacebarrow/soundwaves-final

https://soundcloud.com/artspacebarrow/sound-poems-and-music-final-1

We have further recordings of our exhibition visitors interpreting and
  reading the poems for themselves....cover versions!

Here are Amy's comments on the process behind the recordings..I think this tells the story of our time with North Walney, and a flavour of the whole project.. 

"Since our initial explorations with collage using rescued materials the project with North Walney evolved into a sonic adventure! We enjoyed a windy trip to the beach, making field recordings on the way, capturing the contrasts of Walney, from the sound of shop doorbells and cars, to birds, wind and sea. On the beach we investigated the sounds we could make using found objects and brought some back to school to play around with simple musical composition.


We used the paper based sound maps created on the day and recordings to invent new words, which we cut up and combined to make nonsense sound poems, in the vein of Schwitters famous ‘Ursonate’ sound piece.
Our trip to the Merz barn fuelled our imaginations and helped the children get more of a sense of the environment that inspired some of Schwitter’s work. (See May blog post for more on this visit).
We worked intently to produce materials for our final sound installations, destined for the garden at Bram Longstaffe Nursery. One piece was inspired by the sound of the waves and combined vocal sounds and words to create a layered textured piece that ebbed and flowed like the sea. On installation day this was played from a radio transmitter hidden in an old canoe, to tie in with the watery theme. We scattered stone shaped collages of the children’s favourite beach words to complete the scene.
For our second piece we bravely performed and recorded our sound poems in groups, which were later layered up with the Walney field recordings. The groups created their own musical compositions to act as ‘credits’ between the poems, returning to the use of beach objects as their instruments. These were transmitted alongside paper and cardboard collage versions of the poems scattered amongst an untamed willow dome!
The children of North Walney have responded with gusto to these unusual artistic opportunities. Their work has resulted in some unique and intriguing compositions, and they have been an absolute pleasure to work with!"

A MESSAGE FROM BIBI BOE, IN AUGSBERG ,GERMANY

We've had a nice comment from Bibi, and a link to some information on Schwitters' story of Miss Auguste Bolt. While the thrust of our work with the schools on Overground has been towards the visual and auditory, in quieter moments we've been looking closely at the poetry, plays  and stories. Thanks to Bibi for sending this, and for her interest. We hope we can keep in touch.

http://saetzeundschaetze.com/2015/05/15/kurt-schwitters-auguste-bolte-eine-doktorarbeit-1923/

LOOKS LIKE A PLAN. RECCE AT BRAM LONGSTAFFE

Two weeks to go, and Amy, Karen and Ellie have been wandering the installation site at Bram Longstaffe Nursery to decide what is going where and sorting out a timetable for the day with Bram's Head Teacher Jackie Drake and John.

The garden is a lot lusher and denser since our early site visits in the spring, and offers lots of places for surprises, hidden sound sources and contained spaces for our audiences to view the work.  There's a wet weather plan in the offing ( "run..") and we are hoping to have Brams Governor and Walney Councillor Alec Proffit on hand to fire up the Brams Bread oven, which was built at the end of last year by Japanese artist Yuki Akama with help from  John, Alec and Finn from the Bram's parents group.  Looks like a plan. Or at least the beginning of one.

ASSEMBLY AT SOUTH WALNEY

By way of a dry run for the presentation and as a way of sharing their work with their families and friends we held an Outdoor Assembly. Here are some photos of what was an excellent morning, and much enjoyed by one and all.
After the project is over, Ellie and the Year Two group have decided that The treehouse models will be given to the Reception year boys and girls to enjoy in their classroom.

NORTH WALNEY AT THE MERZBARN

Awareness of the sonic environment has been a feature of the North Walney project, and the idea of Sound as Resource led to some good research and composition in the weeks leading up the Merzbarn visit.

We began again at the Armitt in Ambleside. These visits have been vital for demonstrating the breadth of Schwitters' approach, and for dispelling any over romantic idea of the artist as a rural eccentric. These children are themselves from a environment of contrast; at any turn Barrow's current and former industrial landscape can either merge or contrast  with the natural and managed landscapes of the Furness Peninsula and Walney Island. The Armitt has provided us with a point to follow up classroom discussions about Schwitters' background , his importance to the 20th Century art and  and the circumstances that brought him to Cumbria. There is scope for a greater look at Schwitters' story in other areas of the curriculum, and we hope to persue this in a later project. The Walney group are a little older than some of our children , and their questions and comments have demonstrated an awareness of the practicalities behind a project like the Merzbarn, and a great appreciation of   the Armitt's collection.  We are grateful to the Museum and its staff for their support.

The work on site included listening exercises, and recording written impressions. The Langdale Art trail provided an excellent vehicle for the close observation and engagement with place we asked for from this group.  At the Merzbarn the children were introduced to some surprise visitors.   Martin Bagness is a well-known figure in Ambleside, an Olympic medallist Orienteer and climber he also runs Bilbo's cafe and writes music with South Cumbrian traditional musician Mike Willoughby.  Martin explained to the children that he lives in Schwitters' old flat, and has made it his mission to learn about the man and his life .

Martin brought with him his own Slate Lithophone, tuned to 3 octaves of C and played with Golfball beaters.
Amy integrated work with the lithophone into  percussion pieces, using the metre of sections of the Ursonata.  

The clay relief work produced a number of good results, the children were provided with a selection of new and corroded hardware, plastics, coins and other materials associated with construction and assembly rather than the natural landscape. They were asked to think about the properties and form of the materials, and to make careful selections as to what they used and where they placed them in the clay.

Amy plans to use the sound recordings made today alongside those made earlier as elements in  a long form sound piece to be further developed back in school. The group will make and edit  further recordings, with the intention of broadcasting them to radios scattered around the site, an idea we  were introduced to by  Schwitters devotees Mobile Radio, friends of ourselves and of  the Octopus Collective and based in Germany.