Feedback from the Hangout Group on A Day In The Life

Feedback on The Second Draft of a Day in the Life

Having completed the second draft of my new project on A Day in The Life of my mother I shared the work with my fortnightly peer led Hangout Group.  The main points from the discussion are listed below:

• It worked well using my daughter to record the video as she 'became my mother'.
• Using my daughter's voice made it sound real and compelling.
• Several members thought that using my daughter really worked rather than my own voice.  This person felt a connection and found the work very interesting.
• One member of the group felt that the work became more confusing with the addition of a voice.  This person felt that my voice worked better as the female voice was flatter; there was no pause for reflection and it's freshness jarred somewhat.  This person also felt that if a voice was going to be used then there were two choices: a) no intonation at all and deadpan or, b) the opposite - illustrate the words by how they are spoken.
• Someone else suggested that the female voice was preferable but that it should be a performance.
• Perhaps use different voices or, as suggested by A Day in The Life group member in a different forum, try choral speaking with myself and my daughter.
• One member suggested that there could be different uses for the work.  I agree with this and intend to produce a version for family consumption as well as one for the art/academic stage.
• A general comment was there was a lot going on in the images and they were, perhaps confusing.  People were not sure which element to look at as none were prominent.  It was suggested that the map layer was the most distracting.  However, one member of the group felt that having several themes throughout makes it complex and makes the viewer work.
• One suggestion that I like is to produce the work as a video (with or without voice??) and have different elements coming to the fore and fading to allow another element prominence as the presentation proceeds.  I like this idea and can see it in my minds eye but it will need some research into technique.
• There was a suggestion that not only were the maps distracting, but the roads being all at the same angle/parallel lines was too.  As someone else suggested this could be resolved by changing the orientation.
• Overall people feel that this is a very rich project.

So where do I go from here?  I was very pleased with this hangout and it has given me much food for thought.  Despite the divided opinion I am still of the view that my daughter's reading of the words is the way forward.  I do, however, wonder if her rendition is rather flat.  In her defence, though, this was nearly done on sight.  I would like her to absorb herself in the full text and come with me to visit all of the locations and 'have a drink with her great grandfather' in the Star and Garter.  I would then like her to rehearse the reading and record it again.  I am also quite take with the idea of us sharing the reading; I don't think that the choral speaking idea would work.

I like the idea of producing the video and having different elements come to the fore and fade, but I am not totally sure how to physically do this yet.  I will try it with the Proshow Gold software first and if this doesn't work look elsewhere.

What I am very keen to do is to take out the maps and print the images with just the remaining two layers.  I will then print long narrow strips of map and use these to link the images together to reference the idea of journey.  This comes back to an original idea my wife and I discussed.  The work could then be exhibited in this way on a gallery wall as part of a larger exhibition.

I also like the idea of producing a physical collage with prints of my mother's writing, map sections, archive photographs and my own and, even as has been suggested other objects that are mentioned in the writing such as bottles of pop, tins of herrings.  I can see some of the images being cut out to be used in the collage in much the same way as I did digitally with the first image in the series.

With either of the last two ideas the work could be presented as a concertina artist's book.

There is much food for thought here and I have lots of ideas to play with.  I now have a deadline:  Grimsby Minster has nee booked for our group exhibition on A Day In A Life for mid January 2019.

A Day in a Life, Second Draft

A Day in a Life

Second Draft

This work is based on some personal writing of my mother's which she entitled My Memorable Day.  Written in the mid 1960s she tells the story of a day out with her father when she was about 8 years old and so, about 1930.  Grandad Taylor was a baker in the small Lincolnshire village of Martin and after baking the bread in the early hours of the morning he would then deliver it by horse drawn baker's cart around the local villages.  On this particular day my mother was taken with him.

In producing this second draft I have changed the following:

• In the first set of images I have not included a caption at all.  My mother's writing is part of each image and hopefully clear enough for the viewer to be able to make up their own mind as to what the image is saying.
• In the second (and also first set) I have not used my typed text of my mother's words but have cut and pasted the relevant phrases.  I have displayed these as they might look spread across two pages of a book or, perhaps on a gallery wall.
• For the third aspect of the work I have created an audio visual component where I read my mother's words.  The link to this can be found at the end of the images.
• I have achieved the consistency that was lacking in the first draft of this work.  Each image has three elements and all of the photographs fill the image space.  I have set the writing at the same opacity in order to achieve consistency of legibility.
• I am still working on one excellent suggestion, that of producing hard copies of the images by making use of cut and paste collage.  I really like this idea and my experiments continue.

This is still a work in progress and, as such, remains unresolved.  

The following images can be viewed large by clicking on a thumbnail.

Set 1

Set 2

Set 3

The images can be viewed as an audio visual presentation on Vimeo.  The link is : https://vimeo.com/283936302

For the above presentation I spoke my mother's words.  I also, felt, however, that it would be better to have a female voice and persuading my daughter to take on this role preserved the direct familial link.

The link to this on Vimeo is: https://vimeo.com/285985787

Feedback From My Hangout Group on A Day in a Life.

I have had this project in mind for some time.  I have always been fascinated by going back into the past to be a 'fly on the wall' and I think that this project using my mother's writing has done that.  I also have a theory that the landscape holds memories and this project is a way of exploring that idea.  As part of my networking I have become involved with a group of artists as part of the Arts Meridian initiative led by curator Linda Ingham.  Although continued Arts Council funding for the group failed to materialise, Linda encouraged us to continue as a self supported group included in which are painters, ceramicist, textile artists, sculptures, printers and myself as a photographer.  A title for our initial project was agreed: A Day in a Life (inspired by the Beatles song), with a view to exhibit later this year.  This was an ideal opportunity to begin work on my project using my mother's writing.  I had also discussed the project with my tutor during my feedback for Assignment 5 and he suggested that it would be good to submit the project, even as a work in progress, as part of my submission for final assessment in order to show evidence of sustaining my practice.

I have been working on the project over the last couple of months.  As well as my own contemporary images which I took while retracing my mother's journey at the same time of year as her day out, I have gathered images from our family archive, old maps and images from the internet and, of course, my mother's writing.

As part of my research I was recommended to read the paper: Photographs and Signatures: Absence, Presence and Temporality in Barthes and Derrida by Lori Wike.  I found this work fascinating and relevant when comparing my mother's personal writing, my own contemporary images and archive images.  I will write my thoughts on this paper in a future blog.

I shared the work with my Hangout Group on Thursday 12th July.

Overall the work was received positively by the group and they made very useful and helpful comments which will enable me to take the work forward.

All of the group felt that my typed text did not work well when it was part of the image as in numbers 1 - 20.  It was felt that it perhaps worked better when set out in book format in numbers 21 - 40.  However, despite being my mothers words, it was felt that the typed version did not work.  One suggestion was that I might extract my mother's own writing and use that as a caption or even rely on her writing as part of the image, even if the viewer had to look very carefully in order to tease out the image.  It was suggested by one that perhaps I was directing the viewer too much.  One person argued that the actual handwriting contains the essence of the person and this was lost if I type out the words, even if the writing is difficult to read as part of the image.  One excellent suggestion was that the words could be spoken instead of typed and form part of an audio visual presentation.  If I read the words it would be a direct link to my mother.  I am very taken with this idea and may well do this as well as exhibiting the work on a gallery wall or in a book.

One person liked the way that I had 'cut out' the photo of my mother in the first image and perhaps I could try that with other photographs.

It was generally agreed that consistency of presentation was lacking in the work; it was currently too haphazard.  I agree with this.  This is my first draft of the work and I have left it experimental in order to see what works and what doesn't, but I now need to work on consistency of approach.

There was some discussion on whether it was better to leave my mother's handwriting blue as I had converted some to black and white.  The general consensus was that I should leave it blue.

One person suggested that it was more difficult to respond emotionally to images of buildings and also that it worked better when none of the layers were opaque.

One member of the group felt that the execution of the work was very good, although there were some consistency issues.  This person felt that the second set, set out in book format worked better although my typed text was too modern.  It was felt that the images were too busy.

I also showed the work the same evening to a portfolio group to which I belong.  The agreed with much of what the Hangout group commented and also made the suggestion that I could try converting my contemporary images to sepia.

One member of the group couldn't make the hangout, but very kindly responded by email.  Many of the comments agreed with the rest of the group especially on the work being too busy with too many layers. Another point of agreement was that the actual handwriting was more important than my typed version.  Perhaps the images could be simplified by just using the maps and images and cropping the piece of handwriting that I wanted and using that as a caption, perhaps on the opposing page if using a book format.  The point that I really like is to produce the work in a journal format and physically layering the images, maps and prints to make a collage., perhaps experimenting with textures and giving a 3D rather than 2D outcome.

All in all some excellent feedback and plenty to think about in order to further develop the work.  My thanks go to the group.

A Day In A Life.

The idea for this new work came out of my progress through the Body of Work Module.  It is still a work in progress and as such, is, as yet, unresolved.  When I was walking the Viking Way from Lincoln through the Witham Valley and along footpaths through the Lincolnshire Limewoods, which resulted in the publication of my major project Shul, I became entranced by the idea that footpaths and the landscape itself hold memories of those that have gone before. I then began to wonder how to represent this idea photographically. I came up with the idea that if I could follow a journey that someone had written about, I could photograph it as it is now and pair that with written description from the past. I was aware that Robert Louis Stevenson was a big walker and had written about his long distance walks in France in his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. I thought that this would make an ideal project as the route is now a French long distance foot path, The Stevenson Trail. With time constraints this was a project for the future, though. Whilst reading Stevenson’s book, however, I remembered that I had inherited a piece of my mother’s original handwritten script from the 1960s describing a day out with her father in 1930 when she was eight. My grandfather was a journeyman baker, baking the bread in the early hours of the morning and then delivering around the local villages on his horse-drawn bread cart. My mother’s writing describes a day accompanying him on this round. This was a perfect project as I was able to follow in their tracks photographing landscapes and buildings that are described in the writing as they are today. I would be able to combine my contemporary photographs with my mother’s writing, archive photographs and old maps of the area. So this has become a project, not just exploring the fact that the landscape holds memories of those that have gone before, but also family memory, collective memory and the use of archives. I think that, like all memory, my mother’s writing is a memory construct and I have made those memories my own by recreating the journey and what I have selected from my mother’s script. The beauty of this project as well is that, through my networking and contact with Arts Meridian, I have become involved in a project entitled A Day in the Life, inspired by the Beatles song. My project fits this brief perfectly and hopefully, when complete, the work will be exhibited along with work from the rest of the group at Grimsby Minster.

The first task, then, was to gather together archive images, old maps and my mother’s writing and then retrace and photograph the journey.  Much of what was there in 1930 is no longer there.  The ‘Red Lion’ pub has been demolished and is now the site of a sheltered housing complex.  Most of the other pubs are private houses but I enjoyed researching and talking to local people and discovering their current locations. The old footbridge called The Pier mentioned in the writing has long gone but the foundations remain. And Pincher Francis’s Shop is now a private house.  I was fortunate in that I was able to make my journey at the same time of year as my mother: early summer.

This is a work in progress and I am still experimenting with the combination of my own images taken recently, my mother's text, old maps from the time, my own family archive photographs and others I have found on the internet.  I am also experimenting with how my the text might be used.  In the first of the two examples  below, the text is part of the image.  In the second I have displayed it as it might be if I published the work in book format.

If the first image is clicked it can be viewed large and then will run as a slide show.  I have numbered the images for identification purposes only.

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