ON GETTING OUT OF STUCK

In the summer of 2021, The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland commissioned a number of artists to make a piece of artwork and a podcast – and gave us a very wide remit as to what these might look like.

I am very interested in uncovering different kinds of processes in relation to art making - pathways to getting inspired to make work or to get ourselves out of stuck. All things we’ve found more difficult than usual within a pandemic.

In response to the commission ask - I created two things - firstly I dipped into the background and thinking around archives, and made a podcast from interviews with three people from three key archives that I thought would be interesting and useful for students. Secondly I made an artwork from my own archive.

From those conversations I hoped to provide inspiration and techniques from the interviews, field recordings and archive collections that featured.

You’ll learn about creating and curating your own archive by hearing from people working with a range of library and archival collections including live art and performance in Glasgow and beyond. There are interviews with Lois Kiedan from Live Art Development Agency, Louise Lawson from Tate and Conor Walker from the National Library of Scotland. At the end of the podcast you can hear the sound artwork.

The artwork aspect came out of a spot of tidying I did last year under the first lockdown when I was stuck in my room away from my studio and life. I thought I could something useful and something I’d been putting off for a while. I went meandering through the mess of archives collected over many years from my part-time PhD from when I was doing lots of interviewing lots of people about two artworks – Jeremy Deller’s ‘Battle of Orgreave’ – the pretty famous re-enactment of a key battle between striking miners and police as part of the 84 -5 Miners’ Strike, and Graeme Miller’s epic audio soundscape relating to stories and histories lost as the result of the building of the M11 link road - ‘Linked’.

I listened to lots of those interviews and decided to create a piece ‘after’ Graeme’s work from some of the recordings I’d done over that time.

Linked is a walk that can take up to about five hours, as you walk through suburban East London, listening out for the soundscapes along a five-mile route in East London – made up of snippets of interviews and sound and music. My soundscape then is made up of snippets from my interviews about these works as well as the one time I took a group of people on the walk at night from 1am to dawn – that we did in silence. I had partially recorded that experience and it forms the base of the soundscape along with extracts, repetitions, and memories from those interviews.

This is particularly timely as Graeme Miller took Linked down at the end of 2021 after 18 years of the artwork talking into the air in Leyton and the surrounding area. Whilst Miller is staging intermittent events with Linked - it is no longer available in the way it was between 2003 - 2021.

All music unless otherwise mentioned - by Charles Ballas © 2023

Extract from Conor Walker “Pistol Shrimp, Muck” Sail Britain: Life of Islands residency 2019 https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=46316&snd=52615

“Thirty eight (degrees of separation)” © 2021 and used with kind permission of Kevin Sanders – https://hairdryerexcommunication.bandcamp.com/merch/kevin-sanders-embers

“Casiodrone” and “Wedding Song" © 2021 and used with kind permission by Daniel Thomas – https://sheepscar.bandcamp.com/album/codeine

Thanks to Charles Ballas, Lois Kiedan, Louise Lawson, Tate, Conor Walker, The National Library of Scotland, Live Art Development Agency, and especially to Mark Godber, Graeme Miller, and Tana West for being kind enough to let me use our conversations again.

This podcast was created whilst working with students from the Royal Conservatoire’s Fair Access programmes.

Banner image - “Linked Transmission Duration Image 02’ © Nicholas Middleton www.nicholasmiddleton.co.uk - Cyanotype 2024