The Trip

There was a course trip for first year’s this week, we spent Monday to Wednesday at Featherstone Castle, which is in the middle of nowhere about 2 miles from Hadrian’s wall.

Course trips for first year students are seen as essential, not so much as a chance to work elsewhere or to visit places of cultural interest, put as a bonding mechanism. This is something very important, as group dynamics are vital to the success of the program. We are entering the forth week and already cliques have started to form and some students as individuals are shy or socially awkward. These groups need stirring round a little and opportunities for new relationships set up. The fact that Featherstone Castle is remote, very run down, lacks amenities, has no wi fi access and is run by an eccentric elderly gentleman, who tells very good stories is perfect for the job. The additional fact that it has extensive grounds that slope down to the river, including both woodland and overgrown gardens is also useful.

For the staff most of the time is spent overseeing cooking and preparing food, as well as organizing 50 mainly young people who are in cold dormitories and yearning for some central heating.

We do work of course and for some students it is a very productive time, and a chance for them to test out where they can work and more importantly whether or not the studio environment is the ideal place for them.

The Transformation brief is still running, but there is another brief to be set going ‘Materials and Processes’.

I give a talk on how using using different materials and their associated working processes can transform things. I look at a range of artists using processes as diverse as plywood forming to glass blowing, digging holes to throwing sticks. The key point being that everything can be crafted, all activities demanding care and attention to how they are done; the craft of walking being as important as the craft of stone carving.  Initially I’m looking at how ideas could possibly be transformed by building them using different materials, but I also have to separate out ideas into two parts so that I can explain the new brief. The new ‘Materials and Processes’ brief is one that runs throughout the year and students are required to keep evidence of every material and process they have used, whether it is welding or log splitting, it all has to be documented and recorded, and then finally reflected upon. As always I find these briefs far too restrictive and narrow, but at least it’s a clear and simple task to do.

At one point I show them some of Erwin Wurm’s ‘One Minute Sculptures” and make one myself by trapping as many DVD cases as I can between my body and the wall, I make a mess of it and end up with only three holding my weight, but they get the point. It can be fun; deal with fundamental things and by using a camera you can capture the vital moment.

I gradually find myself weaving a story between meaning making and documentation, finally arriving at a point where I try and get the students to see that they have in effect arrived in some sort of arcadia. A space of transformation, in effect an enchanted island, cut off from the world where they can themselves reinvent who they are and what they do. I end up singing them Ariel’s song ‘Where the bee sucks’ from The Tempest, for them it’s a really odd thing for someone to do, but hopefully it makes the point memorable.

On the second day students get a very different lecture, the owner of the castle gives a talk on its history, this is fascinating and includes ghost stories and tales of prisoner of war camps for Italian and German soldiers. What is interesting is that material evidence can be found for all the stories either in the various building stages of the castle, or traces of long gone camp huts and a cinder 400-meter running track built by POWs. 

I follow his hard to follow act with a reminder to the students of how the stories are materially evidenced and that materials therefore hold in themselves other forms of potential, associations, memories, and possibilities for new stories. 

One of his stories included the walking of 4,000 POWs through a local bluebell wood to the camp where they were to be billeted for the duration of the war. I picked this image out as something that could be visualized in ways that left the results still open to interpretation but also making a direct response to the story.

Apparently the same bluebell wood still exists and bluebells still come out in Spring. An individual could walk through those bluebells 4,000 times in order to recreate the event, (we had looked at Richard Long’s walk traces as an example of craft the day before) however this time the link between walking as art and the idea of art as ‘history painting’ could become conjoined.

So on the second day students were sent out to work with an extra issue to consider, materials have histories and cultural associations, do these offer potential for further transformations or new ideas?  

Unlike many similar trips in the past we get very little time to see them working, once briefed, students disperse out into the grounds and we go back to food preparation and/or cleaning the kitchen. The food is though fantastic and crafted to high levels not only in preparation but presentation. This hopefully percolates through and several students make comments as to how seriously we take the cooking. We tell them, “Whether mixing a colour or making a soup, care and attention to detail is vital”.  

As evening entertainment we have a selection of artist DVDs to show, ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy”, ‘Lust for Life”, ‘Pollock”, ‘Basquiat’ etc. It’s interesting how many of them have made choices to come into the profession based on the artist myths as played out in these sort of films. We remind them that their own profession and it’s myths, are at times a subject matter for artists.