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Showing posts from 2018

On returning home

Family issues have required me to return to the Isle of Man, where I lived from 1966-1979. It has changed a lot but still has a geography of memory and poetry.... Ersatz Memphis Your old school only with extensions, of stiff joints,  Smeared and running down, draining, creaking gulls, salt grime  sticky, blown dry, of corrosion to that pretender syndrome.  Newness equals something quintessential like the early eighties -  ersatz Memphis  Of a bad idea bankrupt in poor locations, dregs. Sacrificing First  Nation hate sanded & mouldering to resentment that corporal  arrogance aspires only to commissioner syndrome. But linger Nice skies and fresh air and concrete of pebbles and small stones  cracking and damp  With salt Memories     like the Latin for ‘flying buttress’     Normal distribution is to American churches as vinyl    over slate and stone is to Old haunts –  there and gone with scaffolding in beautiful geometry with only Spring further

Gaza

It's not much in the horrific circumstances of 16 Palestinians killed and more than 1400 injured yesterday, but I thought I'd republish my 2005 poem 'Israel':  0. homotopy equates to  autoimmune disorder : to transform every figure into a Compendious Book on Guernica by incidence and effects enshrine pernicious anemia around anthropic argument: verb sensitive to assumption reports exogenous acts of God – operations run their inquisition. All the texts submitted and accumulate authority to help run their Inquisition moving a negative quantity from one side of the equation to the other side with changing its commutation all the same. These so irretrievable. The overstaid fraction, so irretrievable, overstaid, auxetic, coloured by pungent ahistoricism; unsettling sonorities webbed over the other ideas report adverse events and deterred from becoming expert witnesses no human conjecture is involved, a physical transportation, curfewed to prove

Marianne Eigenheer

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I discovered this week that the great artist and my friend Marianne Eigenheer has passed away. Marianne has been a constant support in the work of Bury Art Museum since 2006. We met that year in Reykjavik at an Alan Johnson exhibition at Safn . We actually met at the exhibition, but it turned out when we started talking that her first encounter with me had been earlier. She was walking up the main street and passed my hotel. My first time in Iceland, I was wondering how warmly one needed to dress. The hotel room window only opened ajar, so I pushed my arm out to test the temperature and Marianne, below, was fascinated by this hand inexplicably waving in the air from an upstairs window. In Bury we have shown (and have in the permanent collection) her beautifully poetic line drawings, and her video-drawing “ Dancing Chairs and a Walking Woman ” originally in the Irony of Flatness in 2008 and again as part of the Foreigners exhibition last year. Marianne was endlessly w

Irwell Sculpture Trail Tales (2) – Ed Allington

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In the first IST blog, I mentioned how the National Lottery Assessor, Mike Sixsmith, who recommended we receive the funding to build the trail, observed that we hadn’t bid for enough money to achieve the scale of its ambition. My previous experience had been with projects of up to about £15,000. When describing the aim of commissioning internationally significant artworks which would put IST on the world stage, I had guessed that such commissions would cost about £80,000. Mike and I were standing in Ramsbottom Market Square which was one of the highest profile sites on the whole trail. He really like the site and thought it had massive potential for a sculpture but, like with other key sites, he observed that such a location would need nearer to £250,000. It was this conversation that prompted the significant increase in the final lottery grant referred to in the last blog. Because of the high visibility of the sculpture, we created a selection panel of local councillors and o

Irwell Sculpture Trail – 25 Years of Public Art (1)

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This year is officially the 25 th Anniversary of the  Irwell Sculpture Trail   (IST). It’s a funny feeling realising that you have been working on something that long, provoking, inevitably, the urge to reminisce. As anyone who tried to study the Text Festival, before Susan Lord stepped in to establish the Text Archive , will know I am notoriously disinterested in past projects – as John Peel used to say: “The last song isn’t as interesting as the next song”.   Someone wanting to know about the IST can look at the website, visit the sculptures or, if studying public art, make an appointment to see the historical files. But there are very few people left who can tell the stories behind the IST and the artists, and actually only me left still able to recount the tales of the 40+ artworks plus supporting community projects, temporary works and exhibitions, and ultimately also the creation of the Bury Sculpture Centre in 2014. The first sculpture I curated was by an artist called