The Final Fridays walks 8 - 12 (August to December 2024)

Looking for the gap in the fence.

Beginning to read Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (2013) last summer has been transformational on my approach to the Final Fridays.

You know that feeling when you read a book that feels so fundamentally pivotal, and the world starts to make a bit more sense, because you feel deep down that there’s always been something wrong with how we organise, partition, and describe it? Yeah, that.

So, I decided to seek a gap for these thoughts to root.

Since the start of the Final Fridays in January 2024 I have recorded the walks on a GoPro and edited the film each month to document the journey and the process. Something about this started feeling too lineal, both in the development of ideas from one walk to the next, and in the order of activities within the walk.

At times when we are walking and mark-making, our senses can reawaken memory, and this can be transformative on our understanding of the concept of ‘now’ and how we experience time and place. Are we where we are, or are we back in that memory? What set of circumstances has led to the assemblage of things we consider to be the present moment? Our experience of the world does not tend to be lineal, but rhizomatic.

The monthly film edits as they stand don’t reflect these ideas. I have continued to record each walk but will be looking for future edits to form portals rather than transitions.

Seeking a no-man’s land.

Another change since reading Deleuze and Guattari, has been a re-consideration of how we make marks on the Final Fridays walks. Since August we have moved from individual sketchbooks to all working together on the same 10-meter roll of paper.

This co-creative practice helps encourage more of a sense of community and collaboration, considering the roll of paper as a de-authored and de-hierarchical space. Deleuze and Guattari might deem this ‘a smooth space’.

I have been thinking about the space created on these rolls of paper as a sort of no-man’s land, like the types of edgleland places we seek during the walks. The sort of places no-one is really responsible for, or at least no-one takes individual responsibility for. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts’ Edgelands (2012) continues to be inspirational for the sort of places we seek on the walks.

The act of rolling and unrolling of the paper has been synonymous with the rolling and unrolling of time and place. The marks we make on the roll of paper has allowed more space for non-human voices in the work – feedback from surfaces, and dialogues with the unknown.

Since working in this way participants have remarked on a feeling of greater interconnectivity not just between each other, but also between us and the land. We have spent longer in particular places, thinking about the sense of lingering, revisiting, remembering, and repeating.

Concepts such as edges and thresholds have become more significant, and as we move into the next stage of the Final Fridays, more space will be given for the unknown, the unexpected, the in-between, and the forgotten.

The Final Fridays will continue throughout 2025 at a revised time of 5:30pm, on the final Friday of every month, from Altogether Otherwise.

THINGS HAVE CHANGED

Since my previous entries in this journal about the installation at Altogether Otherwise (see: ALTOGETHER OTHER AT ALTOGETHER OTHERWISE and ALTOGETHER OTHER), things have changed.

The installation at Altogether Otherwise has become something altogether different. Something more akin to a field research centre, conducting investigations and explorations in the landscape by collecting and sampling matter and data, marking time and place with the things that we can all experience together.

Containing maps, plans, GPS coordinates, instant film images, Google Earth images, and photocopied images of drawings; the installation expands upon the previous Final Friday mark-making walks and anticipates those upcoming. It is a collective, and co-created work of landscape art, continually in flux and never static. Renamed The Final Fridays, this installation is intertwined and integrated within the walks that it intra-acts with. It is an example of intra-active and relational landscape art.

QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERING

I have recently been closely considering some questions that have been posed about my residency at Altogether Otherwise, which includes the Final Fridays mark-making walks, alongside an installation.

 

What is happening in the relationships between myself as the facilitator, or ‘the artist’, and the people, or ‘the participants’, joining me on the Final Fridays mark-making walks? Whose choices determine what happens?

 

The formation of Landscape art that happens on the mark-making walks is co-created. Authorship, if such a thing can even exist, belongs to all those taking part, if at all. I am more of an artist as curator than ‘the artist’. Through my practice and my research, I am interested in the things we can all see together. I am not particularly interested in phenomenology, psychogeography, or one person’s individual response over the collective. No one person’s perspective is any better than anyone else’s. There is no value hierarchy, only variability.

 

Am I analysing my own practice or analysing the work of others?

 

Both. I am analysing the work of a dynamic collective of collaborators and co-creators, of which I am part. The work is formed through the intra-activity of the collective. We do not exist as independent agents, but co-operative and interdependent agents. The work of Karen Barad, and her theories around interrelationships has been influential to me as I continue to contextualise this dynamic.

The walks are time-based, collective, and relational landscape artworks, facilitated by me, by co-created by all those taking part. We are interdependent; not independent, intra-acting; not interacting.

The installations are both prequels and sequels. They are both a before and an after. A priori and posteriori; reactive and proactive. They activate and expand. They diffract and intra-act. They investigate the walks and become entangled with them.

Authorship of the installation is unimportant. As ‘the artist’, I am not fully in control of it and I make decisions based on the outcomes of unexpected encounters.

Altogether Other at Altogether Otherwise

The installation piece Altogether Other began as a relatively static piece. An artwork that came into existence at the group exhibition Continuum at Hive Gallery, it remained in place just as it was, for the duration of the show. However, it’s next iteration at Altogether Otherwise will not be static, but in flux; dynamic, open-ended, and ever-changing.

Not quite a studio space, not quite an exhibition, Altogether Other will be a space that holds live investigations. More like an office or a lab than an art space. At times we may even deny it exists. Things will be added, removed, altered over time. It will respond.

The piece has grown out of my studio space, out of my painting practice, to take on a new role of art as searching for an unknown sense of time and place.

Both the installation and my walking practice are about searching for a sense of lost time and place. Searching through walking, presenting, investigating, mark-making, reanimating, projecting, reminding, and remediating.

From January 2024, there will be monthly sketchbook walks from Altogether Other, on the final Friday of every month. In the sketchbook walks we will use walking and mark-making as a group, to explore, discover, listen, experience, and linger.

The walks inform the installation and the installation informs the walks. Ideally this would become a perpetual feedback loop, always present, but often out of sync, and disjointed, like the ghosts and magick of the land we continue to seek.

Altogether Other

An installation set up in the back of house areas at Hive Gallery in Bolton as part of the group show Continuum. An exhibition of art from the University of Bolton tutors past and present. 15th July - 19th August 2023.

The installation was titled Altogether Other.

Making use of the usually inaccessible back of house areas, the installation sought to present ‘an other’. There was something else going on as part of this group show, and it felt as though something was under investigation, and those conducting the investigation had not long left. An assemblage of art objects were presented alongside ephemera one might expect to be present in the back areas such as stacked up chairs, a mop and bucket, a step ladder, and other housekeeping equipment. After weaving through the passageway of paintings and photographic installations, viewers would find themselves presented with a small room where the main piece of the installation was to be found. In this small room, there was a sculpture sat on top of an overhead projector, projecting the base of the sculpture onto the facing wall. The side of the sculpture was being recorded by an old analogue video camera which displayed its image onto a black and white television via a video cassette recorder. The installation seemed to be filming and projecting itself in an endless loop, awaiting a point of disturbance. This disturbance was ready to re-occur and repeat on the activation of those present carrying the congruent set of conditions.

Viewers were left with the feeling that they had departed the gallery environment temporarily, and had stepped beyond an imagined boundary into something else. An unsettling experience leading to viewers questioning whether they were allowed to be there. Something has happened here that was unexpected. It was still happening. A live repetition of an unknown, or peculiar set of circumstances.

This installation marks the beginnings of an open-ended investigation into aspects of hauntology, the paranormal, and pseudo-science orchestrated by an art practice which will continue to involve painting, photography, video, assemblage, and analogue or obsolete image-making technology. Altogether Other will be remade in another space for longer term investigations, and subject to change, development, and repetition as part of an artist residency to be announced soon.