ARTISTS TALKING

# 8 [17 June 2010]

Leeds Young Authors are a group of young people who meet weekly to write and perform poetry.  I am interested in the group because they contribute to the creative map of Chapeltown.  Also, I have seen some of the older poets from Leeds Young Authors perform at Letterbomb in Leeds before and I know they go to poetry slams in America and their work was brilliant.  So I am going along to the group tonight to find out more and meet more young people.

So, before the young people arrived I chatted with Khadijah Ibrahim and Paulette Morris who were running the session.  They were saying that when they were at school in the 70s was the most exciting time for creative energy in Chapeltown as young black people didn't have many opportunities in education so had to make their own ways of working and expressing themselves.  From talking to them it seems that lots of artists, poets, musicians, performers from the area work internationally and come back to Chapeltown to give back to the community although they aren't necessarily known about in the rest of Leeds.  I find this strange because surely this should be something for the city of Leeds to boast about!

Names that come up include Leonora Stapleton and Harlem Dance, Kuffdem theatre, David Hamilton and Phoenix Dance.  Paulette tells me how her Dad was the first peripatetic steel drum teacher in Leeds and that he went round lots of schools in the Leeds area at a time lots of people had never seen a black man before in more rural areas.

# 7 [16 June 2010]

I went to meet Max Farrar with Ulrika (Flink) today, she is interested in his photographs of the carnival and curating a show around this and I thought it would be interesting to see his work and hear about his experience of Chapeltown and the carnival, which he began documenting in the early 70s.

Max talked about photographs as part of the collective memory, he showed us lots of photos of the carnival as well as peoples weddings, other family celebrations and photos of peoples families taken in their homes.  Max Farrar said he has been like a community photographer and lots of people have asked him to take photos of him.  As a professor or sociology, and his energetic way, Max Farrar has an interesting commentary on Chapeltown and his own work.  He is a font of knowledge on the carnival committee, how it came about and who has been instrumental in the community over the years such as Arthur France and Garnet Dore so I have lots of leads to follow up from this meeting.

From Max we learnt about Peepal Tree Press, a local publishers who I must find out more about.  We talk about the national carnival centre in Luton - where I'm from and how it is mapping carnival histories.  We talked about where carnival originates from - the 19th century transgression of society  when colonialists houses were burnt down.  Carnival as inversion of norms and how at Leeds carnival on the Monday mornings after the weekend of partying, young people would still be out in their party clothes and the oldies would come out in their pyjamas.  Play and jeu vert...

It was interesting to listen to Max talk about his experiences of Chapeltown in the 70s as a white guy living in the area.  He said the first protest he was witness to was in 1971, he heard it from his window and went down, he went to the meeting room with the group but wouldn't have dared take any photos as black people were very wary of white people at that time.  One thing I realise from working in Chapeltown, which I did know already, however in a more theoretical way, is how recent the history of division between races is and how different it would have been to grow up 20 years earlier.

Max suggested we should get in contact with Leroy, a black photographer who also took lots of photos of the carnival so Ulrika is going to try and find him.

We discuss the Leeds art scene and why the Chapeltown art scene seems so separate to this, do black artists from the area choose not to engage with it or do they not feel welcome or invited.  Perhaps the is an 'invisible barrier of space'.  Maybe for some it is a choice to work within the community that their creativity developed in.

Overall a very interesting discussion to think about.

# 6 [16 June 2010]

So, the MAPPING event.  I have been looking into maps which has been very iteresting.  Chapeltown as an area isn't actually recognised by the Ordnance Survey.  The Chapeltown Development Trust commissioned Leeds City Council to make a map of the borders of Chapeltown when it started up a year or so ago.  However, from speaking to people I imagine that there are different ideas about where the border of Chapeltown is within the community.  Just thinking about how - technicalities and materials - to get people to map out borders, daily journeys and favourite places etc.

# 5 [16 June 2010]

So, some dance students got in touch - from Northern School of contemporary dance across the road from union 105.  They have to do a collaborative project and might be interested in working with me.  The deadline is very soon for their project and I am also organising a mapping event so will see what kind of work they want to make.

We meet.  They are nice, Why Not? is their theme.  They are thinking about socially acceptible behaviour and what people will or won't do in front of others.  This is interesting and we discuss how this could relate to my work and to the local community.  With so many people from different cultures living in the area it occured that maybe there are things that people do that aren't acceptible to other cultures and whether the boundaries of appropriateness of behaviour are blurred or crossed.  We discussed documenting or observing people in the street and whether they do things that we or others might find inappropriate and then recreating them in performance.  Or asking people what they wouldn't do in public space or what they would love to do in public space but don't feel able to.  We could then create these acts as a representation of the thoughts of others from the local community.

This could be interesting

# 4 [16 June 2010]

I feel like Chapeltown is such a rich area, culturally, creatively and historically.  I am going to collect stories, oral histories and existing documentation of the area and communities who live here. I am also interested in how people navigate around Chapeltown and where the paths of different people cross, whether public spaces are shared between communities or not.  So I am going to look for old maps as well as present maps of Chapeltown and develop some work around mapping.  I have always loved maps so this should be interesting!

# 3 [16 June 2010]

In the first week of my resideny the Union 105 Salon show is coming to an end and I go to the gallery for a peer to peer discussion about some of the artists' work.  The Salon show was brilliant, with interesting artwork, curated nicely and having a salon was a brilliant way of getting lots of local artists and residents tyo come into the space.  So I was happy to meet some of the artists and here about their work at this informal group crit.

As well as the artists' work, we discuss education and what an art education gives you aor doesn't and whether it's important in being an artist.  The consensus is that going to art school isn't the most important thing - making good art is.  However, I can't help noticing that the many self taught artists I have met in the area so far some how feel apart from the art world that I know and feel obliged to keep bringing up the fact that they didn't study art, as if this makes their opinions and artwork less valid, which it does not.

# 2 [16 June 2010]

I am also really interested in this parade of shops - Reginald Parade.  There is a sign outside, a compulsory purchase order.  And the new joint service centre is being built right next to it.  I feel sad about this even though I didn't know the shops that were there because they have all closed down except one - the hairdressers, which is still open and doing business.  I wonder what their plan is for the future?

From conversations I've had with people already I can feel some resentment towards the joint service centre, it has taken over half the playground and forced this shops, which were well appreciated by the community, to move out.  If the parade was done up it would look beautiful but I guess it's too late for that now.

# 1 [16 June 2010]

So, the residency has been going well.  I have been meeting lots of interesting people, having conversations about Chapeltown past and present and building up a body of research work.

I'll start from the beginning:

On Wednesday 14th April, the first day of my residency, I wrote:  Walking up Chapeltown Road a lot of interesting things jump out at me already.  Blocked up doors in walls and buildings, lavish plants and trees spaced sparsley and sporadically in large gardens and the overall grandness of the architecture.  The dilapidation, the building sites and the remnants of shoddy building work.  I am struck by the clearly evident history of strong community bonds and awareness of heritage, as well as the multitude of communities living in and accessing the area.  Community centres, religious centres, memorials and acknowledgements are in abundance.

I have also noticed that Chapeltown still has working phone boxes, unlike many other areas and it even has a red phone box, which by the way, stinks of piss but functions perfectly.  I wonder if it is the only one in Leeds apart from the one in City Square.

I ask myself: 

-  Do people use these open spaces in the ways their architecture suggests?  Like the stage area in the park next to Unity - does anyone ever perform there?

-  Do memorials and tributes to tragic acts (in this space and others) allow/promote or hinder change and development.  I agree that we must be aware and knowledgeable of our hertiage, history and legacies of theose who came before us, however, would it not be more appropriate for these dedicated physical tributes to give hope for the future?  Perhaps like Jaume Plensa's 'Dream' in St Helen's.

-  What allows or would enable distinct communities to thrive in the area?

-  What used to be here, who used to live here and how does that impact on today?

-  Does the existence of so many community initiatives indicate their necessity? Or, the communities' active voices and caring for their communities?  Or that extra funding has been available for these within Chapeltown?

As I continue up Chapeltown Road, the houses become less grand but better kept, the streets tidier and the road pothole free.  I ask myself, 'have I crossed the border into Chapel Allerton?  Then I see a sign for Chapel Allerton Hospital.  It's only later, after talking to people who have grown up here and lived here that I discover that 20 years ago Chapel Allerton and Chapeltown were in fact the same area with the same communities living in them.