LINES OF RESISTANCE

TRUE NATURE 2011, painted applewood, willow and silver birch, 110 x 45 x 12 cms

It seems I'm drawn to trespass - to cross the line, to make my own desire lines.  'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us.'  I don't think of myself as religious - having been brought up in a secular working class family for whom Sunday was a day of roaming.  At school though, we said the Lords Prayer every day and, whenever I heard the line, I thought of my grandparents and what they'd taught me about trespass.

Despite all the printed and handpainted notices I used to see on posts and fences in the countryside when I was a child spelling out TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED, trespass was not and still is not a criminal offence in Britain.

April 24th 2012 will be the 80th anniversary of the Mass Trespass on Kinder Scout. 

On Sunday 24th April 1932 a group of about 400 ramblers from Manchester, led by Benny Rothman, set off from Hayfield to cross the moors up to the top of Kinder.  The aim of the trespass was to uphold the right of walkers to unrestricted access to uncultivated moorland.  That same morning a group of ramblers from Sheffield (which included my grandparents) set off from Edale to join the Manchester group on top of the Kinder plateau - the highest point in the Peak District.  On the plateau the Manchester ramblers came in conflict with the Duke of Devonshire's gamekeepers.  One gamekeeper was injured in the ensuing scuffles and Benny Rothman and five others were arrested and tried for unlawful assembly and breach of the peace.  They received jail sentences of up to six months.

A few weeks later, moved by the plight of the Kinder trespassers, a group of 10,000 ramblers - the largest in history - assembled for an access rally in Winnats Pass near Castleton.

These mass actions by walkers and ramblers led to the establishment of the National Parks in 1949 - including the Peak District National Park in Derbyshire which borders the southern edge of Sheffield.

The Duke of Devonshire was something of a 'baddy' to me when I little.  He owned a lot property in the city and most of the land around Sheffield and we seemed to spend many a Sunday afternoon trespassing on it.
Although he worked in the steel industry my grandfather was a born countryman who loved annd great respect for nature.  He'd been brought up on a large estate in Lincolnshire where his father, my great grandfather was head gardener and my great grandmother had been in service as a kitchen-maid.  Grandy Marvell, as I knew him, came to Sheffield after the First World War to look for work in the factories.  There, in the east end of Sheffield, he met my Grandmother Lizzie and they set up home in Bright Street, Carbrook in a two-up, two-down terraced house next door to the Brightside and Carbrook Co-operative Society Store. 

By the mid 1950s they were able to afford to buy a small car - a stone grey coloured Ford Poplar, registration number OLA 583, the only car registration I've ever been able to remember.  I loved that car dearly, it was my transport to heaven - a day out in the country-side every Sunday, summer or winter, rain or shine, snow or sleet.  Grandy Marvell would be at the wheel, Nan-nan Marvell in the passenger seat and myself, my brother and cousin in the back.  'Slow down Frank we've got kiddies in't back' Nan-nan would say if the speedometer ever nudged over 30mph.

In the summer there'd be picnics on the moors above Toads Mouth and the ancient iron age settlement at Carl Wark.  In the winter we'd walk through the snow to visit Tip's grave at Ladybower Dam and drink hot beef tea to keep warm.

We were taught to respect the country-side: keep to well-trodden paths where possible - they are the safest, close all gates behind you and never, ever drop litter.  Wildflowers we could pick (no longer alas) but we were also taught their common names: toadflax, cuckoo pint, ragged robin, lady's slipper and eggs and bacon.   Wild berries we foraged for in their season; blackberries, bilberries, elderberries and sloes to take home to make pies, jam, wine and liqueur. 

TRESPASS 2007, red and green dogwood and painted willow, 90 x 65 x 12cm

These pieces are about boundaries.  I feel that my grandparents were teaching me about the importance of and respect for boundaries: when it's okay to cross the line and when not.  Some property is private and access should be respected. Some property is common ground and, though there are those who might try to claim it as their own and deny the access of others, they should be resisted - if necessary again and again until the lines of resistance are clearly woven into the social  fabric.

In this blog I'm tracing my desire lines.  If you'd like to follow, please tread carefully. 

Carrying on the family line

I was born in the industrial east end of Sheffield.  All my immediate family; parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and later my two brothers, worked in the steel industry.  My grandfather, for example, worked in the rolling mills making stainless steel for aircraft engines,  while my grandmother was a buffer girl whose job it was to buff and polish the famous Sheffield silver-plate cutlery. At home she always wore white cotton gloves to hide the raw and weeping sores on her hands caused by industrial dermatitis.  My dad was one of the few family members who had a 'white-collar' job - he didn't come home with dirty hands.  He'd studied technical drawing at school and worked all his life as a jig and tool draughtsman.  He designed the screws for the Thames Barrier (not, as I used to imagine, the tiddley little ones that you can tighten with a screw-driver but the gi-normous ones that open and close the barrier itself).

I was the first of my family to go to college and not have to work in the steel industry. Nevertheless, one of my first summer jobs when I was on art foundation was working in the packing department at a famous tool company.  The few short weeks I was there seemed interminable as, day after day, I boxed up thousands  of hammers, planes, files, screwdrivers, drills and  knives.  It was so mind-numbingly tedious as to put me off hand-tools for life.  I studied sculpture at Art College and we all had to buy a metal tool box filled with hand tools supplied at a special rate by the company I'd been working for.  Throughout my course I somehow managed to devise ways of making sculpture without using any of them. 

Apart from the fact that they were made in Sheffield, from mild steel by a Sheffield company Rabone Chesterman, what I now love most about making these plaited vintage steel tape-measure bangles is that they are handmade in every sense. Like most plaited basketry, my hands are the only tools I need to make them.  More than that they are actually formed around my hand, to pass over my hand and are then worn close to the hand. 

The plait itself is a paradoxical thing: it looks on the surface like a multi-stranded plait but is made from a single length which alternates between warp and weft, the weave unending until the thread runs out. 

After all that seemingly endless packing who'd have thought I'd ever end up using re-cycled strapping tape as one of my favourite basketry materials.  I  love the circularity: what goes around, comes around!  Desire is almost never straightforward.

                                       GREEN JEWEL 2010, polypropylene strapping tape, rattan and vine.
All photos by Sylvain Deleu.

First line......

The desire or the line - which comes first?

I don't know when or where I first came across the notion of a desire line or desire lines.  It feels like it's one of those things I always just knew about and therefore assumed everyone else did too - just common knowledge.  The more I talk about it to people and ask if they've ever come across the term, the more I'm realising that it isn't such common knowledge.  In fact, so far, no one I've spoken to about it has heard of it.

For me though, and other makers I now realise, this is a powerfully evocative, super-charged pair of words DESIRE LINES (I prefer the plural)- each one a little bomb of inspiration which together trigger chain reactions of ideas for making.

I've always had a desire to make things, mainly three dimensional objects that I can make solely with my hands.  I'm not a lover of tools.  As I'm making the often slow, concentrated, repetitive movements of the basketry techniques I now use seem to stimulate thought processes around and about the work in progress.

I've always been something of a collector too.  I have collections of words, phrases and potential titles for my work.  I think of basketry as a meditative process through which I can follow a line of thought, collecting and gathering together ideas along the way to give expression to my heart's desire. 

I enjoy making abstract, open, linear forms.  Many basketmakers are drawn to lines - it goes with the territory and much of the material.  I'm particularly drawn to the narrative qualities of accumulations of lines - notations, writings and storylines.  So it goes - nothing new.  Yet we try to tell own story somehow.

DESIRE LINES 2010, painted apple, dogwood and rattan, 95 x 40 x 12cms

I've been collecting desire lines too for sometime (see later posts) but this piece made in March 2010 was the first expression of some of the research and ideas.  The applewood came from a small tree in my garden, the red dogwood from waste ground in my home town of Sheffield - I collected it with my grandchildren Jackson and Scarlett.  As well as the three branching lines crossing and disrupting the lines of stencilled applewood there are more lines of dried-blood-red dogwood threading down the channels of woven rattan. They can be glimpsed between the lines as kinetic points of colour.

As a small child growing up in the industrial east end of Sheffield I was often taken by my grandparents into the nearby Peak District, there to follow the desire lines of sheep, rabbits and Sunday ramblers across the moors.  In the 1930s my grandparents had joined a mass tresspass to ensure free access to the moors by workers in the surrounding cities.  The moors were the lungs of these cities - much more than a breath of fresh air they were a vital organ for bodies that were otherwise choked with sulphurous fumes and smog, heat and dust.  I spoke about this recently with conceptual artist Kate Murdoch whose Scottish family had similar experiences of the country-side above Muirkirk.

I first showed the piece at my interview for the Craft Council's Hothouse programme for emerging makers.  No one asked about the title - there were more searching lines of enquiry needing answers.