Issue Three of the Shrieking Violet

Issue 3 of the Shrieking Violet is out today (it can be collected from the usual places - see previous postings!). There is a slight Autumn/ public art/ student/ university theme.

It features a cartoon by the multi-talented Rob Taylor (who also plays music under the name Sparky Deathcap), my piece on gargoyles in tiny print (it turned out to be much longer than I realised!), Jim Waterson on the demise of football terraces, Victoria Conway on females in comedy, an evocative piece on street collection boxes by Morag Rose, a short story and artwork by Lizzy Huthwaite, an article on murals and mosaics in Manchester by Manchester Modernist Society's wonderful E.P. Niblock, recipes by Rachel Cranshaw and Rebecca Wilmott and listings, plus illustrations by Alex Boswell and Fiona Bratherton.

The front cover was designed by Alex Boswell.

The self-assembly PDF version can be downloaded here.

To request a copy/ contribute, email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com.

The new issue of the Shrieking Violet has definitely been overshadowed by the discovery there is a new issue of Belle Vue out, though. The first issue, which came out last year, was the best fanzine I've ever read and a big influence on The Shrieking Violet. The new issue contains articles by E.P. Niblock and Richard Barrett and can be found in Piccadilly Records and the Cornerhouse bookshop.

Open publication - Free publishing - More violet

Where have all the gargoyles gone?

Manchester is a city of a million eyes. Everywhere, eyes watch you, stare at you, scrutinise you, look you up and down, look past you and through you, but rarely focus or make eye contact. There are some eyes that will never look away, though, once you meet their gaze, and will never close. These eyes of the city are cast in stone, relegated from the level of human life. They watch from a vantage point high above the city, detached from the world of the eyes attached to the heads that rush about below.

For Manchester has a parallel population, unknown to many of its present residents; gargoyles. Exaggeratedly real, these faces, often human-animal hybrids, are the guardians of the city, growing out of the brickwork. The city is their playground, where they contort and perform acrobatic feats. They nestle on the outside of the town hall, clamber up and down drain pipes upside down at John Rylands library on Deansgate and leer down at the River Medlock from the back of the Palace Hotel (the former Refuge Assurance Company), forced to forever look down into the depths below, hidden from most people but passengers on trains going across the railway tracks behind (buses are also good for gargoyle spotting!).

Strictly speaking, a gargoyle spouts water out of its mouth, as the word ‘gargoyle’ comes from the Latin for throat (think gurgle!). Medieval gargoyles were designed to collect rainwater, and non-watery gargoyles are known as chimeras. Most of Manchester’s are merely for decoration and only a few expel water, such as those on the fountain outside the town hall, where winged fish cling to the edge, their mouths forced wide open to spew water for the pleasure of the passing public.
Most are inconspicuous, but dramas are played out by these larger-than-life personalities. Though a few faces are stylised, most are astonishingly human, every last line of recognisable human experience carved into their faces. The erosion and smoothing away of stone, or layers of peeling paint from past attempts to cover up gargoyles, serves only to reinforce the effect, adding to their solemnity and seriousness.

Though gargoyles are often grotesque, their faces twisted into grimaces and mouths extended in agony, some are comic figures, at whom it’s impossible not to laugh. Rows of taunting gargoyles on the side of Manchester Cathedral hold their mouths open with their fingers, pull faces and stick their tongues out at you.

Perhaps it’s for the best that most people rarely look up, though. Some gargoyles are benign, cherubs providing a consoling view, but many people would be disconcerted if they got off the bus at Piccadilly Gardens, looked up at Somerfield and realised they were being eyed up by rows of staring lions, wide eyed and hungry. Somerfield’s pack of lions is just a small part of Manchester’s leonine population. Jowly lions watch over grand buildings, ready to pounce into action from the doors of the Old Fire Station on London Road, or loyally and proudly guard banks, reassuring customers their money is safe inside.
The city is also overrun by guard dogs. Caricatures with giant, pricked ears, they’re watching, waiting and listening. On the buildings of the Northern Quarter, dogs look defiantly out of columns and pillars as if daring you to try any funny business. At John Rylands library, gargoyles nest in corners in the stairwells that lead up to the historic reading room, as if reminding readers, before the days of CCTV, they were watching the precious books within.

Manchester is also a city of thousands of mouths. Eating, talking, gossiping, advising, shouting, singing, the city is never silent. There are some mouths that will never speak again, though. If they could, the roar the of the city would be replaced with a different tune; the singing of anguished souls, the warning cries of gargoyles forced to live out their penance in public in an act of revenge. What stories they could tell if they could speak. Maybe the man who’s holding his head in his hands on a building above Piccadilly could tell us what he did that made him freeze in permanent regret (or whether he’s just suffering from a colossal hangover!).

Manchester Cathedral is teeming with the creatures, a reminder of those less fortunate, the victims of terrible fates, condemned for eternity. One poor tortured soul, clad in human clothes as if a warning to the ordinary man, who sees something of him within himself, has been painted a ghostly green over time by moss, and cobwebs grow from his mouth like strings of saliva over his bared teeth. Forcefully propelled from the building, his mouth is permanently flung open as if in a silent warning. We’re shown the retribution and punishment, but what crimes did these pour souls commit that they were forced to constantly relive their humiliation in public?A cathedral is exactly the type of place you would expect to find gargoyles - think of Notre Dame in Paris - and the Gothic buildings of Deansgate are home to clusters of chimeras, but they’re also dotted about the city. The most unlikely place is the gun shop that occupies a corner on Withy Grove. A winged gargoyle, painted black to contrast with the white walls of the building, is crouched on the corner of the building, about to take off in flight over the Printworks. The man inside the gun shop speculated that the gargoyle was a remainder from those added to the Cathedral in Victorian times, when the building was reclad, and told me there are many more leftover gargoyles on buildings across Manchester.

Whether they’re comical or grotesque, gargoyles, like all good public art, add a human side to the city. They’re also a history of place, a record of the city and its values captured in time.

Imagine if we had gargoyles nowadays; gargoyles seem to have disappeared from modern buildings, but they served a useful purpose. The old Smithfield Market building on Swan Street, from the mid nineteenth century, belies its function with the carved heads of sheep and goats. The Old Fire Station is covered in the likenesses of damsels in need of rescue, almost mermaid like, rendered in terracotta with their hair plastered dramatically across the brickwork of the windowsills. It’s even adorned with busty, topless women perching above doorways, surely as much of an inspiration to firemen as their male counterparts, bare chested young men with rippling muscles. Though they’re some of the most recent gargoyles in Manchester, from the early twentieth century, perhaps they wouldn’t look so good in glass and steel, the ubiquitous material of the modern city (although the 1930s Chrysler building in New York is adorned with gleaming, metallic gargoyles, replicas of hood ornaments).
Perhaps the best example of modern gargoyles and adaptation of the form is in Chicago, where the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa has imaginatively reinvented the concept with his Crown Fountain, which was opened in 2004. A stunningly beautiful city that’s full of public art, in the downtown Loop area Miro and Picasso offer their opposing, yet similarly abstract, visions of women’s faces in huge, sculptural form, adding something personal in amongst the towering minimalist built environment.

In the waterside Millennium Park, on the shore of Lake Michigan, Plensa’s Crown Fountain sets two giant faces opposite each other, human gargoyles in the best sense. Onto two huge towers are projected close-up videos of the faces of citizens of Chicago - truly gargoyles in which the public can see their reflections. In slow motion, they gradually purse their lips until spurting water, then finally smiling. In summer, children are taken down by their parents in their swimming costumes to frolic in the water, screaming and laughing. It’s public art at its best.

Consider if, instead of consisting of blank stone and smooth facades, the walls of our city were still exciting and had personal touches. A man frozen in blissful repose to guide the weary traveller through the last through steps towards shelter. A series of ‘before, during and after’ gargoyles detailing the various stages of alcohol consumption, from sober to merry to worse for wear, to warn drinkers entering a pub to know when to stop, could be far more effective - and entertaining - than heavy handed government poster campaigns. The caring yet expert face of a doctor reassuring a patient on the way into hospital. An enraptured face lost in the adventures held within the pages of books to inspire the reluctant scholar into a library. A friend above your front door, offering you company on your way home by yourself late at night, or just a few more friendly and welcoming faces around the city.

Update: On May 27th 2010, The Culture Show included a celebration of gargoyles by the critic Andrew Graham Smith, who describes them as 'folk art', goes to see some new garogyles at Westminster Abbey and watches them being made.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t6c5

Where the Wild Roses Grow - Part 2

Wurlitzer Jukebox: The Lancastrian Theatre Organ Trust, Eccles (open for Heritage Open Days this weekend!)

Entering into the Lancastrian Theatre Organ trust’s headquarters in Eccles is, in many ways, like stepping back in time. The main room is a replica of a 1920s movie theatre, complete with a rows of wooden, curved-backed cinema seats in faded, itchy velvet with cramped armrests. Anyone who has ever been in an Art Deco cinema will feel a sense of déjà vu, recognising the décor (a distinctive shade of rose-pink with gold trimming), chandeliers, bowl lights and pictures of silent film stars that line the walls, as well as the plush red curtains that open and close mechanically at the start and finish of a film.

It’s also home to one of the most charming museums you could hope to visit - the type where ladies serve hot drinks and biscuits, you’re entered into a raffle on arrival and the gift shop sells second hand cassette tapes, VHS videos, sheet organ music and 78 and 33 inch records (divided into categories such as ‘musicals/ opera’ and ‘fairground’). Staff are smartly uniformed like cinema ushers, with name badges, matching shirts and even striped ties featuring a picture of a Wurlitzer.

The Lancastrian Theatre Trust was formed in 1968 to save the Wurlitzer from the old Odeon cinema (now derelict) on Oxford Street in Manchester. Across the country, the Wurlitzer theatre organ, a perfect accompaniment to silent films before the war, and used later to entertain patrons before screenings, had been a victim of the process of modernisation and, as with many other cinemas, there was no longer room for it in the Odeon. The Trust ensured the organ found a new home, first at the Free Trade Hall, and then at Stockport Town Hall, where it is still in use.

Since then, the trust has rescued and found new uses for a number of other Wurlitzers, and created a musuem dedicated to Cheshire inventor Robert Hope-Jones, the ‘founder of the cinema organ’, who came up with the design that was later popularised by the Wurlitzer company in America. In 2002, it acquired a 1927 Wurlitzer from a cinema in Liverpool, which now takes pride of place at the front of the cinema, rising from a console on the stage.
The trust has around 20 volunteers, who use their expertise, whether in woodwork or IT, to restore the instruments. Volunteer and organist Alan Crossland said: “It takes a month to disconnect a theatre organ - you can’t just turn up in a van and move it. It took two and a half to three years to restore this organ.”

The organ now entertains visitors with weekly Wednesday lunchtime concerts from visiting professional organists. Crossland said: “The cinema seats 80 and we get 40 to 80 people a week. Some travel from as far away as Crewe on a weekly basis for the concerts.” The organ can also be hired by individuals or groups for tuition.

For many, it’s like a trip down memory lane. Crossland explained: “We put the words up and people sing along - they can’t say they can’t join in as they don’t know the words then!”

For the Heritage Open Days, the trust is screening old films of Eccles as well as a documentary about the formation of the museum, which is housed in an old Sunday school, and Laurel and Hardy silent pictures, accompanied by members of the trust on organ.
Crossland, whose fingers and feet whiz across the rows of keys, stops and pedals, explained: “I've been playing organ for years, although I started on the piano. I’m a church organist, but I prefer playing the Wurlitzer (don’t tell the vicar I said that!). There’s more to a Wurlitzer - the church organ has no cymbals and drums!” He also seems excited that, as well as more conventional instrument sounds like trumpets and flutes, it has an inbuilt doorbell button.

The building rings with the distinctive, seasidey vibrato tremble of the Wurlitzer, whirling its way through everything from hymns like Morning is Broken and the jaunty tune of Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head to the old musical favourites Edelweiss and As Time Goes By.

Crossland explained: “I like to start with a march as I can do a drum roll and use a crash symbol, then do a waltz. I always finish with the National Anthem - that’s what they used to do in the old days. Everyone in the cinema would stand still. You don’t get that anymore.”

He added: “I also take a portion from The Two Tars, a Laurel and Hardy film. The film is about 50 minutes long, but we just use 10 minutes. I memorise the film so I know what’s coming up and then improvise, quiet, tender music if it’s a love scene, for example, or fast music for a busy scene where they’re rushing around. We show Charlie Chaplin films too.”

Hearing sound effects fly about above, seemingly coming from random directions at the side of the stage, is almost as funny as watching Laurel and Hardy bumble around themselves. Notes fall from the sky. Trumpets parp. As the slapstick duo roll and writhe around in incompetence, the organ mimics with rolls and flourishes.

One of the most exciting things the trust is offering for the Heritage Open Days (as well as talking members of staff into letting you have a play on the organ itself!) is a tour of the organ chamber, beneath the theatre, which isn’t usually open to the public (though there are viewing windows which explain the inner workings of the organ).

Crossland said: “People think the sound comes from the keyboard, but it doesn’t - it comes from real instruments.” The organ sounds like a whole orchestra, and beneath it is a complicated contraption of instruments based around a wooden framework, including sleigh bells, xylophone, glockenspiel, castanets, bass drum, church chimes, triangle, cymbal, car horn, tambourine, and Chinese glockenspiel - as well as a noisy motor which provides the wind. Watch the workings while the organ is being played and metal pipes vibrate, hammers hit chimes and cymbals seem to hit themselves.Crossland explained: “It has to be kept warm down there to keep the pipes in tune. We tune them once every five weeks and test every bell.”

The museum also houses journals produced by the trust, models of Wurlitzers, magnets manufactured by Royce (later of Rolls-Royce fame) that were used in Hope-Jones‘ organ designs, examples of later electric Wurlitzers and reed organs and a couple of Hope-Jones’ church organs (the trust has a rotating display of ‘organ of the month’, drawn from instruments nationwide).

I also found it fascinating as a snapshot of the golden age of cinema, with mini overviews of the history of ABC and Gaumont chains. I particularly liked one description of the distinctive architecture of old Odeons, many of which were bombed during the war, or are currently in the process of being knocked down and replaced by multiplexes: ‘cream or batter-yellow faience tiles, rounded corners, slab towers, neon outlining by night and, of course, the distinctive style of the Odeon lettering.’

A sign for a ‘Ballroom lounge-bar upstairs’ is a reminder of the first days of mass entertainment, when super cinemas were built as sumptuous picture palaces where people could go and marvel at the new phenomenon of film. Nowadays, sadly, this notion of going to the cinema as a special, luxury event seems almost as old-fashioned as the old motorcars and dated attire seen in the Laurel and Hardy films.

The Theatre Organ Heritage Centre
Alexandra Road
Peel Green
Eccles
M30 7HJ

The Heritage Centre and Museum is open as part of the nationwide Heritage Open Days (http://www.heritageopendays.org.uk/directory/HOD008729E) on September 12, with special screenings and tours.

The Heritage Centre and Museum is usually open every Friday and Saturday from 11.00am until 3.00pm. For visits at other times, call 0161 792 1836.

Entrance is free (donations welcomed).

Trains go from Manchester Victoria to Patricroft station (from which the musuem is a short walk) every hour at 39 minutes past.

Lunchtime concerts are held every Wednesday at 1pm (doors open at 12pm).

There will also be lunchtime concerts at Stockport Town Hall on September 7, October 5, November 2 and December 7 at 12pm, costing £1.50, as well as Sunday concerts on October 11 and November 29 at 2.30pm.

http://www.voxlancastria.org.uk/

Issue Two of the Shrieking Violet

Issue 2 of the Shrieking Violet (September 2009) is now finished and I'm really pleased with it. It's a lot more visual than issue one, as it's got illustrations by Sam Turner, Lauren Velvick and Alex Boswell, as well as a front cover by Dominic Al Bhardi.

It's got some great articles inside; Sam Lewis on the lost art of the football shirt, Catriona Gray on Manchester's symbol, the bee, Alice Kelly arguing that maths is beautiful, a fairy ring by the Mancunian Way, a short story by Tom Whyman, a poem by Richard Barrett and a recipe by Rachel Cranshaw. I have written about my favourite green spaces in Manchester (at the moment, some of the articles I have written for the zine are appearing on the blog, some aren't. This is because some lend themselves to the written page and not the computer screen, and vice versa. Some are more like guides to Manchester that work best laid out on a page with photos etc..)

This is the self-assembly pdf.

http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=e0d8d53f3da369260c814df2efeadc50e04e75f6e8ebb871

There will also be about 50 copies around Manchester.

To request a copy, email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com. Alternatively, there is a facebook group here.

Open publication - Free publishing - More violet

Jeffrey Lewis and the Junkyard, Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, Thursday August 27

Jeffrey Lewis must be the hardest working man in indie. Relatively unsuccessful in America, the New York singer-songwriter and comic book artist has built up an ever growing and well deserved fan base here over the past few years by embarking on a seemingly perpetual tour of the UK (the bohemian life of a sleeping on fans’ floors and appealing for a place to spend the night at the end of gigs is well documented in his comics, including one overnight stay in a Manchester halls of residence).

He was last in Manchester only a few months ago, but no matter how many times you’ve seen him before, Jeffrey Lewis is ever entertaining. This is partly because he has a huge amount of material to choose from, including a library of ‘films’ - large, travel-worn comic books flicked through to a half-spoken, half-sung accompaniment, a collection of timeline songs documenting everything from the story of the Fall to the history of punk, and even an album of Crass covers.

There is still room for surprises, though. Starting at the Trades Club with a rap about mosquitoes, Jeffrey Lewis flits between introspective guitar and voice based folk songs, swinging pop tunes like Posters and noisy, squalling punk with the tap of his foot on a guitar FX pedal.

For a while a lone troubadour with a guitar covered in an ever-changing crust of stickers, Lewis has been touring with his brother Jack recently (Jack Lewis and the Fishermen Three provide the support, Jack's Pavement esque pop punk contrasting with his brother's erudite, thoughtful wordiness. Jack Lewis's band swap singers and mutate into the slower, more countrified Fishermen Three from time to time, and later members from both bands adorn Jeff's set with drums, trumpet and keyboard).

What makes Lewis' songs stand out over those of his brother, though, is his poetry and imagination. His songs are highly personal narratives, like windows into his life, from The Last Time I Did Acid I Went Insane, a cautionary tale of an acid trip gone wrong, to a wry acknowledgment of a 2.3 Pitchfork review. His subject matters are instantly familiar, but somehow he makes every day things like instant noodles sound just as interesting as more conventional comic book topics like zombies.

The thirty three year old admits the past year has been tough for him (Broken Broken Broken Heart reminds us of his publicly documented split with former girlfriend and band member Helen), and the transient lifestyle has obviously had its effect on him, not least in his thinning hairline.

For this reason, Roll Bus Roll, from latest album ’Em Are I, is the highlight of the night. Starting slowly with Lewis’ clickety clickety guitar, it builds momentum to imitate a rolling bus journey. We can all recognise the ‘rolled sweatshirt’ that ‘makes the window soft’, and the end of youthful freedoms that whiz past. Jeffrey Lewis sings ‘I wasn’t designed to move so fast, I wasn’t designed to have so much past’, but he makes it through to the end, and still appears to be enjoying every minute of it.

http://www.thejeffreylewissite.com/
http://www.myspace.com/jefflewisband
http://www.myspace.com/jacklewisband
http://www.myspace.com/thefishermenthree

Thomas Paine - Champion of the Common Man - at Salford Museum and Art Gallery

‘Government in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one’. These words, written by the political thinker Thomas Paine over 200 years ago, still ring true today, and a new exhibition about Paine’s life at the Salford Museum and Art Gallery reminds us of what we have learned from him. The words, which are among Paine’s best known, are taken from the book with which he made his name in 1776, the hugely influential Common Sense.

A foreword to the exhibition by Tony Benn sets Paine up as a ‘symbol of change’. Benn argues Paine’s dictum that ‘God did not make rich and poor. He made man and woman’ is just as true now, and points out that with the British political system in a time of great uncertainty today, we could do well to look again at his theories. We’re told Paine, who argued for an elected head of state, the welfare state and end in state involvement in trade, would be ‘shocked’ if he knew that there is still no world peace, and that Britain still has a monarchy, unelected peers and no written constitution.

In Rights of Man: Part One, Paine argued that ‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges or hereditary juries’. His warning against a government that is ‘accountable to nobody and not trusted by anybody’ is just as relevant today, with growing calls for electoral reform and confidence in politicians plummeting with every new scandal and blunder.

Paine was a great advocate for the need for a written constitution, saying it should codify ‘everything that relates to the complete organisation of a civil government, and the principles on which it should rule and by which it should be bound’.

He would be dismayed that so many of his beliefs, which we take for granted today, were only achieved in relatively recent times: universal suffrage, free universal education, old age pensions and the abolition of slavery and the death penalty (the death penalty was only abolished in Britain in 1969, France in 1981 and still has yet to be ended in America).

Born in in Thetford, Norfolk, in 1737, the son of a corset maker, Paine took advantage of a grammar school education to become versed in reason and science and debate the ideas of the Enlightenment. The exhibition sets the scene of a grim eighteenth century life which was at the mercy of the wealthy and aristocratic. In Thetford, out of a population of 30,000, only 20 men could vote. Public executions were common, with the condemned having no right to defence. Unsurprisingly, Paine had a thirst for adventure and, after meeting Benjamin Franklin, set off for the New World, where he became a campaigner for revolution.

Paine was a passionate driving force behind the American and French revolutions, as well as an advocate of Irish Independence; in Common Sense, he claimed ‘we have it in our power to begin the world over again’. He convinced George Washington of the need for revolution, to end American’s governance from afar by the British monarchy, and even coined the phrase United States of America. He also spent time in France, where he wrote Rights of Man: Part One as a retort to the conservative thinker Edmund Burke’s attack on the French revolution.

Yet the exhibition, which is comprised of material from the archives of the nearby Working Class Movement Library, argues that Paine’s most important legacy is his championing of the rights of the common man; Paine said we should endeavour to ‘make our fellow creatures happy’, and that man should ‘respect his neighbour, to do as he would be done by’.

Paine wrote his books in plain English, and produced inexpensive editions of his works which became best sellers and were read aloud to the illiterate. As well as early editions, the exhibition displays cartoons and satire based on Paine’s work. Naturally, this spread of ideas panicked the establishment, who tried to prosecute Paine for libel.

The exhibition also displays works by Paine’s contemporaries, alongside writers and movements on which Paine had an influence, including Chartism and women’s rights. Paine was an inspiring individual: he was also an inventor, and the exhibition shows it wasn’t just his political ideas in which he was ahead of his time - he invented an innovative bridge, the design of which is still in use today.

There are plenty of fact sheets and lists of quotes to take away, as well as recommendations for further reading in the WCLM’s archives. As Veronica Trick, volunteer co-ordinator at the Library, said: “If our Library had a patron saint it’d be Thomas Paine. He’s so much the starting point, both chronologically and ideologically, for working class history.”

Thomas Paine, The Voice of the Common People
Salford Art Gallery
Peel Park
Salford
M5 4WU
Until November 22

http://www.salford.gov.uk/leisure/museums/salfordmuseum.htm

Working Class Movement Library
51 The Crescent
Salford
M5 4WX

www.wcml.org.uk

Waiting for the blackberries to grow

Long before the blackberry was a type of communication device, and before the ‘pick your own food for free’ movement became fashionable because of the recession/ a general concern about where our food comes from, blackberries were the original free food. The summer tradition of scouring the nation’s hedgerows and fields for ripe blackberries has even given birth to its own verb, blackberrying - or, to pick the fruit of the bramble.

Blackberrying is as much a part of the English summer as summer fetes and swimming in the sea. Our summer may fluctuate between broad sunshine and torrential rain, yet I like to think this is helping the blackberries along. I have spent many a lazy day wandering canal side and through the countryside with a bag in hand, eating some guiltily along the way yet returning home with handfuls of delicious food, squishy but not soft, sweet but not too sweet.

In his poem Blackberry-Picking, which concerns a childhood blackberry picking memory, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney places the blackberry at the heart of summer, describing the ‘sticky’ juice of blackberries as ‘summer’s blood’. He makes it sound almost intoxicating by describing it as ’thickened wine’, going on to explain how its juice creates ‘stains upon the tongue’ and leaves the eater hungry for more. Blackberrying is an annual summer tradition, a rite of passage even, something to be looked forward to through the spring and early summer months, to be shared with family or someone special. He sums up the suspenseful summer feeling of waiting for the white flowers to give way to hard green berries that turn red and then, finally, into a ‘glossy purple clot’ ready to be eaten. The poem ends with a change of mood - like the summer, the edible life of the blackberries quickly comes to an end - they can only be picked for a short time, that comes around just once a year, like the all too short summer itself.

Similarly, the American writer Sylvia Plath found inspiration in the fruit for her poem Blackberrying. Blackberries are popular in England and America, where they are also grown commercially, although apparently the type of blackberries that can be bought in shops are blander and less flavourful. In Plath’s highly sensual poem she describes the excitement of the blackberry picking experience by telling of a ‘blackberry lane’ that has in it ‘nothing, nothing but blackberries on either side’. She paints pictures of ripe blackberries as ‘big as the ball of my tub’, ‘fat with blue-red juices’. Her blackberries too are alive and rich, giving a ‘blood sisterhood’ to those who pick them. (Rich in vitamin C, blackberries are a type of antioxidant and during the first world war children were given time off school to pick them so their nutritious juice could be sent to troops.)

My first summer in Manchester I spent hours picking my bounty along the banks of the Ashton Canal, culminating in the bushes of Phillips Park out by Sportcity. I was stunned at the riches on offer - Manchester blackberries are giant and juicy and, in the areas I went, completely unharvested by anyone else. Blackberrying is often a competitive business - in my hometown down South, I have often arrived at the best bushes, which deliver year after year, too late, finding only stumps - yet Manchester’s are ripe for the picking.

If you don’t have a park or canal near you (in South Manchester, I imagine that Chorlton Ees would be ideal), the chances are that you can find them in you back garden/ in your nearest alley way. Bramble bushes are weeds that tend to spread and take over any patch of uncultivated land, from wasteland to neglected gardens.

To pick blackberries, it’s advisable to wear long sleeved clothes - but nothing that could get caught on the bushes or is easily plucked - and closed footwear. Also, wear dark colours if possible and preferably old clothes as blackberries stain easily (in the old days, the juice were used as a dye). I generally use carrier bags to collect the fruit, although you can use any kind of container, from Tupperware to old ice cream tubs.

Blackberries can be picked in August and into September, although in English folklore they should not be picked after Michaelmas (October 10) as it was said the Devil had contaminated them with bodily fluids. Even today, children picking blackberries are told only to pick from the higher branches where dogs can’t reach them when urinating. On that subject, it’s also best to avoid picking blackberries by busy roads, although it can be tempting as they ripen earlier from the pollution, and to wash blackberries before use.

Once picked, blackberries will keep in the fridge for a day or two, but can also be frozen. Blackberries are good turned into jam and in cakes, buns and pies, as well as served on their own or with ice cream and custard. The classic blackberry dish is, though, undoubtedly the crumble.

The crumble is one of the easiest, cheapest and quickest, yet tastiest and most impressive dishes that can be made. It’s virtually impossible to get it wrong, as it contains just four basic ingredients, which you probably already have in your cupboard - butter, flour, sugar and fruit.

Blackberry crumble for two

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees c
200g blackberries (if you fancy it, substitute half the blackberries for apples, plums or another fruit of your choice)
60g sugar
30g butter (or vegetarian/ vegan equivalent)
60g plain flour

Extra adornments such as ginger/ cinnamon/ oats for the topping, as desired

Grease some kind of ceramic baking dish with butter. Cook the blackberries in a pan with a little water and half the sugar (or more, depending on how sweet/ tart you want the mixture) until soft. Place in the bottom of the baking dish. Place the butter in a large pan and add the flour, rubbing it into the butter until it resembles bread crumbs. Mix the rest of the sugar in. Sprinkle the mixture evenly over the top of the blackberries ensuring all areas are covered and press it down a bit so it forms a tidy topping. Bake for 30-40 minutes until the crumble starts to go brown on top.

Best served with custard.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you could make blackberry brandy for the winter, which is delicious as a fruity accompaniment to Christmas cake and ensures the summer lingers on through the cold months. This is my grandad’s recipe.

450g blackberries
225g sugar
1 litre gin

Wash blackberries and put in a large sterilised jar. Pour in sugar and gin, seal, shake well. Store in a cool, dark cupboard and shake every other day for a week. Then shake once a week for two months.

The Shrieking Violet printed version

This is the paper version of the Shrieking Violet, a 16 page free fanzine of which there are 30 copies around Manchester. It features creative writing by Emma Tillyer and Rebecca Willmott, an article on regeneration in north Manchester by Alice Ruth White, an article on how feminist Sex and the City is by Olivia Singer, illustration by Stephen Marshall and a front cover by Dominic Al Bhardi, as well as a B of the Bang obituary by me, an article on blackberry picking and recipes and articles on street names and canal boat names.



The Shrieking Violet issue 1 can be read online here (pages unfortunately not in right order):

Open publication - Free publishing - More blackberries

To request a paper copy email Natalie.Rose.Bradbury@googlemail.com, or alternatively download and print this PDF (some of the formatting went a little funny when I converted it to PDF, I don't know why) here. To assemble your Shrieking Violet zine, print the pages double sided and fold them into the correct order.

For the best Shrieking Violet experience, pages 7-8 should be read whilst listening to the jangle pop tune Streets of Your Town by 80s band the Go Betweens, transporting the scene from Australia to Manchester:

"Round and round, up and down
Everyday I make my way
Through the streets of your town

Don’t the sun look good today?
But the rain is on it’s way"

This should be followed by the Scottish jangle pop tune Charlotte Street, by '80s indie band Lloyd Cole and the Commotions.

Seek and Ye Shall Find

B of the Bang 2005-2009 RIP

MOST cities have their landmarks - Paris the Eiffel Tower, London Big Ben, Rio de Janeiro Christ the Redeemer etc.. For four years, B of the Bang performed that function in Manchester, a 56 metre reminder on the skyline, high as a twenty storey building, of what the city stood for. Commissioned in 2003 to celebrate the success of the 2002 Commonwealth Games, Manchester’s chance to clean itself up and put itself back on the map after the IRA bomb, and built outside Manchester City's new Eastlands stadium, it took its name from the sprinter Linford Christie’s claim that he starts a race on the ‘B of the Bang’ of the starting pistol.

An audacious piece of public art by the innovative young designer Thomas Heatherwick, whose best known work is a folding bridge in London, B of the Bang was a bold and unmissable gesture in Manchester’s history for being a city of firsts and fitted right into its penchant for extravagant architecture. The sculpture had unmistakeable Manc swagger behind it, erected to capture ‘the city’s innovative and pioneering spirit’. A familiar and welcoming view, exploding like a firework over the city as passengers arrived into Piccadilly on trains from London or the south, it became as much a part of the Manchester skyline as the peaks in the background.

B of the Bang was an artwork, but it was also something more than that - an icon, a reminder of the new Manchester full of ambition and hope for the future, rebuilding itself after decades of decline. Spikes reached for new ambitions like arms, stretching across often grey skies for something in the distance beyond their reach. Splayed dramatically across Manchester postcards, it became one of the bold single images that represented Manchester to the outside world post-bomb (although, implausibly, in the pictures it‘s always sunny).

Its impact was made all the more powerful by its context: B of the Bang didn’t adorn the corridors of power, but was tucked away in Beswick, a suburb just outside the city centre that ranks amongst the most deprived areas of Manchester - according to the Government’s Multiple Indices of Deprivation for 2000, Beswick was in the top 1 per cent most deprived wards in the country - where little else would make it into tourist promotional material. It didn’t look out over grand municipal buildings or manicured lawns but busy roads and a giant Asda superstore. B of the Bang wasn’t built in the type of area people would visit for pleasure, (apart from Manchester City stadium), but it was a symbol of hope that gave the area something to be proud of (in theory).

Funded partly by the Northwest Development Agency and European Regional Development Agency, it was intended as part of the process of regeneration that was being undertaken in the area, and contains a time capsule in the centre so people opening it in three hundred years time will have a record of an area of Manchester that has been knocked down and rebuilt several times, with more of the same planned for the coming years.

At B of the Bang’s launch in January 2005, the Chief Executive of the urban regeneration company New East Manchester called the B of the Bang a "very clear and bold statement of intent”. He said: “The regeneration of east Manchester needed a monumental piece of public art to provide a sense of identity and place and to represent the physical, economic and social changes underway in the area."

It’s been suggested that B of the Bang could be reerected at a different site, possibly outside the City Art Gallery, although it would lose much of its impact submerged amongst the clutter and bustle of the city centre. (However, Salford Quays has been suggested as an alternative location, and B of the Bang could inject some much needed personality into that area.)

The sculpture had problems from the start and quickly became known, unkindly, as C of the Clang by residents, with people taking exception to its rusty appearance (although this was part of the design as the sculpture was, like Angel of the North near Gateshead, built in weathering steel that was supposed to gain a layer of oxide as it was exposed to the elements). The council has considered the option of rebuilding it in a lighter material, yet it wouldn't fit so well the redbrick fabric of the city.

B of the Bang cost £1.42 million to build - way over estimate - and was finally installed two years late. It lost one of its spikes soon after being erected and had to be fenced off from the public. Last year, the council settled for £1.7million compensation in an out of court settlement, which added to local people’s anger that £120,000 of their taxes went towards funding the sculpture - although there are many passionate admirers of B of the Bang who protested against the decision to take it down.

In total, 22 out of the 180 spikes had to be removed, and earlier this year work began on sawing off its hollow tubes. Now only a collection of stumps remain, looking like a bad homemade haircut, with one lone spike trailing limply like a rats tail ponytail. B of the Bang’s gravestone esque memorial is a meek notice apologising ‘for any inconvenience caused’ due to the sculpture’s ‘technical difficulties’. The official line is that "B of the Bang is a magnificent artistic statement that was just right for modern Manchester. It is regrettable that technical problems have undermined that artistic vision”, yet Anthony Gormley, the artist behind Angel of the North, and others have criticised the council for their loss of ‘nerve’ in choosing to dismantle, rather than make the investment to repair, the sculpture.
Unlike other statues, even big ones like Angel of the North, B of the Bang has an edge to it, elegant in its simplicity yet spiky as a Yucca plant. The Beetham Tower is the image most people have of a sky high Manchester, yet its only distinguishing feature is its height, and it couldn’t be said that it contributes any excitement or dynamism to the Manchester sky. B of the Bang didn’t passively watch over the city or, like Gormley’s Another Place on Crosby Beach, near Liverpool, stare out to sea. It swayed in the wind like a trembling tree (an inbuilt design detail) and strange music whistled through its spikes on a windy night.

As the Heatherwick Studio website puts it, “the design reacts against the convention for passive-looking monuments to sporting events that celebrate peace and harmony, rather than the dynamism and explosiveness of physical competition”. 39 year old Heatherwick was no outside choice for Manchester either, as a former student at the Manchester Polytechnic. He said: “I love the city and I’m not interested in building it anywhere else.”

Ps, a few days after I wrote/ posted this, the Manchester Evening News printed this editorial on B of the Bang, which obviously I totally disagree with (as usual!)

My journey to Salford Job Centre (to which I am a regular visitor)

Whenever I go to the jobcentre, there seems to be a high likelihood it will be raining, and I will be soaked by the time I get there. I generally cut through shiny, new Spinningfields - although it seems to flood easily, and I often get wet feet in this area due to the poor drainage! - past the courts with hoodies grouped outside and onto Bridge Street, although sometimes I approach from Chapel Street as I like the views and getting to walk under railway arches. This is the view from Chapel Street looking towards the river, probably one of the most dramatic views in Manchester - it looks so modern, futuristic even!
The buildings gleam in the sunshine as much as the puddles in front of them. There are many other modernist buildings in Manchester but not really clustered as dramatically in one area as here.

The white 1960s buildings completely contrast with the dank, dark, dripping railway arches of Chapel Street, built in grimy redbrick, from which the photo was taken!

In this photo, you can see why the new Civil Justice centre is known as the 'filing cabinet!'.

I also like walking this way as there is a curious cluster of circles in one of the railway arches:

Manchester Modernist Society

From a grubby concrete wall hidden behind scrawny trees to a shabby former council building turned into a giant advertising hoarding, all across Manchester are iconic pieces of the city's fabric laying neglected and forlorn. Otherwise known as the Holloway sculptural wall on London Road, built in 1968 as a sound-buffer yet an artwork in its own right, and the former Unemployment and Benefits Office on Aytoun Street, these are just some of Manchester’s hidden treasures that we walk past on a daily basis.

Whilst to some these buildings rank amongst outdated eyesores that should be pulled down as soon as possible, many regard them fondly as a vital part of their personal experiences of the city.

Manchester Modernist Society was formed in April by Maureen Ward and Jack Hale, two Manchester enthusiasts, to inspire people to look again at the buildings which, while not necessarily beautiful in a conventional sense, are central to our cityscape.

The pair, who are members of the Twentieth Century Society, the organisation which campaigns to protect the architectural heritage of the last century, acknowledges there are already a lot of fragmented groups that look at how we relate to the city, but wants to encourage them to work together.

Maureen said: “Lots of really interesting things exist relating to how we live in the city in a variety of ways, but often they don’t know about the others. People are coming at the city from all sorts of different angles trying to do the same thing - CUBE, flâneurs, the Loiterers Resistance Movement, the North West branch of the Twentieth Century Society We wanted to get together with likeminded people who could give us ideas we hadn’t thought of.”

As the first modern city, Manchester is choc a bloc with modern buildings, which for the society's purposes are those built between 1914 and 1999. This encompasses a lot of different architectural styles and movements, from 30s Art Deco to 60s Brutalism.

We all know Manchester is renowned for its Victorian and Edwardian architecture - think about the attention conferred on buildings like Gorton Monastery and Victoria Baths, as well as its mills - but what about those buildings that get on with it quietly in the background, minding their own business? While often not as ostentatiously flashy as the grand redbrick Victorian buildings, they have a beauty all of their own.

Maureen said: “We‘re proud of the Victorian city but the modern city developed in a totally different way to the Victorian and Georgian cities. It’s based around cars and roadways, movement and speed and that’s reflected in the design.”

She continued: “Manchester is a really modern city - so modern it doesn’t seem to care about its history. It’s in love with the future but it thinks it’s good to remember the past. The city has no history of itself if it’s always changing.”

Maureen enthused: “I wanted to spend my tiny free time saving the city from itself. We share a real concern about our recent past and our place in the future of the city. We live in the city and it forms us, so us and the city are tied to each other.”

She continued: “Manchester is so in awe of the image it has of itself post bomb. It’s very glossy and glamorous but a lot of people are worried it isn’t really for them. We’re often interested in beleaguered buildings.”

Jack added: “We’re interested in the curious, hidden and quirky bits too.”

Often deserted, Manchester’s modernist icons are neglected and left to rot, until they’re torn down to make way for the new city of glass that’s taking over Manchester, street by street, turning it into something shiny and homogenous yet sometimes cheaply built. Jack said: “It’s expensive to use old buildings in a modern way - it’s cheaper to build new ones than to modernise 1930s buildings”.

Maureen added: “I’m not convinced we’re building really excellent new architecture. Often, new buildings look as if they’ve been wrapped in tinfoil.”

Tearing down these buildings often rips out a page from the city’s history. Maureen said: “The whole of the twentieth century is gone now. Modernism means a lot of different things to different people but the vernacular is fast disappearing without really being documented - we are trying to find people who are documenting it.”

Jack, a freelance arts project facilitator and fundraiser who has spent time working at CUBE, said: “I’m an urbanist. I’m not interested in the country or medieval churches, but I’m interested in recent history. It’s a part of our architectural heritage that needs caring for so we’re doing it ourselves.”

Maureen, who has an academic background in archaeology, agreed: “Our architectural heritage shows what we were. For example, the New Century Hall had a ballroom and scooter boys used to meet there. I’m interested in old cafes as well, and meeting places.” For example, pre-1967 cafes became spaces where gay men could meet when homosexuality was still illegal.

That’s what the buildings of modern Manchester capture - its recent history, from old cinemas to tower blocks and council estates. As Maureen says, they show the ‘machinery of how the city works'.

Two buildings stand out for the pair as epitomising the society’s fasincation with modernist architecture. Maureen said: “I’m obsessed with the UBO office and have been for years. It’s magnificent in a peculiar way but it’s increasingly being surrounded by very tawdry modern buildings and its beauty is becoming very obvious.”

Jack singled out the Daily Express building on Great Ancoats Street as ’unique’ in Manchester, saying: “I love the fact it’s one of only three of its kind built. The black glass they used has become very common since the 1930s but then it was radical. A successful building has to work as a building and be beautiful as well. The Express building is a great example as you could see the factory printing machines through it, the massive newspapers going on big conveyor belts.”

He elaborated: “Disappearing buildings are often part of what we’re proud of. Buildings aren’t very interesting by themselves - it’s about what they represent and what goes on in them. The Daily Express building was part of an alternative Fleet Street.”

Maureen agreed: “Manchester was the setting of lots of firsts - what are we first in now?”

Unfortunately, few of these buildings survive in their original purpose - the Express Building for one is now flats and offices. Lutyens’ magnificent former Midland Bank on King Street, built in the 1930s, is lying empty, having trouble finding someone to give it a new use, and the Coop is moving out of the CIS tower to a new, purpose built premises. Manchester University wants to sell off the former UMIST campus, home to many innovative buildings such as the Faraday Building - many students at the university are unaware North Campus even exists - and students will cease to study at the affectionately named Toast Rack in Fallowfield by 2010. Moberly Hall, the former refectory building, which Maureen praises for its 'lovely angles', is already on its way out.

The Manchester Modernist Society’s love of the mark modernism made on our city goes far beyond buildings, however, encompassing design classics such as the K8 Telephone Kiosk. Maureen said: “There are only four of them left in Manchester now as we don’t use payphones anymore. They are listed buildings but they’re in a terrible state. It’s sad.”

Their passion even extends to Manchester’s own Highway in the Sky, the Mancunian Way, with its flyovers and roads into nowhere, a built monument to utopianism and post war optimismMaureen explained: “There’s lots of interesting bits of history that aren’t buildings too. For example, the Holloway Wall, which is rather forlorn now.”
The society acknowledges it may not be able to save the buildings that are already condemned to be replaced, but hopes to raise awareness of them before they go forever through specially commissioned artwork and screenings of old films. There will also be talks and debates, walks and social events such as outings to other cities.

Maureen cautioned: “There will be virtually nothing left if we’re not careful. People always do just want to pull things down that we now think are national treasures. The city council thought they could sell or get rid of buildings on the quiet but we’re acting as their voice. We need to get together into a critical mass to try to save them.”

She concluded: “Even if we can’t save buildings, we’d like to have a celebration before they go.”

http://www.manchestermodernistsociety.org/

Join the facebook group here.

The CUBE website has a brilliant guide to Manchester's buildings, broken down into area/ theme/ architect, with an extensive building by building guide to its modernist architecture.

Manchester Confidential has often sung the praises of modernist buildings too, from the Holloway Wall to the UBO.

Toad Lane, Rochdale - the best museum I've been to in ages!

If you've ever wondered why Manchester has a Corporation Street or the area around Shudehill and Victoria is lined with grand old buildings advertising wholesale exchange across the country, it's because the Coop, the nationwide banking/ food/ insurance/ travel chain, has its roots in Greater Manchester.

The Cooperative Society we know today may have its headquarters in Manchester, with a statue of Robert Owen - perhaps the world's most famous cooperative thinker, best known for founding a workers' community in New Lanark and fighting for workers' rights - offering protection to a child outside, but it all started in a small street in Rochdale back in 1844. Today, the Coop's main office is just a stone's throw from Manchester Victoria, where trains to Rochdale take 15 minutes.

28 'ordinary men', who became known as the Rochdale Pioneers, took it upon themselves to open a shop for two hours, two evenings a week, concerned at the exploitation of the poor by unscrupulous traders who 'mixed sand with the grain and soil with the cocoa'.

Back then, the landlord wouldn't allow a group lease, but now the Coop is the biggest consumer owned company in the world and the building where the first shop was opened, which is tucked away behind Rochdale's present day shopping area, is a fascinating museum dedicated to one of the world's biggest social movements.

On arrival, a member of staff gives a brief history of the movement. I was told proudly ‘anything cooperative today is thanks to these lads here’ and given a background to the industrial landscape: 'During the hungry 40s, wages dropped 80 per cent, but this was a chance for workers to work their way out of poverty'.

The museum, which is mainly just one room, is crammed with artefacts like weavers' clogs and looms. Objects such as pamphlets, caps and truncheons used against workers and campaigners during strikes illustrate a timeline of the cooperative movement in Rochdale. Later, letters between different branches show its spread across the world.

There are explanations of divi day, when those who invested in the company could reap their share of the profits, and the principle behind the cooperative movement can be seen first hand through the commodity tokens and Labour notes - a form of currency used mainly by craftsmen that was equal to the amount of time it was estimated goods should take to make - on display.

Cooperativism is based on the idea that labour is exchanged for labour and noone should be able to make a profit out of others.

In the nineteenth centrury, it also offered a way for workers to be educated and improve their lives socially as well as economically.

Toad Lane doubled up as a reading room and classroom to promote the ‘educational, cultural, social traditions’ of the cooperative movement, and the museum has information relating to pageants and plays held by cooperative societies as well as cricket matches between different branches and copies of the Pioneer song book.

Upstairs is like an aladdin's cave of objects donated by people from all over the world, from displays of goods on sale in cooperative shops over the last two centuries - including, intriguingly, haemonglobin capsules - to bikes and banners and a 1920s magic lantern. There are photos of cooperation in action all over the world, from Sweden to South America.

A 1934 article from the Rochdale Observer entitled 'the Romance of the Coop' describes how the Coop ‘started on £28, now handles £346,000,000 a year’, and the Coop is just as successful today.

Cooperativsm based on the Rochdale Principles is practised worldwide, with over 800 million members in more than 100 countries, and a display on Fair Trade shows how the Coop is still helping the less fortunate today.

Rochdale Pioneers Museum
31 Toad Lane
Rochdale
Lancashire
OL12 0NU

The museum is open from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm and Sunday 2pm to 4pm.

Adults £1.00, children/students/senior citizens 50p, family ticket £2.00.

http://museum.co-op.ac.uk/
http://www.co-operative.coop/

En Plein Air: Knitted Nature, Touchstones, Rochdale

A small room in an art gallery, hung with canvases in muted colours. Though they range from small countryside scenes to large paintings of the seaside, what they all have is that they were created outside, in the moment, and were chosen to show how art can be alive and transport the outdoors inside. The exhibition brings together artists who have drawn their inspiration from the outdoors, yet something's lost in translation. There's something flat about them, like the effect you get when paint dries and the colours become less vibrant.

Your eye, however, is drawn to something incongruous, over by the door. It appears to be a window box or plant pot on the floor, from which are climbing tens of flowers in every colour you can think of, with reds and fluorescent yellows and oranges leaping out.

This artwork almost dances through the air, fragile tendrils twisting against the pane of glass in the door. It's more alive, somehow, than any of the other works in the room. When you get closer, you realise it's knitting, but not as you've seen it before. It's sort of a pop art take on flowers, remade in wool, shiny, fluffy and multicoloured.

The flowers are cartoonishly real - gaps are knitted into the pattern where the veins of the leaves would be, thread winds through the blooms like filaments, tiny clear beads glisten like a trail of dew and silvery embroidery trails across leaves.

Others are more obviously stylised, with buttons for centres. It’s like nature magnified, complete with perching bumblebees. A starburst flower is like a giant sun, a lacy, frayed flower looks indistuingishable from the real thing, whilst also resembling la sea sponge or anemone. Another seems like a floppy starfish. Bluebells and poppies are easily identifiable, and other flowers are plaited, clumped in clusters, coiled like roses and balls of colour.

Knitted Nature, and an accompanying tree adorned with knitted Valencia oranges in Broadfield Park across the road, is an installation by the Manchester knitting duo ArtYarn who invited knitters across the world to knit a leaf or flower and send it to be part of their indoor garden.

It stands out as a reminder of the beauty that’s in the everyday around us, both in nature and in traditional crafts like knitting. Knitted Nature is so striking because it uses the imagery of nature that’s all around us and recreates it in an art form that is so often practical and useful - so conventional and accessible.

In her 1974 essay In Search Of Our Mother’s Gardens, the African-American novelist Alice Walker uses an evocative description of her mother's garden to explain how African-American women of her mother and grandmother’s generations, who were denied a basic education because of the legacy of slavery and segregation, and were therefore often unable to even read or write, expressed their creativity in the only ways they could, often conventional crafts.

Walker raises fundamental questions about what it is to be an artist - many of these women were anonymous and would have never considered themselved to be artists - and concludes that her mother’s art was her garden, describing a type of woman who ‘left her mark in the only materials she could afford, and in the only condition her position in society allowed her to use’.

Walker asks when he ‘overworked mother’ had time to ‘know or care about feeding the creative spirit', and challenges conventional ideas of who can be an artist, saying: "The artist that was and is my mother showed itself to me only after many years."

Like a painter, her mother ‘adorned with flowers whatever shabby house we were forced to live in…she planted ambitious gardens - and still does - with over fifty different varieties of plants that bloom profusely from early March until late November’.

This garden instilled in Walker a love of beauty and art that transcended their poverty. She even implies it alleviated the hardship they had to endure: "Whatever she planted grew as if by magic … because of her creativity with her flowers, even my memories of poverty are seen through a screen of blooms - sunflowers, petunias, roses, dahlias, forsythia, spinea, delphiniums, verbenas".

This special talent wasn't unique to Walker's mother, though - according to Walker, every women is an artist. She quotes Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist novel A Room of One’s Own, which explores the notion that inside every women is the potential to create art, when allowed to flourish.

Walker distinguishes between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, arguing that inside the traditions that were handed down from generation could be found works of art. She says: "Many of us have spent years discovering it. We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high - and low."

Walker touches on the rediscovery of craft as an art form in In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by describing a quilt on display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, saying: “It is considered rare, beyond price. Though it follows no known pattern of quilt making, and though it is made of bits and pieces of worthless rags, it is obviously the work of a person of powerful imagination.”

Vernacular art is a common theme in Walker’s writing. In another of Walker’s shorter pieces, the 1973 story Everyday Use, Walker explores the reappropriation of folk art - in this case, quilts again - by scholars and the establishment.

She describes how quilts, whilst stitched from ostensibly worthless scrap fabric, can become more than a sum of their parts, often a stitched history containing within them the story told by their composite pieces.

The quilts in Everyday Use contain 'scraps of dresses Grandma Dee had worn fifty and more years ago. Bits and pieces of Grandpa Jattell's Paisley shirts. And one teeny faded blue piece, about the size of a penny matchbox, that was from Great Grandpa Ezra's uniform that he wore in the Civil War'.

The story raises interesting questions about the value and authenticity of art, particularly folk art. The story is broadly based around the contrast between the old way of life and the new, featuring a mother with two daughters, one of whom, Maggie, stays at home with her mother and another, Dee, who leaves the family home to study.

Dee considers the quilts to be of no inherent value, 'old fashioned' and 'out of style', until she leaves the traditional way of life and realises their value as museum pieces. She reduces the role of the quilts to 'priceless' relics of a quaint way of life that is fast disappearing - once they are removed from the context in which they were made, of course, and hung on a wall.

Dee tries to remove the quilts from their place in the family home and is offended they are set aside to be handed down to Maggie instead of her. She says: "Maggie can't appreciate these quilts...she'd probably be backward enough to put them to everyday use."

She rejects newer quilts offered to her, saying: "I don't want those. They are stitched around the borders by machine." Her mother counters "That'll make them last better", but Dee insists "That's not the point".

The quilts had been set aside to be handed on to Maggie on her marriage, but the artform itself is also passed from generation to generation. Whilst Dee is sent away to be educated, it is Maggie who is taught the craft of quilt making. Even though Dee accuses her mother of not understanding her 'heritage' by keeping the quilts in everyday use, her mother is perpetuating the tradition that enabled the quilts to be made by handing it on to Maggie to keep alive certain aspects of her heritage.

In In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, Walker pays tribute to her own mother for the gift she left Walker - her mother ‘handed on the creative spark' and instilled in Walker ‘a heritage of the love of beauty’. She acknowledges the debt she owes the women who went before her. She says: ‘Art is her gift, the legacy of respect she left to me, for all that illustrates and illuminates life. She has handed down respect for the possibilities and the will to grasp them.’

In one of the defining images of the essay, Walker describes how her mother’s garden shared and disseminated the beauty she created, just as crafts and traditions are passed on from generation to generation and shared: ‘And I remember people coming to my mother’s yard to be given cuttings from her flowers. I hear again the praise showered on her because whatever rocky soil she landed on, she turned it into a garden. A garden so brilliant with colors, so original in its design, so magnificent with life and creativity that people…came to stand or walk among my mother’s art.’

That's why it's so interesting to see crafts like knitting and embroidery in a gallery setting, in this age of mass production - whether they are created to be used or just conceived as objects of beauty, knitted and crafted goods strengthen the relationship between creator and product. By inviting knitted and embroidered goods into a gallery, the tradition of the handmade is celebrated and kept alive.

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens can be read here.

Knitted Nature (part of UK DIY)

Touchstones Gallery
The Esplanade
Rochdale
Lancashire
OL16 1AJ

http://www.link4life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=c.showPage&pageID=1452

Until September 6

http://www.artyarn-knittednature.blogspot.com/

http://www.artyarn.blogspot.com/