Moving Through

Here is the link to our short film made during our second Ticket Exchange which took place  on 15th September 2011 whilst travelling between the Derbyshire stations of Shirebrook, Langwith Whaley-Thorns, Creswell and Whitwell with a brief stop at Mansfield Woodhouse. Postcard answers from both Ticket Exchanges can be found by clicking the Mailbox page above.

Whatstandwell Ticket Exchange

Travelling between the Derbyshire stations of Belper, Ambergate, Whatstandwell and Cromford, artists Miles & Dacombe staged their first Ticket Exchange on 23rd August.  We offered a ticket with a question on it, in exchange we asked for an answer!


We made ourselves badges, tickets, bags and postcards, and jumped on and off the trains all day to talk to as many people as we could.

It was remarkable how friendly and open most people were.  We are always delighted by the staff on this stretch of railway who all seem to be having such a happy time of it and love their jobs.  They were all really supportive though rather bemused by our antics!

All the railway staff we met seemed really happy in their line of work

and were friendly and welcoming to the artists.

Reasons for travelling were varied.  Many were going off on day trips and felt that the train was the most enjoyable way of doing this.  Others had more serious intentions.  A man from Leicester was cycling alone to Telford for charity, dipping on to trains with his bicycle to link up parts of his journey.  A couple were laden with flowers, on their way to place them at the grave of a loved one.

Passengers alighting at Belper Station

A family group on their way to Matlock Bath for a day's outing

The theme of connections grew stronger throughout the day.  Our ticket designs and strange request helped us form an instant connection with passengers - people were intrigued and curious to know what question would be on the back of the ticket they picked.  Our questions opened up conversations straight away.

This is one of the first passengers Carole met at Whatstandwell waiting for the return train from Belper. Carole had spoken to her and some of the other passengers, asking whether the trains were well used. It seems that since the introduction of parking fees at the station car parks there has ben a drop in rail usage, but the parking fees were introduced as many visiting walkers were parking before exploring the canal side walks. The passengers thought it might be fairer if parking fees were refunded to those who were travelling on the trains, as is common practice in supermarket car parks.

A husband and wife sitting in different parts of the train in order to capture parts of their journey on film.

Walking on up the carriage, we often turned around to look back and see people discussing their ticket questions with each other and sharing them around.  Connecting again.




We felt we had changed their journeys.  Intervening and asking challenging questions about train travel, asking them to consider a new viewpoint.  "Have you ever thought of a network of rail travellers as a community?"  "Are you leaving or returning, and how different do these feel?"  "Do you ever imagine the story of a stranger travelling near you?"

Jo giving out her tickets

Some people wrote us answers on the postcards straight away.  Others took their postcards with them to think about it more and post them back to us.  We really hope they do.

Mother and daughter

Fabulous friends

We made new connections with 71 people that day.  Some were travelling short distances, others were going a long way.  Jo met a man who works at the Brush company in Loughborough, a place not only visible from the train but also just up the road from where Jo used to live.  Other people connected to us through art - we met art students and art teachers.  A small child drew us a picture.

This lovely lady took one of each ticket as her husband was an art teacher!

We experienced parts of other people's journeys.  Jo sat with a couple who pointed out the bits of the journey they liked - the new log cabins being built just past Whatstandwell.  They watched the lorries trundling down the road below us, parallel to the train and matching our speed!

We met Jim and Pat at Belper Station and travelled with them for a while

We hope the postcards will further connect us.  We imagine a network of postcards which have all started on that particular short train route, travelled to different places and hopefully been posted back to us in Corby.  Jo met a lady from Australia who took a postcard to write back to us!

It was good to visit the Stations again at Whatstandwell, Cromford, and short stops at Ambergate and Belper.

At Cromford, yet another Handy Andy helping to collect his Aunt's camper van and take it back to Devon

Beautiful nasturtiums in the planters and the commemorative sign at Whatstandwell Station. There are no longer any station buildings there but we did find this link with wonderful images of the station and lovely recollections by William E Glossop.

On the same site there are also the recollections of Mr A C Phillips a former Station Master at Whatstandwell Station.

Whilst waiting for Jo to arrive, Carole's eye was drawn to the house, some of which was built during the 1700's, which has a tunnel running beneath it. The previous evening, whilst Mac Canonymous was filming, Carole walked over the bridge and onto the towpath by the canal, only to meet Sheila, the current owner of the house.

 
Sheila very kindly invited Carole into her garden to see the railway line from the less commonly viewed direction.  Carole invited Sheila to come and take part in the Ticket Exchange the following morning, but sadly they missed their connection!

A slice of train heading towards the tunnel under Sheila's house.

A view of the house behind the restored Cromford Waiting Room

It was a great day and gave us lots of food for thought!  Mac Canonymous is putting together a film of the day, and we'll let you know when that's up to see.

We're looking forward to doing our Ticket Exchange again, this time at Whitwell, Cresswell and Langwith Whaley-Thorns, where we will be visiting on 15th September.  Perhaps see you there?

Last train from Cromford Station

It's underneath our feet

A couple of things coalesced for me last week.  More maps, walking, networks...
 
On Monday I had a great time walking around Snibston and finding the footpaths that lead in and out of the site.  (There is now a Facebook page for the Transform project at Snibston.)

I also met with Nick at the museum, who was fantastic and spent lots of time showing me the maps of the mining seams and how they had been mapped from the mid 1800s until the 1980s, a period of almost 150 years of mining in the area.

Walking back through the fields I had this astonishing sense of the mapped tunnels beneath my feet, layer upon layer of seams cut through the earth, like the floors of a building inverted.

On the maps you can see that the mining seams are absolutely vast, stretching out underneath the town and neighbouring villages.

The maps themselves are beautiful, and incredibly complex.  Spiderwebs of tunnels that radiate out, the drawn lines mapped on top of other maps of the surface - the underneath layered on top, a very strange sense of parallel worlds that exist simultaneously in the same place.

Lines and networks stretch out everywhere, below and above ground.

A couple of days later I attended the New Research Trajectories event in Nottingham.  Bringing together research students from across the region, the event had a small audience who were also participants in exploring Nottingham on a walk, where we  encountered and took part in art presentations and happenings in unusual places.  (There is a great write-up and photos of the event on Heather Connelly's blog, scroll down to NEW RESEARCH TRAJECTORIES - Navigation in the City and Online Space event, Nottingham, 15th December.)

I met Jackie Calderwood who has done some interesting work on exploring spaces and walking.  She led us in an exercise on "Clean Language", asking each other questions in a set format which revealed deep levels of thought about our own research interests as well as producing extremely concise words or short poems.

We had to write our results on a sticker and also use colour in a grid pattern to express our research interests.  We then had to find a place to "disseminate" our stickers.

We visited the incredible Nottingham tunnels, we also experienced work in an old theatre and finished in a room above the Surface Gallery currently being used as a LAB for an artists' collective, where they served us an excellent minestrone soup!

My disseminated sticker ended up with the words "It's underneath your feet".  The colours on the grid represented the natural and the urban, reflecting how suddenly, by walking, you can cross from a predominantly urban area into a green stretch of land and countryside.  I placed my sticker on the bottom of a scaffolding pole, a place being refurbished which, for me, made it a transitional space.

Lots of connections with my walk at Snibston.  And a very fascinating day.

Slowing it Down

For the last 6 years I have been working in a small and lovely school in Bedford, the time is short - 6 to 8 mornings a year but we are never tied to a rigid format. I choose artists to look at, take the children on a walk through their work, ask them questions, ask them to look and think about what they are seeing. They are all longing to get straight into the drawing, painting or making but taking a few moments to look and discuss adds to the quality of the work they move on to produce.

Whilst there last week I was brought a cup of coffee in the mug above, a lovely coincidence combining a map describing a network showing relationships "connecting the education sector across the UK". The network seems to be making connections, but the more I look at it, the more the diagram seems to describe branches that cross each other but place its practitioners in isolated bubbles.

Today we are used to a world of immediate communication, speedy responses, words broken into fragments, tiny shards of meaning, we are in such a rush to be here there and everywhere all at the same time, we forget the value of slowing it right down. This is particularly true of delivering creative outcomes in schools, we believe that children have a short attention span, will get bored, run riot, if we ask them to slow down.

During these activities the teachers and I also try to take the children on imaginative journeys, for the past two Fridays we have been in China looking at surface decoration and ceramics. Their teacher had recently been on a school exchange trip to China, her experiences helped to bring the vases to life for the children.

We could have thrown ourselves straight into the planned printing activity as soon as the children had finished their designs, instead we asked them to add to what they'd cut out and to plan out their designs by placing them inside the paper templates.

Slowing down creates space, there is nothing lovelier than drifting into a bubble of relaxation, of quiet and creative contemplation, the rush and buzz of the rest of life shrinks away, there are your thoughts, the materials and the many possibilities they present. The first mark needn't be the finished item. Everyone should give themselves the time to take that journey, not everyone ends up making images but we can all walk around inside them and enjoy or learn from the artist's chosen viewpoint.

What are maps?

Maps show what can't be seen.  They make visible connections, structures and overviews of how thinks link together.

But they are selective.  They only show connections from one viewpoint.  They simplify reality in order to make a coherent network.  A map only shows one version of reality.

If we were to map connections between our twelve places, how would we select what to acknowledge and what to leave out?

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” – Martin Buber

″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” – Moslih Eddin Saadi

“Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” – Miriam Beard