Blackpool litter picks.
From a recent field trip to Blackpool on a busy August Saturday. All found along the promenade and down the piers. Litter picking can be a way to connect to your surroundings, find out about people and practices, imagine scenarios, and do a little bit for the environment in the process. Blackpool as a tourist destination that facilitates family fun and entertainment, is revealed through these colourful fragments. From trad buckets and spades, to fun snaps and silly string, and bolstered by sugarBlackpool is steeped in invitations to play and be playful.
The (Amusement) Arcades Project
Sample field notes from my PhD project. The (Amusement) Arcades Project creatively and critically explores the contemporary British seaside amusement arcade as a uniquely sensory and affective space. The project moves beyond historical reductive understandings of amusement arcades as dejected commercial spaces primarily constituting sites of deviance and gambling, to challenge negative perceptions that situate these sites as places of low commercial culture that contribute to the decline of British seaside resorts. Due to their undervalued nature, arcades remain neglected in the arena of research despite persisting as popular sub-holiday destinations throughout the UK. Archive image research that foregrounds the arcade’s development and sensory history and heritage lays the way for the project’s returned research trips to Blackpool to collect primary data (fieldnotes, soundwalk recordings and photographs). This project sits at the intersection of art, visual culture and human geography, creating and communicating the nuanced and underexplored qualities and experiences of seaside amusement arcades in their contemporary contexts.
Blackpool at night.
Postcards exploring the unique lightscape of Blackpool at night. These are from the 1970s and 1980s.
Photo postcard slide photo postcard.
Bank Holiday in Blackpool / 2. The North Bay, Scarborough / 3. The Windmill, Bidsten Hill, Birkenhead / 4. Sefton Park, Liverpool / 5. Cotton Exchange, Liverpool / 6. Rhuddlan Castle / 7. Brittania Tubular Bridge / 8. Pen Rhos College, Colwyn Bay / 9. Dyserth Waterfall near Rhyl / 10. Scott Series No. 565 Barmouth by Moonlight / 11. Waterfall, Jesmond Dene, Newcastle-on-Tyne / 12. Betwis-y-Coed Pandy Bridge. Work exhibited and published in The Imaginary Museum: Art Library as Archive Exhibition & Book, Leeds College of Art and Leeds Central Library. 2015.
Coin cups.
Coin cups from Blackpool’s amusement arcades. Been thinking about the materiality of coins in an increasingly contactless society. The smell of 2ps and 10ps. The sounds of coins, when you drop them or rummage through them. The weight of them in your pocket and the way they heat up when held in your hand. How they age and travel and circulate. Encounters with vending machines and charity boxes. Those slow collections of them in big whiskey bottles.
Seaside arcade shoe pics.
Risograph print of nine seaside amusement arcade carpet shoe pics, from ongoing The Amusement Arcades Project. 2021.
The Blue Guide.
This photographic collage adopts the title of one of Roland Barthes Mythologies essays, first translated into English in 1957. Barthes dates the mythology of the Blue Guide (the travel guidebook) back to the 19th century, to a phase in history when the bourgeoisie was “enjoying a kind of new-born euphoria in buying effort, in keeping its image and essence without feeling any of its ill-effects.” He critiques the aesthetic existence of the Blue Guide with its presentation of landscapes lacking in spaciousness. Many of us have experienced ‘travel’ as a predetermined process, mapped out by a trusted ‘guide book’ that manipulates our collective memories.
By juxtaposing numerous fragmented blue skies from travel brochures and guidebooks, this work explores the ethereal pretense of the popular travel image and its place in the travel experience.
Work exhibited in Mapping Memory, Unfold Fringe for British Art Show, at 42 New Briggate, Leeds. 2015-2016.