Back To Life, Back To Reality
Beeston sunrise from the bus stop.
“I wake-up in the morning, and I wonder
Why everything’s the same as it was
I can’t understand, no, I can’t understand
How life goes on the way it does”
Over the last two years, my mood and enthusiasm in relation to most things has been up and down to say the least. In fact I have vacillated so wildly between the highs and the lows that I have given myself the bends. Whilst I had the privilege to be forcibly removed from the anxiety of the Covid situation last March, the reality was that it was a state of mind deferred rather than removed, and that come the second lockdown as of Christmas 2020, things, psychologically speaking, would be completely different.
Empty lockdown motorway (Beeston)
Eighteen months down the line I start to see the effect that it has had on my mind and my thinking. The world has changed for sure, but has it changed in the ways in which we had imagined or hoped? Or, are our worst fears coming true? Well that really depends upon your viewpoint, which is in turn dictated by circumstances.
Alistair Woods installing work at Sluice Biennial 2017
Back in January 2019, I visited London for the first time in two years. The reason for my visit, as it had been two years earlier, was the same; Art. In fact, even more specifically, it was Sluice Art. In 2017 BasementArtsProject had taken part in the Sluice Biennial in Hackney, and now two years later I was attending the launch of the spring edition of their bi-annual magazine, in which I had written an article about grassroots art, at a small temporary gallery space in Peckham Rye.
‘Breakdown. Persevere. Repeat.’ Sluice Magazine
I have always enjoyed visiting London. I have been doing so for art purposes since I was 18 and first at art college in the late 1980’s, but this time something was different. As I mooched around Camden market and Tate Britain, interspersed with coffee shops and such like I found myself becoming increasingly despondent and eventually, after an argumentative phone call with a school, angry. I remember thinking to myself how much I hated London and that I never wanted to come back. Everything seemed hopeless and futile. Touring around art events on my own has never bothered me, but something about this trip had really got to me.
Sluice Magazine: Survival Strategies Issue Launch event - Peckham Rye
Upon reaching the Sluice event in Peckham things changed yet again. The negativity that had been building during the day seemed to suddenly disappear. I cannot explain it, but my time at this event seemed to remove all of the despair that I felt during the day, and going home overnight on the late train was a pleasant and even relaxing experience. Over the next couple of weeks my memory of the day fluctuated between the negative and positive viewpoints that I held at the time, meaning that I would periodically state how much I hated London and that I never wanted to go back there.
‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About The Artist Led’ symposium Liverpool John Moores University
On January 31st 2019 I visited a conference at Liverpool John Moore’s University entitled ‘What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About The Artist Led’. The theme of this related very much to, not only my personal circumstances being the person behind an artist-led independent space, but also to the article that I had written for Sluice, and once again I found myself writing for Sluice, this time a review of the days talks and presentations. This trip to Liverpool brought forth none of the anxiety that my London trip two weeks earlier had induced. That night as I sat in my accommodation on the Wirral, across the River from the conference, I watched the breaking news about the nineteen people being brought to Arrow Park Hospital from Wuhan; and we all know where that led.
Henry Moore Studios & gardens, Hertfordshire
Anyway I am not going to go into that as I have written elsewhere about it over the last two years and I do not want to dwell on this aspect anymore. One earlier incident that I have never forgotten but have never previously mentioned was a work related trip to the Henry Moore Studio and Gardens in Hertfordshire in November 2019. In this case the work relation was to my non-independent, paid employment with the Henry Moore Institute. I remember this two-day trip being a very similar situation to my London visit. By the time that I arrived my mind was in such a bad way that I could barely bring myself to look at or talk to people, not very helpful when you have been brought along to contribute. By the time I lay down in the hotel bed that night I was wound tighter than I had ever been. Upon waking up the next day all of that anxiety had gone. I pity the people who had to deal with me over those two days.
Henry Moore Studios & gardens, Tapestry Barn
The reason why I am bringing this up here is to make a point about the future; the reality and how we perceive it. I now know that it was nothing about any of these trips that had caused me to behave in the way that I had on these and, if I am honest, which I am being, many other occasions across the forty-nine years of my life. It was my viewpoint. It was a distorted viewpoint, based unknowingly on some kind of unhelpful prognostication in which a future did not exist.
Stephen Harwood - work from Sluice Magazine: Survival Strategies Issue Launch event
And this is the rub, in my imagination, the future did not exist, or it was so degraded that it might as well not exist. Not long before lockdown I visited the doctor, not something I like to do, and came away with a handful of prescriptions for depression, anxiety and hyper-tension. Come the lockdown, it was this that saved me from what I would imagine could have been a very dismal, negative and fractious time. Those around me would agree that it changed me. Occasionally I would see things on social media that angered me about my circumstances, things over which I had no control. One such meme shared by many ran thus “This is no cure for depression” -picture of a handful of pills similar to those that I was taking, “This is” -picture of a beautiful woodland glade in dappled sunlight with a gentle stream trickling through it. Whilst this idealistic representation is all very nice, it is only as real as my apocalyptic end-time reality, that is to say not real at all. Whilst those places do exist, many people do not have access to the nicer side of living; the woodland glades, the Alpine mountains on which they can run, dance and sing proclaiming the hills to be “alive with the sound of music”. We must work with what we have.
Beeston, South Leeds
Yesterday morning was a low point after recent highs. Having come back from a very positive project in Dortmund, I had a phone call from the artist working on our ongoing Jacob’s Ladder project here in Beeston, to tell me that for the last two nights someone had been and defecated under, and on, Jacob’s Ladder. He and his technician had sorted it out with hot water and bleach before getting on with the job of carving. The streets of Beeston are not stranger to the concept of al-fresco defecation, there are a number of places nearby that are used as outdoor lavatories, presumably by the burgeoning homeless population. The sad thing is that despite the increase in homelessness throughout the pandemic, and the increasingly aggressive panhandling strategies that this has engendered, the problem has always been there. Back in 2017, the piece of land on which Jacob’s Ladder now rests was one such unofficial lavatory, and was also full of needles and what some would rather euphemistically describe as ‘sex waste’. An unsavoury, unwholesome, unhealthy and unsanitary tract of wasteland with protected trees, that was neither useful nor pleasant.
Tunstall Road grass with abandoned bedding
In the years since we have, along with our Ward Councillor Paul Wray, negotiated use of this land for the public good. It has been cleaned periodically by the owners of the land, although not enough, and the presence of the as-yet unfinished artwork has attracted nothing but positive attention since we moved the stone there towards the end of the last lockdown. For two days now the phantom defecator has not returned. I have put a polite message there saying ‘please do not poo here, we have to work here’. Maybe that has worked.
Conversations around Jacob’s Ladder with artist Keith Ackerman and technician John Barber
My point is, that these can be temporary blips if we are prepared to take steps to address all of the attendant problems that go with living as part of a society, rather than looking in and condemning the behaviour, viewpoints and circumstances that others find themselves in. There will always be problems, in solving one issue more arise, but that is what makes us useful human beings. The ability to change ourselves and in doing so perhaps help others. We may not be nurses, doctors, supermarket workers, long distance lorry drivers etcetera, but as artists we are part of the future world, and what we do now influences the world into which we one day hope to return. What do we want that world to look like?
Jacob’s Ladder: An Intergenerational project
The fact of the matter is, there will never truly be any money to do things with unless those with money start to relinquish their grip on it. Until that point we have to continue building, defer the payments, we cannot defer the future in the hopes that the short-sighted rulers of the world will one day have that Damascene moment, in which the scales fall from their eyes and they witness the error of their ways, and the horrors that they have subjected their nations to.
We do not need to dwell on the idea that at some point everything will end, it can shackle us to the idea that we can do nothing about it, and that it is not worth fighting for. Similarly so it would not be good for me to dwell on my own past thoughts, there is no point in regret; regret is an inevitable consequence of life itself, guaranteed as much as the rising and setting sun each day. But, to recognise our regrets and use them as a force for change, that is what can truly save us, in whatever aspects of life and the living of it that we are involved in.
Sign above the doormat Assembly Leeds, spotted as I was leaving the day before the UK lockdown began - March 2020
In reality we need to fight for the future, not just our own but for the future of everyone else at the same time. Purpose is a great thing, and a sense of purpose is important. When we lose a sense of purpose we lose our sense of the future, and that is where hopelessness slips into the void and feeds our deepest fears. That is the point at which the sun sets never to rise again.
“Why does the sun go on shining?
Why does the sea rush to shore?
Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?
’Cause you don’t love me any more”
6:30am running in the park before work as the sun rises