Stillunresolved

The Pam Flett Press is an independent serial exploring the aesthetics of everyday life. Words and pictures by Joanne Lee. Designed by dust. 

Issue #2 'Lord Biro and the writing on the wall' is all about misreadings and willful misunderstandings: it explores curious characters encountered on various city streets as well as the names people are given, or (sometimes) choose to go by, before digressing into the unexpected poetry of tagging and abstract paintings on city walls. 

The concertina companion of footnotes starts to get a little out of hand, with many entries spawning notes of their own, and some of these generating still further annotation... Amongst these you’ll find a disquisition on the naming of colours, consideration of the biro’s invention and use, a list of recording artistes whose names claim spurious nobility, thoughts on archaeology, the different knowledge made possible by practice, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger on contradiction in essays.

Returns is an on-going collaboration between Nottingham Trent University and Sheffield Hallam University. It emerged from Topographies of the Obsolete, an international research project initiated in 2012 by Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway, which focused on the disused Spode ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent.

Taking the Spode site as ‘author’, the artists in Returns have conducted research through practice in a series of residencies and workshops. The project addresses the particular histories and the present state of the factory, amidst the wider context of post-industrial landscapes and their ruins. As manufacturing ceases or moves elsewhere, and buildings crumble, what becomes of these remains and the communities cast adrift by the receding tides of commerce?

The exhibition brings together artistic research from Andrew Brown, Chloë Brown, Joanne Lee, Danica Maier and Debra Swann. Recent Fine Art graduates Ciarán Harrington and Christine Stevens are producing new work ‘in-residence’ in Bonington Gallery during the exhibition. http://www.boningtongallery.co.uk/coming-soon

Exhibition continues 12 February – 4 March 2015
 http://www.boningtongallery.co.uk/coming-soon/returns

RETURNS Discussion Workshops

Throughout the exhibition, a series of events will consider specific issues uncovered in Returns’ research through practice. Variously using presentations, conversation and practical activities, three discussion workshops bring together professionals and practitioners to reflect upon particular points of focus.

Digging through Dirt: Archaeology past, present, precious and unwanted 11 February, 1pm – 2.15pm

Referencing recent activities at Nottingham’s Lenton Abbey, the Island site and Stoke-on-Trent, Spode Works, this discussion will consider archaeology as a form of art practice, the archaeological dig experienced from an artists’ perspective and the ruin as site for artistic enquiry. Led by Andrew Brown. Participants: Anne Helen Mydland, Curator and Professor, Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway; George Miles, Photographer and academic, Nottingham Trent University; Rebecca Beinart, Artist, educator and activist, and Wasteland Twinning Project explorer

Artists will have your Ruin: Regeneration through the arts 18 February, 1pm – 2.15pm

The session brings together artists, gallery directors, studio managers and council developers from Nottingham, Sheffield and Stoke-on-Trent, the three cities involved in the Returns research project, to consider how artists repurpose ruins and how creative practices breathe life into a city and its cultural economy beyond purely monetary gain. Led by Joanne Lee and Ciarán Harrington. Participants: Glen Stoker, Anna Francis, Co Directors, Airspace, Stoke on Trent; Michelle Bowen, Development Director, Primary, Nottingham; Matthew Chesney, Director, Backlit, Nottingham; Richard Bartle, Founder member and manager, Bloc, Sheffield; Peter Thompson, Development Programme Manager for Spode site, Stoke-on-Trent City Council

Ruins of Craft: Lost art of making 25 February, 1pm – 2.15pm

Taking as a context the three cities involved in the Returns project, and the loss of their craft-based industrial heritage – Nottingham’s lace and textile industry, Stoke on Trent’s ceramics factories and Sheffield’s metalworking – this session considers the disappearance of craft skills and its implications for contemporary decorative and fine arts. Led by Christine Stevens. Participants: Dr. Becky Shaw, Post Graduate Research Tutor in Art and Design, Sheffield Hallam University; Jude Wensley, Senior Lecturer in Decorative Arts, Nottingham Trent University; Andy Harris, Ceramics and Glass Technician, Nottingham Trent University.

If you would like to join us for a Discussion Workshop, please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.  The events are FREE but booking is essential as places are limited to facilitate discussion. More information on each event is available at www.boningtongallery.co.uk/events/returns-discussion-workshops

The Pam Flett Press is an independent serial exploring the aesthetics of everyday life. Words and pictures by Joanne Lee. Designed by dust.

The first issue 'Call yourself a bloody professional' adapts an album cover aphorism from The Fall as its title and is something of a manifesto for the rest of the series. It begins with trying to avoid getting a proper job and recognises that the amateur does things out of love rather than professional necessity. 

Readers will also find extensive discussion of curiosity and careers, carrier bags and colanders, a consideration of the distinctions between amateur and professional wankers, as well as an engagement with experts and epistemophilia... Francophiles will enjoy name-checking those who’ve inspired this endeavour: Roland Barthes, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Michel de Montaigne, Georges Perec, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Agnes Varda. Northerners will know that none of this could have happened without Mark. E. Smith and the mighty Fall.

For her latest work ‘Whiling’ Katja K. Hoch uses the city as an external gallery by projecting slow-moving films and images of nearby Bestwood Country Park and the Winding Engine House onto different surfaces and buildings in Nottingham. By choosing this woodland as well as the disused sand quarry near the former Mining community of Bestwood Village as her subject, Hock addresses a topic especially relevant to the area, the demise of the Mining Industry while at the same time presenting the contrasting beauty of the surrounding woodlands nearby with the busy city environment.

The Pam Flett Press is an independent serial exploring the aesthetics of everyday life. Words and pictures by Joanne Lee. Designed by dust. 

'Gumming up the works' features a spoken word essay, listenable/downloadable from Soundcloud. (If you prefer to read rather than listen, you can download/print a pdf transcript of the recording here.)

This third issue fantasizes about luminous constellations of dropped chewing gum on the street, confronts a horrible compulsion to seek out the hard stuff glued under desks or in the recesses of train carriages, before finding itself fixated upon various species of lumps, heaps and piles; ultimately the writing explores creative work as a sort of digestion or composting, and suggests we have quite a lot to learn from worms. 

The essay, which runs to just under an hour of listening time, is accompanied by a printed publication featuring 26000 words of excessive, digressive footnotes (about lichen, large format photography, islands, creative block, binary erotics, fiddling, getting side-tracked, stickiness, shit, disgust, using animals to think with, the Katamari Damacy computer game, tumbleweed methodology, hoarding, clutter, impropriety, rubbish...) the generation of which have become the point of the exercise... 

The print publication comes with a postcard and 10 full colour photographic images. It was selected as one of the best books by European artists for the exhibition/fair KALEID London 2014.

Joanne Lee participated as one of four ‘Seers in Residence’ responding to Traci Kelly’s monoprint installation Feeling It For You (Perspective)

The installation formed half of From Where I Am I Can See You, alongside works by Rita Marhaug, and was exhibited through January in Nottingham Trent University’s Bonington Gallery.

The Seers in Residence programme engages four researchers from NTU: Emma Cocker, Ben Judd, Simon Cross and Joanne Lee to respond according their own research and practice. Some documentation of Joanne Lee at work appears here thanks to Julian Hughes. 

Working with photography and text this project developed ideas begun in issue 2 of the independent serial publication Pam Flett Press and in a residency at the former Spode factory in Stoke-on-Trent where Lee considered Yukio Mishima’s articulation (in Sun and Steel) of ‘the profundity of the surface itself’ and historian Joseph Amato's assertion that, in order to understand modernity and our present, we ought ‘to concentrate on surfaces’. 

Images and texts from Traci Kelly and the four Seers appear in Feeling It For You (Perspective) with Seers in Residence, published by Bonington Gallery / Nottingham Trent University. Emma Cocker's introductory text 'Stepping Towards Stepping Away' begins: 'Within a research culture that often privileges the distinction of one’s research from others, what place is there for the building of bridges? Beyond the realm of institutional collaboration and network bids, what does it really mean to construct spaces for speculation, for sharing ideas, for thinking together?'