Review

Harry Meadley: On The Bench

First published by Art Monthly, September 2017

Various Locations with Up Projects and The Floating Cinema, January - August 2017

In the autumn of 1933 the novelist and playwright JB Priestley undertook his infamous ‘English Journey’, appropriating the travelogue as a barometer of national wellbeing in order to record regional resolve against the ravages of the Great Depression. On visiting Hull in the latter stages of his expedition the author was apparently struck by the city’s remoteness, bluntly noting that one ‘cannot pass through it to anywhere’, an observation that would lead him to characterise the port unfairly as an isolated district, ‘not really in Yorkshire, but by itself, somewhere in the remote east’.

Such a vision couldn’t be further from the sensitive portrait of interconnected regional vitality conjured by Leeds-based artist Harry Meadley in his series of short films On the Bench, 2017, which toured a portion of the North East’s industrial canal network this summer aboard The Floating Cinema as part of UP Projects’ ‘In Dialogue’ screening programme. Shown alongside an expansive repertoire of feature films curated by Mariam Zulfiqar, these works betray a broader discursive remit for Meadley, an artist whose previous projects have been marked by a loosely associative, autobiographically driven poetic conceptualism that has often explored themes of dedication, perseverance and self-improvement in relation to his own artistic discipline.

Taking the form of brief, candid and warmly humoured interviews with cultural practitioners located at each of the eight stops the touring boat was due to visit (Sheffield, Rotherham, Swinton, Doncaster, Thorne, Goole, South Ferriby and Hull), this sequence of conversations reanimated something of Priestley’s sociological ambition, making hopeful and poignant inquiries into the reasons that artists, writers and curators might maintain publicly engaged projects despite limited remuneration, lack of institutional support and significant decreases in public funding across the north of England as a result of the continuation of government-imposed austerity. I caught the Cinema at its final location, moored at Hull Marina on an overcast Friday afternoon, joining a steady flow of visitors who were boarding the intimate barge to watch all eight films in succession.

It seemed appropriate that the first film in the sequence captured a discussion between Meadley and artist, curator and director of Bloc Projects, David McLeavey, which focused on the problems faced by recent arts graduates who will have emerged into a world where people aren’t necessarily ‘paid to care about their work’. The conversation was frank, and dealt with the conditions artists might face when considering living and working in the cities in which they took their degrees. McLeavy points out that it was the support of the S1 Artspace bursary programme that enabled him to continue working in Sheffield, underscoring the importance of financial and emotional security in an otherwise precarious working situation.  

From here we travel along the River Don to Boston Castle, a small park overlooking the town of Rotherham, where Meadley interviewed Tair Rafiq, a genially eccentric playwright whose involvement with ROAR (Rotherham Open Arts Renaissance) testifies to a welcoming regional attitude to arts accessibility bolstered by the concurrent activities of the Open Minds Theatre Company and ROMP (Rotherham Open Mic Performance). Rafiq makes for a wryly astute interviewee whose writerly aesthetic is good-humoured but pointedly uncompromising: discussing a prospective three-hour rock opera, he jokes that the only way to make any money from theatre these days might be to keep people in their seats long enough so that they can be pickpocketed.

While these first interviews articulate issues central to Meadley’s self-reflexive exploration of artistic practice, the films that followed made direct excursions into broader issues surrounding the industrial recession in the North, the continual legacy of historic pit closures, and the strange sense of fraudulence or social dysphoria sometimes felt by working-class artists. Nowhere was this more acutely expressed than in an interview with Doncaster-based artist and regional arts magazine editor Rachel Horne, who spoke persuasively about the interior modes of social exclusion that prefaced her own presumptions about what modes of creation were open to her as a young practitioner. ‘Things like that aren’t for people like us,’ she recounts of her initial feelings, before talking through the ways in which her family’s experience of the miner’s strike had come to inform her socially engaged projects, leading to a confrontation with the factors that continue to validate or legitimise working-class identity.

Emma Wilson, founder of Artistic Spectrum – an initiative providing arts access to people with autism based at The Artspace in Thorne, South Yorkshire – discussed her own trajectory as a designer who found a way into developing interactive workshops with a speech and language therapist. Wilson’s community-based activities prompted a pressing discussion on the stigma of functionality that seems to hierarchise artistic projects, and how assumptions of artistic value in arts education are often based on aptitude, for instance in draftsmanship, alongside myopic and exclusionary suppositions of physical and mental capability.

Meadley’s affable manner brought an insightful intimacy to these dialogues, frequently negotiating the necessary interrelationship between the public-facing activities of his interviewees and their personal artistic pursuits. A conversation with Clare Hunt, for example, whose remarkable work on the Sobriety Project draws on the resources of the Yorkshire Waterways Museum to provide opportunities for disadvantaged people, shifted frequently into discussions of the sustaining qualities of her own painting, while the artist, and art tutor at Swinton Lock Activity Centre, Deborah Frith talked candidly about a peculiarly post-industrial sense of community that could be found in the Street Fighter Riff Raff Motorcycle Club she belonged to.

Previous works have seen Meadley perform a confessional mode of artistic accountability akin to an alternative comedian’s off-kilter stand-up routine, often bemusedly discussing the forms of complicity, guilt and privilege that have obtained in past projects. This was perhaps best exemplified by The Harry Meadley Show, 2017, a low-budget talk show broadcast as part of the Jerwood Stagings Series that openly discussed recent identity politics scandals and accusations of cultural appropriation. On the Bench appears to have emerged from such processes of self-reflection, and might have appeared mannered were it not for the artist’s disarming sincerity and emergent consternation at the social limitations of his previous output. What emerges then is an urgent portrayal of the potency of locality, and the techniques of dedication and fortitude that bind communities in the face of economic uncertainty. It is a new direction for the artist, and one that will hopefully continue to provide a vital cartography of regional resilience.