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Doncopolitan
Art Therapy
Pin the Pits

Category: curating

“The Long And Short Of It” Interviewing Adam Ogden Doncopolitan #01

Adam Ogden is a 3D designer and visual artist who uses scrap materials to create artworks which celebrate the lives of … More

Pin the Pits Wunderkammer

I decided to attempt to try and write this post on my recent collaboration with Cast, Doncaster’s long awaited performance … More

activist, Art, artists, Cast in Doncaster, coal, commission, contemporary arts, Esther Richardson, ghost dancer, heritage, mining, pin the pits, politics, theatre, wunderkammer

Curating with artist Dawn Howden “Translating Patterns”

Dawn Howden is a multi-media visual artist and lecturer at Doncaster College. Her current body of work “Translating Patterns” is … More

Art, artists, curating, Dawn Howden, digital art, doncaster, exhibitions, High Melton, New Fringe, twitter feed, White Gallery

Textibition

I’m feeling sad about leaving Doncaster College 😦 I had a great time helping to curate shows there last year. … More

Art, curating, design, doncaster, gallery, graphic design, graphics, High Melton, Simon Gomes, typography, White Gallery

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I glazed this plate at an @emilyrowley workshop ages ago. I really really really wanna do my beats on functional objects. I’m so gutted that I lost this plate, one day I’ll be serving up some V-gang foods on some plates and cups I’ve designed. That my friends will be a good day...

Obsessed with foods in this ‘ouse. Who’s coming for 3 course V-gang foods 🤩 when everything back to normal and it’s 2045? :)

I’m going through millions of files right now, 10 years of Doncaster and @doncopolitan. Came across this and it made my heart jump, this is my nanny at 102 reading issue 5 of Donco featuring @_jade.clark Badman collection.Her eye sight was really poor but she’s loved reading all her life from when the miners penny library opened at the miners’ welfare when she was 16. She also liked hot bods 🤩 She left school very young to work but she alway told me she was taught the three Rs. Reading, writing and arithmetic. She literally went to the library once or twice a week yet never owed a fine for a book. She was very moral and to be in debt was looked down on. I think it’s so stupid the way we need to buy books, these days. The new #zerowaste movement talks about this, my nanny really lived a waste free life, because their generation was not consumerist and had to be resourceful to survive. How’s borrowing books gonna work withCv19? She would take me every Saturday to Doncaster Library, I always wanted her to take out the brightly coloured Mills & Boon romantic novels but my nanny didn’t like them. She liked the murder mystery novels in large print. I have a lot of memories of being L1 Doncaster library in the large print section. It sad that Denaby library closed for a while in the 00s. When it re-opened in 2006 I wrote to DMBC and asked if my nanny could be a VIP for the day and re-open it. She was in her late 90s and a member of the library for 70ish years. I remember someone once telling me that Donny was not cultured because it didn’t had a book shop and someone else saying people in the area couldn’t read. Just one of the many forms of classism I’ve experienced over the years, when you get to enter the circles of decision makers. Despite this DN has experienced some of the heaviest cuts to services, faced with many closures community volunteers have kept these important spaces going for our communities. They provide important spaces places to meet, find-out opportunity, do homework and borrow books! Although, I live with a book junkie I’m consciously trying not to buy but to support my local library. Gonna be joining the Barno one soon ✊ Miss ya Nanny B

2020 a pandemic and Lockdown in Barnsley. Yet there I would find my yoga utopia in @invisible_jim allotment. Namaste 🙏

Cry To Me 🙏 I absolutely love this song. Since I was probs four and first heard it on Dirty Dancing 🥳 way too young but I just loved the tunes so much. Used to make dances up in the playground. Still doing the same thing ha 🤣 Cry to Me is by the legend King Solomon Burke who was an American preacher and singer born in the 1930s (exact date not know) and died in 2010.. He is known as one of the founding fathers of R&B and soul music. He’s massively over looked as an artist. I’m missing dancing 😪😪😪just popped on facecrack to find DJ Kett Bloomfield doing a Northern set. I’ve now officially christened Jame’s bedroom with my soul moves haha. Defo stealing @northern_soul_dancer moves 🤣

Happy #internationalnursesweek2020 Good old Flo nightingale’s Birthday last Monday 🥳 Shout out of all the nurses of the old days and now 🙌 Special big-up to all my palliative care nurses at St Johns Hospice @_chloem_81 @jo.anne3020 Rufus’s. Love you guys and what you do 🙌

My hound is basically a Furby 🐻

Skinned two cans of chickpeas to make pink humous like a sad sack vegan house wifey...#livinglife #S70 style. Made a good salad with beetroot and fresh dill from Eastern European Deli. I didn’t use a filter for that humous. It’s too beaut 💕

How’s it going? We’re pretending that we live in a @brothtarn photograph 📸 #S70life Hoping to release the second Podcast soon. All about my plans to study at Goldsmiths and why after wanting to go since I was 18 I might not end going. 🤣Basically it’s just too expensive. A lot of charities and trusts are focusing on Covid19 and that is beyond understandable. Feelin’ like the kid in the 1950s who got into grammar school and their parents said your can’t go the uniform is too expensive. Fingers crossed there’s another miracle a foot that will help me find some more coins to study there. Dang 😪

Another piece from the back catalogue of many random things I’ve made 😝 This was a commission from @rightupourstreet in 2015 by Creative Director @lorettoandrew for a project called Day Of The Dead. I designed the skull heads which were mostly made of up- cycled old jeans and visi vests. Good memories of lots of help and creativity from The Naughty Eco Pixies and friends. They took hours to sew together but looked great wrapped around the yurt. Love that @arcadia_for_all has taken them to some demos recently and @rosieclark_1 has one at home. I’d like to do more of these 💕💕💕

Meet mamma 💕 She’s a DN12 Queen 🙏 I was dropping off some veg whilst they are isolating. Which I get from @bentleyurbanfarm. She’s now completed 6 hand knitted Corona Virus cushions and mi dad has finally fixed the toilet seat after 2.5 years. They live in a council bungalow in Denaby Main, always makes me laugh how people call these small little dwellings “Gods Waiting Room” they are really cute not too much to cleaning but they have a beaut view of rolling countryside. My nanny lived over the road from the 1970s till she died at 104. She had a coal fire that she made herself everyday till she was 98. 🙌🙌🙏

Pin The Pits (2006 -2009) Old work but still a reminder I’m nuts! I do crazy things, should have gone travelled and got a tan. But nah In 2009 I ran a campaign and lobbied Ordnance Survey to change the maps 🤯 it’s still an outrage to me (please scroll left) that the miners shaft entrance markers are not seen as features of historical and geographical interest...😪 These are such important markers! 410 lives lost underground during the pits century long history. Coal propelled the United Kingdom into a global super power. Millions have been spent transforming these site from heavy industry into rural sites. It’s incredible 💕 BUT You would defo walk by that stone marker and not know a shabba doo about it’s history... Is it important that we know are history? Or should we not care? I won’t be offended if you think this is naff to look back? I like a good critique 👊🥊

Meet Alex Potts an 18 years old coal miner in 2007. Another old piece from my archives. Never got my heels properly into photography but occasionally get a decent shot. Alex was 18 and found me online after reading about my campaign in Daily Mail. He was literally like straight out of the 1980s, he wore the same shirts my dad did to play darts in the 90s. He used to do snuff. Snuff was this weird powdered Tobacco snuff that miners would snort down the pit instead of smoke. I remember pubs in the village I grew-up in still sold it in the 00s. My mum called this the “cocaine of her day” 🤣 He bought me a bunch of flower when we met and three different types of snuff. Later He invited me and my dad to go on a day trip to HayRoyds which was still a working pit in 07. It was a drift mine and really scary. I had to wear all the gear it was heavy, dirty and gross. I think we all did a bitof snuff down there. What a Weird world i’m from 🤣 My dad didn’t like how messy Hay Royds was he said it was dangerous and wouldn’t be like that at a unionised pit. This was tiny in comparison to where my dad work. Also, Alex was the last of a dying breed of people that still wanted to mine! It wasn’t a job for him, he was a miner in his soul even if that world didn’t exist for him. My dad continues to say: I’d go back tomorrow if I could. They’ll always miss their pit village life. Hope your ok Alex whenever you are 🙏

Workers Of The World Unite ✊ This is a sketch from years ago of my grandad’s Yorks Area National Union Of Mine Workers Badge A lump of coal the size of a small car crushed my grandad when he was in his 50s. He recovered luckily but died two years before I was born in 82. My dad talks of his generation fondly, calling them “Old Pit Men” using pics ⛏ instead of the coal cutting machinery my dad would use. Doing that job they never would know if the ceiling might fall of if there would be a gas explosion. Accidents, deaths and amputations were frequently. The Cadeby Miners Union Banner - has E Tenbris Lux written on it. Latin for : out of darkness light. They fought hard to improve health and safety conditions for each other. My dad also told me the most amazing story of when the pit manager made a racist comment to one of the miners. They all went on strike because of that comment. 100s of men. My grandads Union banner was for Denaby Main. It was made in the 1950s and said : Workers Of The World Unite and 8 hour day for all workers. My dad says: all those things we fought for Rachel gone in a generation.

Tah Dah 🥳 Thanks to the glorious power of social media 🔮 I’ve now sold this piece to @doncastermuseum 🙏 I posted this image earlier in the year explaining that I wanted to sell it to help fund the MA I’m starting @goldsmithsuol this September. I’ve really loved living with this piece it’s been a back drop to my life for the past few years and I’m grateful to @castindoncaster for commissioning me to first build it in 2014. Now we have a say goodbye 🙏 If you wanna read more about it there’s a few pieces on my blog. Having a piece of my art in a permanent museum collection kinda validates your work. This is a very western thing where we need institutions to accept our art and to give it a value. I’m very grateful to have sold it but I still need to raise a lot more cash to fund studying but at least I don’t need to sell a kidney 🤣 About the piece. It’s called Pin The Pits Wunderkammer. It’s a mini museum of my life exploring my indenting as a miners strike baby from 2003- 2009. It contains drawings, photographs and ephemera documenting my Pin The Pits campaign whereby I lobbied audience survey to mark former colliery sites on audience survey maps.

Another piece from my Iraq War series for @bee_ewe 🙌 from my archive. This was a great bank note 1meter in length which I coloured in cheap felt-tip pens. It was a copy of Saddam Hussain’s Iraqi currency before the war which my friend sent me in the post from Iraq in 2002. I’ve lost the original, but I still have some of the original currency kicking about at home.

***From Basra With Love *** This is probs one of my favourite pieces of art I’ve made. It’s part of a series I’ve never shown about the Iraq War. In 2003 my school friend Ellen, toured Basra with British Army as part of their peace keeping tour. Ellen sent me letters to my uni halls in London when I was study art @middlesexuniversity (aka going out raving all the time 🤣) This image was part of an installation that combined drawing, photography and ephemera (junk from a pub I worked at in called the Nelsons in Wood Green). Ellen and her solider pals used to give teddy bears and water bottles to the Iraqi kids which is where this image is originally from. Later when Ellen, came back to the UK. I turned this image into a postcard and sent it to her barracks where she had it pinned on the wall. Looking back at it now, I think I was trying to say, even in all the disappear, it’s in our human condition to find moments of joy. I remember Ellen saying that a higher up officer said the image was very inspirational. It’s weird collage can evoke that. If you like this post, I’ll share more old work and stories 💕💕

💕It’s pink humous night 💕 Right! it’s been decided my creative project today is how to make Humous from scratch for @__c.h.a.r.l.o.t.t.e 💕 I’m trying to be creative in my fav way. It involves reaching out to to the people I love and asking them : what ya wanna creating 💅 I’m obsessed with vegan, raw, slow food and slow living. This is why I helped @arcadia_for_all set-up @bentleyurbanfarm in 2015. I wanna eat all the veg from the dirt 😛 Can’t say I’m good at growing 🤯 but I love making stuff with locally grown foods. Then stuffing my face. That’s pink humous made with beetroot from the farm and all the others bits from Josie’s Deli- you need: 1 x can of chick peas Tahini Lemon Juice Garlic Black Pepper Beetroot A Blender Get ya ingredients ready and I’ll see ya laters for the best way to make pink humous 💕 See you on my insta stories tonight from 6pm. 💕💕💕💕💕

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