4WCoP 2023

The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography 2023 was held on 9 September 2023, from 10:30am to around 2:00pm, under the theme of ‘Watch This Space’.

This annual event has been running since 2015, beginning in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire and subsequently moving online in 2020, where it has remained since.

This year the submitted presentation concerned work arising from Patrick's current PhD study on the Victorian Arcades of Leeds, focusing especially on the first of the reflective art making projects that aim to investigate the movement and behaviour of people within those unique spaces.

The 10-minute presentation introduced the focus of the overall study before explaining how drawings made in the field recorded the exact pathways taken by 25 individuals through Thornton's Arcade. The pathway drawings were combined onto a single map, which is currently undergoing enlargement to make individual pathways more easily traced.  

Introducing the study 'The Leeds Arcades Project'

Inspired by Walter Benjamin

The presentation can be viewed here.

The 4WCoP website can be viewed here.

Dialogue with the Landscape, a Guest Blog post

I recently had the opportunity to contribute a post to the blog of Garry Barker, an artist and educator living and teaching in Leeds, UK - my home town.

Garry and his work has been a profound influence on me and my work since the 1970s when I first met him at Jacob Kramer College of Art (later to become Leeds Arts University). Garry uses drawing to create narratives about the world that exists around us and simultaneously through his work he creates multiple other worlds.

For Garry's drawing blog I wrote a piece about a drawing project I had been engaged in for a while. As I was about to progress to the next stage in the project it seemed an opportune moment to reflect on what I had done so far before moving on.

My post is now live and can be found here:

Patrick S. Ford: A Dialogue with the Landscape.

While you are there spend time to read through Garry's previous posts, I promise you it will be worth it.

Garry also has another blog devoted to the pedagogy of teaching art. This is also incredibly informative and can be found here:

Art and Pedagogy.

Layer Drawing Project

The development of work can be a logical process, progressing in a methodical linear way as ideas are unraveled and understood. This would continue in a similar fashion if attention is focused on the journey and what the direction of the next step should be.

My own experience, however, is a lot more chaotic, messy and unruly but no less enjoyable or, importantly, productive.

I have developed an approach in which, at almost every stage, there are multiple possibilities, possible directions, appropriate decisions and therefore solutions. There is, of course, a central element that does progress, develop and arrive a resolution but in addition to these multiple starting points or as I see them, possible 'threads' that can be returned to in the future and then investigated more thoroughly.

The most efficient way to keep track of all these possible threads is to have notebooks around in which to record the alternative ideas so that they may be taken up later. Without these notes many of the additional ideas may be forgotten and never taken up. What waste that is.

When initiating a series of drawings as participation in the Drawing Dialogue 2 project, I started 4 drawings by covering part of a sheet off paper in marks that resembled either 'scribbles' or unknown calligraphic characters, depending on one's attitude. Theses drawings of mine were then worked on by two other partners in the project until a final resolution was reached.

Later, I thought back to these initiatory drawings as I wished to investigate the method a little further than I had at the time. I began laying down these proto calligraphic marks using a light HB pencil and then worked on top of them with a darker pencil, B or perhaps 2B. I was attracted to the effect of having multiple layers of marks of varying intensity and boldness. The resulting image resembled a kind of palimpsest in which marks from the different layers could be read intermittently through the various layers. I tried making some drawings in one of my notebooks, initially as a solid block of marks but then trying leave part of the drawing with some of the marks but with not all the layers superimposed one on another. With each drawing the section that was not covered by all the layers was laid out formally so the number of layers put down could be easily detected simply by counting them as they were revealed in the more open section. For convenience, and for want of a better term I simply called these works 'Layer Drawings'.

It is important to remember that this was not my primary project and so the work on the drawings was done sporadically, whenever I had some free time and whenever I remembered to return to the drawings. I was also working on a journal article, a conference poster, several performances, a photographic project and a sculpture. I juggled these projects according to relevant deadlines and so some of these projects are still unfinished (especially the ones without a firm deadline).

Up to this moment (17 August 2019) there are 5 configurations of the 'Layer Drawing' approach recorded in my notebooks and one that has been realised on a slightly larger sheet of paper that was made to investigate how the drawn marks, and the experience of making them, change as the scale is increased.

In future I shall post further updates to this project which runs in the background to my other work.

First, the 5 A5 notebook images:

July 2018

August 2018

September 2018

September 2018

August 2019

...and here is the slightly larger (43cm(h) x 32.5cm(w)) experiment:

October 2018

International Drawing Dialogue Phase 2, second stage - 2018

To begin the second stage of this collaborative drawing project (see here), 4 drawings by UK artist Jane Kennington arrived in the post.

I unwrapped her drawings and left them out so I could get to know them and, hopefully, strike up a conversation with them.

After a while the drawings began to suggest a way forward and following that I started to construct a response. The drawings evolved as a conversation might, initial introductions, politeness at first, becoming more relaxed as the conversation developed and familiar topics were touched upon.

Jane's opening drawings were generous and left me at least half the page to work with, sometimes more and so the dialogue within the drawings remained polite and respectful.

The resulting drawings were sent on to Georgia Boukla in the UK. I am now awaiting the third stage of the project in which I will be the third artist to work on the set of drawings.

My responses are as follows, in the order I made them:

Drawing Project - Working process

I edited together footage recorded during the recent drawing day on Cheung Chau and edited 2 short videos outlining the construction of two drawings.

These drawings are the latest in an ongoing project that investigates the collaboration between a human (me) and nature and as active participant. Together we create an image through dialogue. As with all conversations, sometimes one party dominates, when they have a lot to say, while the other listens, sometimes it is a balanced two-way interaction. 

I will post more updates from this project in future, hopefully recording the progress of the investigation.

Here are the two drawings made on 7th May 2017.

The first drawing

The recording can also be viewed on my youtube.com channel here: https://youtu.be/ZZLeJxAsITg

 The second drawing

The recording can also be viewed on my youtube.com channel here: https://youtu.be/g8OmGnUXbss

This project was referred to in the blog of Garry Barker, artist and educator in Leeds, UK. Garry goes into detail about the use of frottage in art, in great detail and great eloquence here.

Drawing Project - Work in progress

On Sunday 7th May I gathered my prepared materials and walked down to Nam Tam Wan to take a close look at which rocks could be suitable for the next stage of my drawing project.

The small tests I had conducted previously showed promise and I had intended to build upon those results, I just didn't foresee that it would take so long to move the project along. A conference paper, Dada collage, a digital print and various other things came onto the agenda and pushed the drawing project back. However, putting that delay aside I could now turn my attention to drawing the rocks down at the little bay near my home.

I began with a roll of Chinese calligraphy paper, which I have found to be particularly good at picking up the texture of surfaces when creating frottage images. Sometimes the paper may tear, especially when enthusiasm urges me to work faster and so these tears will need to be repaired later at some point.

Several stones picked up on the beach helped to keep the paper in place and prevented the wind from blowing my work away. I used sticks of willow charcoal to transfer the rocks' texture and as I worked I snapped the charcoal into shorts sticks of approximately 2 inches so that I could slide them across the surface of the paper to create soft swathes of texture on the paper.

When the first drawing seemed to be resolved I took a look at it and thought that it didn't require any further working back home, although I will look again another day to see if my opinion on that has changed.

The second attempt was with a larger piece of paper. This paper was thicker, smoother and had a waterproof covering on the reverse side. This had advantages and disadvantages. The advantages were that the paper was more durable, was easier to pin down using the rocks and was easier to push the paper further into crevasses to pick up the texture. The disadvantages were that the smooth surface texture of the paper meant that it was more difficult to create an organic surface of marks, the waterproof covering on the reverse side formed a barrier, making it more difficult to 'feel' the rocks' texture and the pure white colour of the paper was much 'colder'. I was pleased with the results of this second attempt too, although I will certainly need to work again on this one later. It was satisfying to work on a larger scale, it felt as though I was beginning to get somewhere!

Although it was quite a hot day, the wind that threatened to blow away my paper, also cooled me down and stopped me from over-heating.

The first drawing

The second drawing

This project was referred to in the blog of Garry Barker, artist and educator in Leeds, UK. Garry goes

into detail about the use of frottage in art, in great detail and great eloquence here.

International Drawing Dialogue 2016

Drawing Dialogue - Exhibition and Conference

DalgaArt, Craiova, Romania 24th - 27th July 2016

18 artists contributed to this interesting project initiated and organised by Gabriela Boiangiu, creating 9 pairs of artists who responded to each others work. The participating artists included Garry Barker and Martyn Hill.

I was paired with Martyn Hill from the UK and while he worked on a series of images, I worked on my own set. We then exchanged the drawings and attempted to respond visually to what the other artists had done.

The unexpected nature of the project and the challenge presented by the project deadlines combined to make this a truly enjoyable project.

​

Some of the participating artists managed to make the trip to Craiova in Romania for the related conference but unfortunately I was not able to travel due to my teaching commitments. However, I did managed to join in some of the conference discussions via Skype. I really hope that the planned second stage of the project will become a reality.

The resulting images are displayed below with our names displayed according to the working order. For the first group of drawings I initiated the images and Martyn responded to what I had done:

For the second group of drawings, Martyn initiated a set of images and I responded to what he had done:

Saturday 18th May 2013 - 'Drawn from experience'

I was lucky enough to be invited to Saga University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan to give a lecture and lead a workshop on drawing.
The students were very hardworking and open minded, they were willing to try new things and their enthusiasm led to some interesting results in a short timeframe.

Kyoto is a wonderful city and on this, my 3rd trip, I managed to find time to visit some of my favorite places such as the Sanjusangen-do temple but I also managed to find some new places such as the lovely 'e-fish' cafe where I had lunch on Friday, the day before the workshop. I hope it is not too long before I return.