Week Two
This week we used the work of American artist Ed Ruscha as a starting place, thinking about sayings, advice and proverbs that we might consider passing on to the next generation.
Between last week and this week Nancy Sellars wrote a stellar poem on Elvis Notepaper.
Among the sayings the group came up with – either handed up down, or spur of the moment were “Shy kids get no sweets” and “Mobile phones are not the be all and end all”.
I was on my own as Emma’s car had taken a turn for the worse. I was also competing with songs to get everyone up and dancing and lively game of bingo, so I had to write instructions and thanks by hand and go from table to table. This impacted delivery and evaluation, but I did the best I could and I’m looking forward to typesetting the poems.
I thought of Ginsberg’s line, “America, I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”
In terms of shifting the needle, we had the following results:
4 – I feel totally rubbish (33%)
7 – I feel okay (58.3%)
1 – I feel good (8.3%)
0 – I feel happy and creative (0%)
Which changed to:
0 – I feel totally rubbish (0%)
3 – I feel okay (25%)
3 – I feel good (25%)
3 – I feel happy and creative (25%)
The positive shift is also against the backdrop of the number of respondents from start (12 people) to finish (9 people).
A total engagement was 11 (about half the number from last week). I can’t capture data from people who were not in the specified Ageing Well bracket, because that would impact the data.
I asked people within groups what would be some life advice that they might like to pass on to others. These fragments of advice I can then turn into poems in their own right, either as pieces of visual poetry, or small maxims that can be put onto badges, signs, set against a backdrop of the natural world and passed on to others.
In the context of the anthology we will be producing, this means that their advice will appear alongside their artwork incorporating images from Redcar and Middlesbrough from the middle of the 20th Century. Here are some of the results:
