Pete McPartlan

Since 2007 I’ve been involved with a project initiated by The Salford Restoration Office called Centrifuge. It started with a field trip for 20 (emerging) artists from across the North of England to Documenta. Frankly it was advertised as professional development which sounded pretty dull, but I thought sod it it’s a free trip to Germany I’ll see what happens… Once we were all in Kassel we started to understand the project as James and Lesley (from the Restoration Office) pretty much laid it out as “we’ve got about £10,000, what do you want to do with it?” So then the arguing started and it was really fun. In the final day of our stay at Documenta we had possibly the longest meeting I’ve ever attended, where we discussed everything from buying an island to just splitting the money up and going home but eventually settled on the idea of organising an art prize.

An art prize seems straight forward enough but I think everyone in the group had a different idea of what that meant and had different motivations – whether that be a genuine reward for good work, a critique of the structures and hierarchies in the art world, a parody, an opportunity to speak to a really established artist, a way to give some under-represented local artists some credit (and cash), a counter-capitalist experiment, a name for something completely different and all the different permutations and combinations of the above (and their opposites).

So after what must have been nearly a year of intermittent discussions, group pub meetings, a few drop-outs and several structures that collapsed under their own weight (with a few angry meetings/emails along the way…) we finally decided in early 2008 to proceed backwards and decide once we had nominated artists what the prize, the criteria for winning or even if it was going to be competitive at all.

I nominated an organisation called The Institute for Figuring a science education project based in Los Angeles with a very unique take on that idea. Run by twin sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim a theoretical physicist and a poet respectively who amongst other things teach knitting circles about higher mathematics, topology and higher dimensional space through crochet.

So in April 2008 I went to LA to meet Margaret at IFF HQ, her home in Highland Park. To be honest I have to admit being a little nervous, I made sure I read Margaret’s book Pythagoras’ Trousers in the weeks preceding our meeting and this only seemed to heighten my nervousness, not only is she an extremely intelligent theoretical physicist but a staunch feminist described as ‘fiery’ in every bio that I could find online. What was she going to want to say to a male artist from Hull who has come half way around the world to vaguely waffle about an as yet undefined art prize?

When I eventually got to Margaret’s house it was very pleasant, I had stayed for a week in LA already and was in desperate need of tea, a weak pot of which was already being made when I arrived. We discussed the IFF, science education, science funding, the maleness of the methodologies of science and how craft is an overlooked means through which women have been educating themselves in mathematics, the fact that the art world had really embraced what they were doing and she showed me around their woollen coral reef. I left feeling like I had learned a lot but had absolutely no idea what to do, she seemed totally indifferent to the idea of winning a prize – what she was after was recognition of another way of doing physics, maths and for the scientific establishment to become more flexible – and even if she won (the now diminished) whole £10,000 I don’t think that would make the kind of difference that I would want to be able to offer and they already seemed to have all the publicity they could handle – articles in the New York Times, shows in the Southbank centre and even a TED talk in the pipeline and the idea of trying to engage her in a critique of the art world seemed completely irrelevant.

Back in the UK, I got to thinking about how we could make her a more relevant prize. I considered making an imitation Nobel prize after looking at the skewed gender distribution of the physics prize. I thought it would be fun to try and make a gold medal and I had a vague plan about asking my uncle Alistair, a goldsmith, to help me out. I soon realised that was condescending or even rude – like saying: “we know you won’t get a real Nobel, here is our forgery to make up for it.” But through this process I remembered my other uncle, Maurice, has always given as Christmas presents little keyrings and jewellery made from his own designs of knots – what if we commissioned him to make a knot for Margaret? I spoke to him and he seemed generally keen for a new challenge so he set about designing it – before we had even confirmed it as a winning prize. Then I approached the group and asked if we could pay him in a way that would help him out rather than in cash and so Ruth volunteered to help him for a day photographing his knots for an instructional book he is trying to get off the ground.

To cut a long story, well, medium – we sent the knot to Margaret who returned these photos of the knot surrounded by the most feminine mass of the crochet that she could find, a kind of orgy of fluff that I can only imagine made my uncle (a former catholic priest) blush.

This week the books arrived, they are a documentation of all the artists and their nominees projects including an essay ‘On Feral Art’ about my experiences in Los Angeles and the nature of grassroots arts projects. But there are essays, pictures and documentation by everyone else involved. Please ask me if you would like a copy – I’ll happily sell/swap/give you one but I only have 20.

I’m not sure if I have developed professionally but as a consequence of participating in Centrifuge flown half-way around the world to perform at a festival, interviewed someone who I never would have had a chance to meet otherwise, worked on a project with the quiet one of my family and got to know him better, written stroppy, overly earnest emails – I guess all that counts as development. Mostly what has been great was meeting lots of really interesting people (and debating, collaborating and negotiating with them) – the other participants were: David Baker, Alice Bradshaw, Chris Henry Clarke, Matthew Cowan, Katie Davies, Kate Day, Catherine Elvin, Rosie Farrell, Evi Grigoropoulou, Laura Harrington, Zoe Johnson, Gaz Leddington, Rebecca Lennon, Tim Machin, Daniel Simpkins, Nick Thurston, Ruth Todhunter, Tom Watson and Penny Whitehead. Imogen Stidworthy and Dirk Fleischman who were our mentors on the project and James Hutchinson and Lesley Young of  The Salford Restoration Office.

(I’ve gone on far too long so I’ll come back and proof-read and put links in later…)