listening to the 85%

My three main current long-term research projects are Where the Arts Belong, FOUR WORDS and the AHRC-funded project Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.  

We received the original AHRC Network Grant to bring together a group of academics, students, musicians, environmentalists and members of the public to reconsider some of the short stories of Wirral-born writer Malcolm Lowry (1909-57) in relation to increased care of our seas. Already in the 1950s, Lowry was living off the coast of Canada in a self-sustaining manner and writing about the detrimental impact industrialisation was having on the oceans. In many of his short stories, gathered together in the collection Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place (named after a Manx fishermen’s hymn), he used the Isle of Man which he visited as a child as a model for hope and natural beauty. Our network met at sea between Wirral/Liverpool and Isle of Man between 2021-22 and gathered content for a series of podcasts: www.malcolmlowry.com.  

The Isle of Man is a self-governing British Crown Dependency in the Irish Sea, with a population of 83,000 and it faces some important environmental challenges, including cataloguing Blue Carbon resources through Manx Blue Carbon Project and maintaining UNESCO Biosphere status (awarded 2016) and threats from unsustainable fishing, windfarms, gas mining, pollution and single-use plastics. During the visits, we learned that 85% of the island is marine territory and many of the people we met were interested in some of the underwater recording we did, including Podcast 14 put together by one of the world’s leading sound recordists, Chris Watson: https://soundcloud.com/earsord/podcast-14-chris-watson-isle-of-man-april-2022.  

Building on this, we applied and received AHRC Follow-Up Funding to make five more sailings to the Isle of Man during 2024-5 to specifically focus on underwater recording through a series of workshops with the public. During our May 2024 visit that coincides with Manx Wildlife Week, we hope to get out to sea to record from off the island coast and Chris will also deliver a keynote lecture in the Manx Museum about his experiences of underwater recording. Within each workshop, our Co-Investigator Dr Helen Tookey, Reader in Creative Writing at Liverpool John Moores University and a Lowry expert, will also relate our activities to Lowry’s writing around the Isle of Man and environmental issues.  

As part of the research we’ve just mounted an exhibition at University of Leeds, showcasing some of the artworks and artefacts gathered over the past few years of sailing - https://www.malcolmlowry.com/lowry10.html - as well as creating permanent displays about our research in the Bluecoat and Merseyside Maritime Museum, introducing the name of Malcolm Lowry for thousands of new people.  

The Where the Arts Belong research began in 2019 exploring the impact of contemporary art (and for me, particularly the use of sound) within dementia care home settings. Given that our partners, Belong, not only persevered with this project all through Covid but specifically invited us to adapt and deliver award-winning online activities was incredibly humbling. Out of this period of research, I evolved the use of tongue twisters as non-sensical sound poems and received some QR funding to develop a related publication that I am currently working on, alongside two of our Fine Art students and staff from our Dementia Research Centre. We’re really excited about developing printed ideas around non-verbal, physical barriers, braille, shorthand and other iterations of traditional – but also newly written – tongue twisters.  

And here I’d also like to mention that 2023 saw the end of a twenty-seven year project I developed with artist Brigitte Jurack, as we decommissioned our public artwork ‘RAY + JULIE’ - https://www.alandunn67.co.uk/rayandjulietheend.html  

The basic aim is to fully develop the Isle of Man and tongue twister research, as well as the Wrexham project mentioned in Section 6. They are all complex projects with many partners and moving parts but I really hope that together they form a suite of artworks and moments, outside the walls of academia, that nudge people off their regular courses.   

I think 2023 has been a great year for exhibitions in some of our smaller galleries: Oriel Môn (Anglesey), the Beefheart project at Bury Art Museum, Ty Pawb (Wrexham), Turnpike Gallery (Leigh), the ‘Tartan’ exhibition (V&A, Dundee), Tim Spooner at Bluecoat (Liverpool), Dispensary Gallery’s ‘SGOR’ exhibition (Wrexham), the Leeds Artists’ Show, HoldItUpCollective’s Section 28 launch event (Leeds), Coventry Music Museum, Rob Davies’ watercolours and ‘Worst Record Covers’ (Williamson, Birkenhead), Ty Pawb at Whitworth (Manchester), Liverpool Biennial at The Cotton Exchange, Drawing Paper (Bridewell, Liverpool), Oriel Mostyn (Llandudno), Lowry Lounge (Hilbre Island), hip-hop and Lara Rose (Leeds Museum), ‘Weight of words’ (HMI, Leeds) and Tim Spooner at Bluecoat. In London, ‘Women in Revolt’ and Sarah Lucas at Tate Britain were stunning and in Glasgow, there’s a strong show by one of my former tutors, Sam Ainsley, currently on at GOMA, following on from the memorable Banksy show there (no mobile phones allowed!).  

I’m also lucky to live near Futureyard in Birkenhead and attended some intimate loud gigs there this year, including Frances (The Vaselines) McKee, Ex-Easter Island Head, Loose Articles (featuring one of our Fine Art alumni, Erin Caine) and Lydia Lunch.  

Recently, it’s mostly been music-related reading, partly as relaxation but possibly towards one more big future project: Tracey Thorn’s ‘Bedsit Disco Queen’, the self-published book by Ralph Bullivant, Andy Cowan’s ‘B-Sides’, Shindig Magazine and a re-read of Michael Azerrad’s ‘Our band could be your life.’

I have been working with Ty Pawb in Wrexham for a few years now – it’s a mixture of market and art gallery – and following on from FOUR WORDS: RECIPE, they’ve invited me to extend the collaboration for a further fourteen months. As part of that I’m really keen to work with two young local artists known as Dispensary Gallery and also Wrexham Football Club who were bought by two Hollywood actors and are going through a unique transformation, as beautifully documented in the ‘Welcome to Wrexham’ series.  

The final project that is a very long-term one, in fact a never-ending one, is my collecting of copies of the 1983 LP ‘No Parlez’ – a futile but exciting social and economic act that I am sure will find new iterations in the years to follow. A recent one in London brought together the first 100 copies of the record that I purchased: https://www.alandunn67.co.uk/noparlezapt.html

Isle of Man/Malcolm Lowry: https://www.malcolmlowry.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alandunn67/