'I dreamt of Coventry & thought of you'

On the eve of the installation of the artwork - the project starts on site this week - Thursday 21st October - I wanted to publish some notes made during the project, which go some way to explain how the work was conceived and what inspired it. Some of it remains elusive, the artist's privilege perhaps.

My name is Chris Tipping – I am an artist.?In December 2020 I was commissioned by Coventry City Council & their partners Avanti West Coast - to create a new artwork which responds to the city & which has been installed on the architectural glazed screens of the booking hall at Coventry Station. My brief was to create a personal interpretation of Coventry’s architectural icons and landmarks. A celebration of the built environment as recalled in the memories of a visitor – me!

The streamlined modernist Station was built in 1962 and is Grade II Listed. Described by?Historic England as "Outstanding architecturally, particularly for its spatial qualities and detailing".

This project is one of a series of art commissions being managed by Creative Giants. Contributing to the Coventry Station Masterplan and the wider Coventry City of Culture 2021 celebrations.

?The artwork was manufactured & installed in collaboration with Vinyl Graphics Ltd. long-time creative collaborators of mine. Digitally printed in opaque and translucent polychrome inks onto optically clear vinyl, interrupted and punctuated by super-graphic motifs and cut-out forms, welcoming the city beyond the windows to become an equal part of the artwork -

?Sunlight will bring an ever-changing play of pattern and colour across the glass elevations, providing perhaps a momentary illumination on a dull day, an ephemeral partner to the permanence of the glazed screen.

My work here in Coventry Station is presented as a series of tableaux, as if part of a parade or street party, a Carnival, a spontaneous happening - a mix of iconic & less obvious motifs, but all inspired by this city & it’s people – & all equally significant to me -

The installation respects the architecture of the building, maintaining clear views into the ticket hall - and timbered ceilings of the interior.

I am an outsider, a visitor. I come from somewhere else – I have travelled from my home in Ramsgate, Kent & I’m excited to be here during this?City of Culture year.

I love the idea, that when travelling, by train or otherwise, you take the DNA of a place along with you. You also bring something back in return to balance the equation. The essence of a place is not always a physical thing such as a building, it can be an attitude, a family memory, an accent, a piece of clothing, a sound. It drifts along with you, in your wake - something safe & hidden in your pocket.

Passing through this veil of glass & printed vinyl when entering or leaving the Station, you too are passing through a slice of this place - this Coventry in 2021. A colourful curtain of ideas, innovation and memory - 100 microns thick, yet substantial enough to stay with you

Visitors don’t escape it. ‘A light dusting of Coventry to take away thank you very much!’?

End

The above passage is taken from the audio text which accompanies the artwork. It can be accessed on site via 4 QR Codes which direct you to a description of the project.

The following text is part of an essay based on notes made during the commission. ?

I’m so Coventry curious – there something of interest at every turn.?Coventry Cathedral?consecrated in 1962 boasts an awesome Who’s Who of a vibrant & international 1960’s art world. The very best of the best. These city fathers & mothers had a thing for commissioning public art & architecture of the highest quality. A masterstroke. Genius. Sir Basil Spence ensured that artists were commissioned early in the project & locked into the process - to prevent them being engineered out. Something I know a fair bit about myself…

?The Cathedral embodies the revolutionary & bold Post-War attitude in Coventry. I was lent a book by my friend, Dan Thompson, ‘Phoenix in Coventry’, written by Spence, published in 1962. On the cover is a glorious illustration of a Phoenix by Anthony Blee, an architect who worked alongside Spence at Coventry – contributing enormously to the project. I had to reference this motif, so integral to the Cathedral and the rebirth of Coventry. A version of it now sits within the artwork – an acknowledgement of the creativity and brilliance of all architects & artists who have delivered so much to the city. All credit to Anthony Blee for his contribution to this new artwork.

In the 1960’s Public Art was also commissioned as an integral part of the urban landscape, embedded, indivisible – art & architecture at its very best. After 60 years, a lot of it may have been moved or relocated – it may not be in the best condition, but it has survived, and most has stood the test of time - now is the very time to celebrate that vision and trust in creativity as a catalyst for change once again. The newly completed Upper Precinct regeneration and public realm stand testament to that. Several surviving sculptures and artworks finding a new and intrigued audience.

This city is many things, but what caught my attention very early, were the meeting and gathering places. The places for people. Spaces for the community to gather, mix, shop, pray - places to be inspired.??The Station, the new Cathedral, the round Market. This triumvirate of buildings was and is still inspirational. Three democratic places, three community & socially equitable spaces. All three modernist gems of course. All representing something brave, something bold and new. An original experiment in urban form and community expression. I have chosen to focus on these social spaces. These people-friendly landmarks. On the brilliance of their architecture, on the aspirations & hopes they held and still hold.

I was also much influenced by the City of Coventry Festival of Britain Celebrations and Godiva Pageant held on 23rd June 1951 when all or most of the city’s industrial trades and manufacturers presented a series of visual tableaux within the procession, mounted on lorries & trailers – this was of course back in the days of analogue culture – these were whole community events, which you had to go and physically watch & take part in. The whole city attended. There were 60 tableaux of historical and industrial importance, with 2000 performers. It was estimated that 500,000 people lined the streets to watch the event, which was an astonishing 5miles long.

This was no doubt an historic, colourful & celebratory event for everyone – much as the City of Culture Year is to all the city’s communities today.?What a fitting tribute that the 70th Anniversary of the Festival of Britain can also be such a positive celebration of Coventry in its own Year of Culture 2021.

Coventry’s contemporary creative and cultural wealth has been inspirational. The Street Art seen throughout the city today, much of it commissioned this year is hugely important in portraying the true vitality of the City’s youthful culture. These events are vibrant & ‘in the moment’ experiences. A contemporary Coventry is a young and dynamic multi-cultured community - a city of education & learning and a city of music of course! ?This expression has to come directly from those who live here - but hopefully my contribution supports and celebrates this too, with its patterns, colour & rhythm.

Masterful post-war civic planning – much of it quite frankly gobsmacking - full of hope, ambition & local-sensitivity. Stand-alone or clustered groups of medieval buildings anchor streets in time, whilst others were razed to the ground by bombing. The ruins created oddly framed views, striking vistas and jarring juxtapositions of buildings from a haphazard & jumbled timeline - jolted from century to century within a few footsteps – it’s as if I have become a time traveller! Contemporary bland boxes adjacent to a medieval masterpiece.

A community-spirited & very friendly circular?central market really makes my day. I chatted to people here. Neat rows of Caulis & Cabbages, vibrant African fabric, a giant spliff, a memory jogging Merry-go-round… a beautiful mural painted by German art students – a post-war gift of friendship, peace and reconciliation from Dresden.?

Walking the back streets, always insightful, reading the housing stock for signs of Victorian top-shop factories, ribbon weaving, looms clanking, the sounds of history buzzing in my head.

An uplifting University Library?is surely channelling the Italian hill-town towers of San Gimignano. Public swimming baths disguised as a rather charming zinc-armoured origami Elephant. A rough-hewn block of tactile brutalism spanning the ring road, itself a concrete corsetry of cars & lorries encircling the City’s heart.?But I prefer the honesty of the Britannia Hotel any day over the architectural pastiche of the Pool Meadow Bus Station - & the Ring Road has somehow managed to preserve rather than destroy the intimate & walkable scale of the city centre, its solid grip now being softened by break-through pedestrian routes and greener city aspirations.

Coventry University?had its roots in a?College of Design?founded in 1843 to provide local designers for the ribbon manufactory. Without artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs, this city would not have thrived.

Cathedrals, Churches & buildings of Faith & Community dominate the city, but quite brilliant modernist & contemporary examples also dot the suburbs. Foleshill, just North of the Ring Road has a rich heritage and a diverse community. ?At the roundabout junction of Harnall Lane West, Leicester Causeway, Springfield Road and Howard Street, I could see in one sweeping view - the 3 towers of the Shree Krishna Temple, the Polish Church & community centre of St Stanislaus Kostka - & the Gurdwara Guru Nanak Parkash, with its impressive Dome. Within a 5-minute walk from here, can be found a Hindu Temple dedicated to the Elephant God Ganesha, the Jaamia Mosque on Eagle Street & the Masjid E Zennat ul Islam on Stony Stanton Road. Several of these buildings feature in the artwork, representative of the architectural wealth of Faith buildings and community centres in the city and suburbs.

In 1954 Bishop Gorton commissioned Sir Basil Spence to design three low-cost modernist parish churches to serve new housing areas around Coventry, each seating 250 people. St John the Divine, Willenall - St Oswald’s, Jardine Crescent amongst them - each having an open bell tower of concrete pillars with infill panels of enamelled steel in lattice frames & were consecrated mid-July 1957, when Spence was already engaged in designing Coventry Cathedral.

By far my favourite however, for its extraordinary interior is Christ Church, Frankpledge Road, a Grade II* Listed Parish Church & community centre in Cheylesmore, directly inspired by the 1953 Festival of Britain. If you haven’t yet seen it – go now! ?It was designed in 1953 by Alfred H Gardner and built between 1956 and 1958. The interior is strangely kitsch & playful for a Church – but it is spectacular. The?Architects’ Journal?(1953) described it as “Pleasure Gardens pastiche”, apparently inspired by the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea Park in London that ran alongside the South Bank exhibitions.

St Nicholas’ Church, Radford, comes a close second, this building broke ground in 1955 designed by the architect Richard Twentyman. The interiors contain beautifully restrained and elegant timber detailing, reflected on the exterior elevation too. The Coventry Society published an insightful article about this Church – this is a paragraph from it - “The tunnel vault of the nave is lined with strips of African Walnut and the east wall of the chancel is panelled in block board veneered in Walnut overlaid with raised diamond-shaped panels in grey Sycamore”.?

Sadly, it is soon due for demolition. It’s a hard truth, but every building cannot be saved.

The city centre benefits enormously from a series of interlinked pedestrian public places – this is the public realm – the spaces between buildings. These ‘spaces’ are incredibly important to the ebb and flow of the city centre.

The Upper and Lower Precincts are considered to be the first car-free pedestrian shopping spaces in Europe. How Coventry-forward is that! Broadgate, once relegated to no more than an enormous roundabout & Bus interchange, is now the premier civic centre and major public space, providing a theatre-in-the-round for its backdrop of brilliant architecture – … OK - obviously Cathedral Lanes is not on this list – perhaps for the fact that it is the worst building in Coventry sited in possibly the best place.

The Ring Road, a concrete & tarmacadamed grip on the city once unbroken – is now bridged by a green & tree lined, traffic-free pedestrian public realm and green boulevard leading from the Station via Friargate & Greyfriars Green into the heart of the city. This is a major shift in urban thinking for the city & something of a return perhaps to a simpler, greener & gentle time – less impacted by the Car is King Culture of the 20th Century.

A single reference to the human form can be found in my work – a medieval face, perhaps that of a saint, beautifully painted on a shard of window glass – the work of John Thornton the greatest & most innovative glass painter & artist of his time in England,?whose workshops were in The Burges. His masterpiece was the stained glass for York Minster’s great East Window - and of course, stained glass here too – fortunately preserved before the war from St Michaels Cathedral. His work can still be seen in-situ in St Mary’s Guildhall.

There are also animals in my work – of course there are! But here - I have set them free from the constraints of heritage & dry history – an Indian Elephant, a Wild Cat and an Eagle – all from the Coventry Coat of Arms - a Fallow Deer to represent the 13th Century medieval Royal Hunting Park of Cheylesmore frequented by Edward the Black Prince – a stylized Bull from the fabulous Stainless Steel relief doors of the Nat West Bank at Broadgate, all now free to promote the City of Coventry & its culture far and wide.?What you can see developing in the artwork are repeating patterns & motifs, some abstracted, evolved from local architecture & landmarks. The Ring Road, City Walls & River Sherbourne all feature, as does a quartz crystal version of the War Memorial.

The 1851 Board of Health Map is a revelation of Victorian green space, community gardens and allotments surrounding the Train Station. Much of this green space was established by the Ribbon manufacturers, Charles Bray and James Cash for their workforce. This was sadly a short-lived philanthropic enterprise, but some of these gardens still survive south of the Station in the area known as Park Gardens. My interest in plants and trees and the wider green-city agenda is further triggered by Warwick University’s Vegetable Gene Bank depositing seeds at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway & the Ryton Organic Gardens and Heritage Seed Library, managed by Coventry University & the famous Wyken Pippen, possibly the earliest apple cultivar in England in the 1700’s originating from seeds or a sapling sourced in the Netherlands, grown at Wyken Manor.

The earlier 1807 Sharp's Map even draws the individual planting schemes & garden designs in fine detail. These green and pleasant grids have found their way into my designs too.

From Coventry Blue Cloth, via the Ribbon Industry & on to the evolution of bicycles, sewing machines, cars, jet engines, green low-carbon transport, battery technologies & giga factories of the future, Coventry has witnessed an almost seamless evolution of innovation & reinvention, each new industry building on the expertise and generational craft and engineering skills of the last. These have all been resonant influences on my work.

Jacquard weaving, or more exactly the Jacquard Loom, which changed the Coventry ribbon industry forever - an example of which is on display in the Herbert Collection - brings historic textile production closer than you may think to contemporary engineering and automotive design via their links to advanced computational power. When British mathematician Charles Babbage released his plans for the Analytical Engine in around 1837, widely considered the first modern computer design, fellow mathematician Ada Lovelace (the daughter of Lord Byron) is famously quoted as saying that ‘the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’

We may not know or acknowledge it, but we all store impressions of places we have been. We know intuitively how somewhere makes us feel. We can learn quite easily how to navigate from A – B through landmarks rather than signage. Buildings, trees, the shape and feel of spaces - the texture of a wall, the colour of a door, the sounds of a street, a wobbly flagstone. I have been creatively ‘looking’ at places for thirty years or more. It’s a habit now, un-self-conscious & automatic, creatively surveying spaces, unpicking. This isn’t a critical or formal process it is an emotional and personal one. Seeing the shape, shadow, colour and texture of places. I cherry-pick the visual language and interpretation to understand for myself what makes a place interesting. I’m not looking for rights and wrongs. I am fascinated by the way places silently communicate.

I see patterns in everything. I am fascinated by pavements and pathways – I really am! I see the history trodden into granite kerbs, threshold slabs & worn onto door handles. I notice the craft & language of a building. The hand of a maker. The marriage of art and architecture. The things we have collectively made as a multi-cultural & diverse community. This work is a celebration of our collective skills as makers and creators.

I explore on foot. I can’t drive. I subconsciously seek out what might be considered hidden and forgotten. I see the connections between things past and present. I like the backstreets and the secret places. Curiosity is a sharpened tool of my trade.

The trigger for a project is often a detail, a small thing, something out of the usual. It may be the people, the community who live and work in Coventry. It is often a combination of several strands of interest coming together, weaving a new narrative – or perhaps telling an old story in new way.

Being a visitor, I will see things differently than if I lived here. I will see the city differently to you. ?My experiences will be new and novel, I am bombarded by difference. I will connect and talk to people where I can. I cover as much ground as possible on foot – this way you see the minutiae, the dust of place. The weeds in the cracks.

I visit archives and museum collections. It is an immersive process. My work is process driven. By that I mean I must be doing something, to discover what it is I am doing. I never start with an idea and try to make it. My impressions of places before I visit them or often at odds with the reality of seeing them for myself. I’m like a sponge in these situations, trying to soak up as much as I can. It can be overwhelming having to sift through everything that comes my way – but the things that resonate and stay uppermost in my mind eventually begin to coalesce and form the foundation of an idea.

Industrialists, inventors, thinkers, philosophers & manufacturers stoked the fires of industry here in Coventry. Precision engineered thinking & machine tooled ideas from here shaped the world. Alfred Herbert’s Coventry Die-Head was known worldwide. Tangential spokes & differential gears for bicycles were invented in 1874 and 1876 respectively by James Starley. The modern bicycle was Coventry-born.

On a calm and quiet morning, I walked to the sombre but magnificent Portland Stone?War Memorial and was cheered there by exotic birds painted giant-size! I stood and watched as an older couple paid their respects to an RAF memorial dedicated to the veterans who formed the Coventry Airborne Forces Association.

I made a long walking circuit of the city skirting either side of the ring road. I criss-crossed the centre unworried by traffic which, due to Lockdown restrictions was very light.

The geometry of Coventry inspires me - octagonal spires atop octagonal towers, balanced on rectangular boxes. Circles for markets, circles for chapels, 8, 10 & 12 pointed stars. Emphatic vertical planes, powerful horizontal lines, cross-sectioned columns. Perfect ceremonial-civic-symmetry down the Precinct. A shimmering blue circle to swim in. Exploded hexagonal windows perhaps to better understand the Engineering within. Irregular patterned rectangles in cast aluminium to keep you safe. All this and a True Blue and mostly invisible river running through it.?

The setting-out of my artwork is based upon a response to the clean modernist form of the Station and Ticket Hall itself, using the vast glazed screens to hang the creative elements within.

The strong reliance on rectilinear forms & framing devices in the artwork are deliberately reminiscent of plans for the post-war civic centre & precinct by inspirational City Architect Donald Gibson and the truly ‘modern’ & striking glazed-box stairway entrance to the Locarno Dance Hall – now sadly demolished – designed by Arthur Ling with Architects Kett & Neve -?but also of my own framed views created and captured when walking around looking intently at the City -

Octagonal shapes may inform the construction of each of the City’s three famous spires & towers and can also be identified in a single octagonal column inside Holy Trinity Church. Broadgate and the former Hotel Leofric - now Student Accommodation - are themselves supported on stone-clad octagonal columns.

These are the ‘building blocks’ of Coventry, resonant of both the heavy red sandstone of its medieval past, combined with the confidence & pouting bravado of Victorian?industrial factory & civic buildings and the refined elegance, symmetry & innovation of Coventry’s post-war urban planning as seen in archived designs and drawings.

Coventry boasts two famous tapestries - both purpose-made & still fit for purpose. One, almost 60 years old & the largest in the world, the other, 500 years old & still hung exactly in the same space for where it was commissioned at the Guildhall. A true survivor and perhaps unheralded, one of the most precious artefacts in Coventry.

A supernova?Baptistry Window?by?John Piper greets visitors to the Cathedral. Half-timbered Tudor to top-shop factory triangles. Machine-gun factory to postwar Modernism. Bull Yard to … well, who knows what an architectural journey we are going on next … generic development & globalism is now in danger of swamping the very human scale of the city. Big money is as ever, all sharp elbows and tone deaf.?But change is a recurring theme in Coventry, be it by design or by destruction. ?Returning to John Piper for a moment – he of the baptistry window in Coventry’s new Cathedral, was an official War Artist in WWII. He dashed to Coventry the morning after the destruction to record the devastation, painting and sketching within the still smoking ruins. These paintings can be seen in the Herbert Gallery collection.

My work here will always be accented with the vision & voice of a visitor, but Coventry seriously wanted to have a conversation with me & I am grateful for that.

Coventry Curious fast became Coventry Converted!

A comment also about Coventry’s response to the global pandemic and lockdown – a potentially serious blow to a major Cultural event driven by footfall and lots of visitors. It has, thus far, been astonishing, brave and a great success. Conceived, built and framed for & by the local community and performed both online and in suburban streets, in people’s houses, front rooms, front windows & on their radios – as much as in the city centre, this feels so much more of an intimate community celebration which, rather than shouting ‘look at us’, instead confidently says ‘this is what we are’.?

End

October 19th 2021

“I dreamt of Coventry and thought of you …”

?Christopher Tipping

?