2x £3500 Public Art Commissions for the Ted Hughes Project

Deadline: 10/11/2016

Venue: Mexborough Business Centre and Mexborough Ferryboat Slipway  |  City: Mexborough  |  Region: South Yorkshire  |  Country: United Kingdom  |  Field Trip Arts

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The Ted Hughes Project is looking for artists to commission in the first stage of developing a permanent Ted Hughes Trail around Mexborough, South Yorkshire. We have two £3500 commissions to offer artists for the creation of some lasting artwork to become part of a Ted Hughes Trail that aims to engage members of the public.

The Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire)

The Ted Hughes Trail: Brief for Artist Commission

1.             Introduction

1.1      The Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) is seeking to appoint an artist or artists to develop and deliver two commissions at identified sites in and around Mexborough, South Yorkshire, in response to the life and work of the poet Ted Hughes. The work will require the artist/artists to carry out the following:

  • Produce an artwork to be installed in the grounds of Mexborough Business Centre (formerly Mexborough Grammar School, a place hugely influential to Ted Hughes’s development and the place where he wrote his first poems).  The artwork will reflect and respond to Hughes’s time at the school, allude to the poetry he wrote/experiences he had there, and reflect Hughes’s status and spirit.
  • Produce an artwork to be installed at the Ferryboat Slipway, Mexborough.  Between the ages of nine and fourteen Hughes would regularly cross the river Don at the Ferryboat Slipway (using the old hand-pull ferry), in order to gain access to his ‘Palaeolithic Eden’ of Old Denaby — the rural oasis to which he would resort to escape industrial Mexborough.  At Old Denaby — and at Manor Farm in particular — Hughes roamed the countryside, shooting, trapping, observing animals and generally exploring nature.  These activities shaped Hughes’s inner life and formed his trademark mythopoeic imagination, providing him with the raw materials that would fuel his poetry for the rest of his life.  Several of Hughes’s poems and short stories are set at Old Denaby and he frequently outlines the importance of the place to him in his letters and prose writings.  The artwork will reflect and respond to Hughes’s experience at Old Denaby/ Manor Farm, allude to the poetry he wrote/experiences he had there, and reflect Hughes’s status and spirit. 
  • Liaise with and support the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) in installing and the finished work.
  • Participate in a launch activity after installation.
  • In addition having high intrinsic artistic merit, artworks must also:
    -  Engage local communities;
    -  Increase awareness of the life and work of Ted Hughes as a literary figure of international significance;
    -  Have regard to the importance of Mexborough and surrounding area to his poetic and personal development.

1.2         The fee for this work is £3,500 per artwork or £7,000 for both. This fee is to include preparation, commission production costs, materials and all other expenses incurred by the artist in the creation of the work. 

1.3         The form and media of the commissioned piece is left to the discretion of the artist. Consideration should be given to the fact that the artwork will be installed out-of-doors — weather resilience and durability should be taken into account.

1.4         Artists are invited to submit proposals for one or both artworks. 

1.5         The deadline for the submission of proposals is 10th November 2016.  Short-listed artists will be notified by 25th November, 2016 — site visits will then take place by arrangement, with successful artists being notified by 9th December, 2016.  Artworks will be completed and delivered to the THP (SY) by 28th February, 2016.  Installation will take place, pending discussions with relevant parties, as soon as possible after this date, ideally by 30th April, 2017. 

1.6         Copyright and ownership for the finished work will rest with the THP (SY) who will have rights to reproduction of the image of the work for non-commercial use. If there is to be commercial use then discussions will take place with the artist.

2.             Background

2.1          The Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire) is a Mexborough-based community group constituted to promote the legacy of the poet Ted Hughes in the place where he grew to maturity and was formed as a poet.  Funded by the Arts Council England, Dearne Valley Landscape Partnership and Right Up Our Street, the THP (SY) runs an annual Ted Hughes Poetry Festival and facilitates the highly successful Write on Mexborough! creative writing groups.  The THP (SY) has begun to develop a Ted Hughes Heritage and Literary Trail in and around Mexborough.  Having identified the key sites of Ted Hughes’s Mexborough via scholarship and research, a Ted Hughes Trail leaflet has been produced and a Performance Trail (Ted Hughes’s Paper Round) developed.  A website of the trail will shortly be commissioned.  Over the next few years the THP (SY) plans to install artworks and relevant information at the key sites identified.

2.2          Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was one of the greatest English language poets of the 20th century, the author of acclaimed works such as Lupercal, Crow, River and Birthday Letters.  Hughes was awarded the Queen’s Medal for Poetry, appointed to the Order of Merit and was poet laureate from 1984 until the year of his death.  Hughes is an international cultural figure of towering significance.  However, until recently, few people were aware of the seminal role played by South Yorkshire in his poetic development.  Hughes lived in Mexborough (his family owned a newsagent’s shop at 75 Main Street) from 1938 to 1951.  He attended Schofield Street Junior School and Mexborough Grammar School. During his time in Mexborough, Hughes had the experiences and was exposed to the influences which would shape his poetry — and his personality — for the rest of his life.   It was in the countryside around Mexborough — Old Denaby, Crookhill — where Hughes developed the love of animals, nature and landscape that was to inform his poetry so deeply.  At Mexborough Grammar School, Hughes came under the spell of two charismatic teachers, Pauline Mayne and John Fisher, who introduced him to the poetry that would form his taste and shape his own work — Eliot, Lawrence, Hopkins, Donne, Shelley — and of course, Hughes’s beloved Shakespeare.  At the school, Hughes wrote, directed and acted in plays and crucially, wrote his first poems, which he published in the school magazine, the Don & Dearne.  By the age of eighteen, Hughes was recognisably the poet and man-of-letters of his maturity and was recognised as such in the school and wider community by his teachers, peers, friends and family.   Hughes left Mexborough in 1951, but South Yorkshire was to influence his poetry throughout his life.  Hughes wrote around twenty-five poems or short stories with direct South Yorkshire links (including ‘Pike’, ‘View of a Pig’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘On the Reservations’).   The landscape, flora and fauna of South Yorkshire underpin and inform his work.

2.3          Artists needing to research the life and work of Ted Hughes as part of their planning and preparation are advised that the following works are particularly relevant.  Steve Ely’s Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) gives the definitive biographical account of Hughes’s Mexborough years, with chapters three and five particularly relevant to the two commissions.  In terms of the direct relevance of Hughes’s poetry and writing to the specific commissions, the first six poems of  the ‘Early Poems and Juvenilia’ section of Ted Hughes’s Collected Poems (Faber & Faber, 2007) were written while Hughes was a pupil at Mexborough Grammar School and first published in the school magazine, the Don & Dearne.  Hughes’s short stories ‘The Rain Horse’ and ‘The Harvesting’ (Wodwo, Faber & Faber, 1967) are both set on Old Denaby/Manor Farm, as are the following poems, all available in Hughes’s Collected Poems: ‘Sunstroke’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘Old Oats’.  Both these books are available from any good library. 

3.             Other

3.1         Requirements of the artist/artists – it is essential that artists are able to work independently in researching, interpreting and executing the commission so that artworks reflect the commission brief as described in 1.1 above. Equally important is the artist’s willingness to seek guidance from and work flexibly in partnership with the client. Previous experience in developing public art would be an advantage, but is not a prerequisite.

3.2         Process and timescale - the management of the project will be delegated to a named officer of the THP (SY) who will be the primary point of liaison and who will sign off the key stages. Progress and outcomes will be monitored against this initial brief and the milestones / standards established within it.

Deadline for submission of proposals

10th November, 2016

Notification(s) to shortlisted artist(s)

25th November, 2016

Successful artist(s) notified

9th December, 2016

Artworks completed & ready for installation

28th February, 2016

Artworks installed

30th April, 2016

4.             Assessment

4.1         This commission will be awarded based on the criteria indicated below.  The decision will be made by the committee of the Ted Hughes Project (South Yorkshire).  The artist(s) with the highest aggregate score will be considered for the work.  Proposals scoring 1 in any category or 2 in more than one category are unlikely to be considered. 

  1. Does the proposed artwork respond to and reflect the life and work of Ted Hughes related to the specific location?
  2. Is the proposed artwork of high intrinsic quality?
  3. Is the proposed artwork likely to engage local, regional, national and international audiences?
  4. Has durability and resilience been taken into account?
  5. Does the proposal evidence a comprehensive approach to the work that inspires confidence?
  6. Does the costing of the proposal represent good value?

Scoring on these criteria will be as shown below:

4 — yes, outstandingly so;
3 — yes;
2 — partially;
1— not really

Appendix

Copied below are extracts adapted from a paper — ‘Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire’ — written by Steve Ely for the 2012 conference of the Ted Hughes Society and published in the 2013 edition of the society’s journal.  This gives some context and a sense of the general importance of South Yorkshire to Hughes’s development, as well as an indication of the significance of the locations of the two commissions.

Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire

Introduction

On 13th September 1938 [2], the Hughes family moved from the mill town of Mytholmroyd in the upper Calder Valley to Mexborough, a busy coal and steel town located midway between the larger South Yorkshire industrial centres of Barnsley, Doncaster and Rotherham.  Ted’s parents William and Edith Hughes had acquired an end-terrace newsagent’s shop at 75 Main Street, close to Mexborough’s commercial centre [3].

Ted Hughes had already developed a strong interest in animals.  From a very early age he had variously, collected ‘lead toy animals’, copied pictures of animals from books and modelled them in plasticine [4].  With friends including Donald Crossley, he would look for birds’ nests, and catch frogs and fish in the canal [5].  However, it was during camping and shooting expeditions on the moors around Mytholmroyd under the tutelage of his older brother Gerald, that his lifelong obsession with nature and animals was decisively catalysed.  In Poetry in the Making, Hughes relates how his greatest passion at that time was to act as Gerald’s eager retriever on expeditions into the countryside, where Gerald would shoot ‘magpies and owls and rabbits and weasels and rats and curlews [and where] he could not shoot enough’ for the young Hughes [6].

In South Yorkshire, this close relationship with nature and animals was at first threatened, and then transformed.  On arrival in Mexborough, living ‘over the shop’ on bustling Main Street, the Hughes family were at first culture-shocked by the noise, pollution and bustle of the cramped little town, which contrasted sharply with Mytholmroyd, where (despite the mills), the rhythms of rural life persisted [7] and where unspoiled valleys and vast expanses of wild heather moor were no more than a few hundred yards from any point in the town.  

In a 1997 letter to Jutta and Wolfgang Kaussen, Hughes characterises his mother’s view of Mexborough as, ‘about as far as you can climb down into hell without actually losing sight of the stars’ [8].  Ted’s sister, Olwyn, writes in a personal letter that she ‘… cried for two weeks when we arrived [in Mexborough]’, [9].  Significantly for Ted, who ‘seemed to take [the move] more calmly’ [10] , quickly coming to regard his new home as ‘paradise’ [10] and ‘the best thing that ever happened to me’ [11], Olwyn relates that the Hughes sibling who was ‘worst hit’ by the move was Gerald, who had trained for years in order to work in Uncle Walter Farrar’s ‘textiles factory’ in Mytholmroyd and had now no outlet for his skills.  Reluctantly taking a job in the Baker & Bessemer steel factory in nearby Swinton, Gerald injured his hand in an industrial accident, hastening his departure from the area to become a gamekeeper in Devon [12].  

Ted had always experienced the countryside via and with his idolised older brother.  However, his excursions with Gerald had significance for Hughes beyond the simple pleasures of nature.  Influenced by his reading of adventure books and the accounts of explorers, Gerald had developed a compelling fantasy which enabled him to imaginatively transform the moors around Mytholmroyd into the pre-Columbian American West in which he and his brother were ‘primaeval hunters’ [13].  Hughes was seduced by this romantic vision and the expeditions he shared with his brother were transfigured by a shared communion in the fantasy.

Accordingly, the nine years old Hughes must have felt something close to bereavement on Gerald’s departure.  ‘Two’, from Elmet, conveys his retrospectively expressed sense of desolation, using the iconography of their shared mythos:

The guide flew up from the pathway.
The other swayed.
The feather fell from his head.
The drum stopped in his hand.
The song died in his mouth. [14]

Old Denaby

However, and crucially, Hughes’ relationship with Gerald was able to continue for a year or so prior to the latter’s departure.  Soon after arrival in Mexborough, Gerald had discovered a surrogate for the moors and valleys of Mytholmroyd in the form of Manor Farm at Old Denaby, immediately across the River Don from Mexborough, and had secured from Oats, the farmer, permission to shoot across the fields and woods of his holding.  As at Mytholmroyd, Ted would accompany him [15], and when Gerald finally left, succeeded to his ‘permissions’. 

For the young Hughes, Manor Farm from the start was not just ‘the countryside’.  It was a precious, meaningful space, the venue for the continuation of the special imagined relationship with landscape and wildlife he had developed with Gerald.  At Manor Farm, an imaginative child with a vivid fantasy life, torn from his roots and grievously missing his mentor-brother, further developed the fantasy and transformed a Yorkshire farm into ‘our [the absent Gerald still imaginatively present] Palaeolithic Eden’ [16]. 

And he enjoyed it alone.  Because Hughes’s new world had such a charged significance for him, he was not able to share it with his newly made Mexborough friends, ‘town boys … sons of colliers and railwaymen’ [17].  He could not be sure they would share his semi-mythologised vision of the landscape and was not prepared to risk the desecration of his private world by a rough and tumble football-obsessed pal (for example) who might consider his Red Indian imaginings ‘weird’ or otherwise casually violate the integrity of a mythologised landscape that had become his intimately known, private domain.  ‘I knew every inch.  […]  I crawled over most of it. […]  I knew every rat hole’.  For five years, 1939-43, Hughes kept his town and country lives separate - ‘I never mixed the two lives up, except once or twice – with disastrous results’ [18].  As with moors of Mytholmroyd previously, where he and Gerald ‘never met one other soul’, Hughes felt a feeling of ‘private possession’ of his landscape.  Manor Farm was his exclusive domain: ‘not once did I see […] one other soul […] I had the whole thing to myself’ [19]. 

At Manor Farm, then, Hughes developed three traits that would in later years come to heavily influence his life and poetry: the atavism to retreat from the town into a ‘private’ countryside; an obsessive interest in shooting, trapping, fishing and the observation of animals, and, the perception of nature and the countryside as a special place, the landscape and its creatures imbued with a mythic, imaginary quality. 

Mexborough Grammar School

By 1946, Hughes was publishing poetry in The Don & Dearne, the magazine of Mexborough Grammar School [28].  By 1948, he had established a literary track record and was cultivating a matching image and persona – unconventional clothing, bohemian aspect, slyly subversive manner [29].  In a letter to Ann-Lorraine Bujon, Hughes provides a summary of his evolution into a poet, explaining how the first stirrings of his literary talent became visible in 1941, when his compositions at Mexborough Grammar School, ‘amused [his] classmates and [his] English teacher’, ‘focusing [his] interest’.  Simultaneously, he fell under the influence of his sister, Olwyn, who had ‘precocious’ literary tastes, and received a ‘whole library of collected poets’ [30] from his Wordsworth-quoting [31] Mother.  By the age of fourteen, Hughes had developed a serious interest in poetry, with the Bible, Kipling, Yeats and ‘folklore’ making powerful and simultaneous impacts [32].  By the age of sixteen, under the continuing influence of Olwyn and teachers Pauline Mayne and John Fisher [33], Hughes was already conceiving of himself as a poet -  ‘a writer of some kind, certainly writing verse’ [34].

Mexborough Grammar School had a thriving literary scene.  The Don & Dearne published poems, short stories and a range of other creative pieces, and pupils were encouraged to contribute. Thriving dramatic societies ran annual productions, including Flavin’s Too Young to Marry and Ardrey’s Thunder Rock [35].  Frequent excursions gave pupils the opportunity see a range of plays, in 1947 for example, including King Lear , Othello, Macbeth and Farquahar’s The Beaux Strategem [36].  A play reading society was established, and plays read in 1946-7 included Sheridan’s The Critic, Jenning’s Five Birds in a Cage and Ridley’s Ghost [37].  Less formal revues were performed by staff and pupils each Christmas.

The literary scene at Mexborough Grammar School was focused on the figure of John Fisher, a charismatic and unorthodox English master, who, from the 1945-1946 academic year, became the major influence on Hughes’s poetic development.  Fisher nurtured Hughes’s talent and facilitated his acceptance at Pembroke College as a ‘dark horse’ by enclosing a portfolio of his poems to invigorate an otherwise unremarkable application [38].   Hughes held Fisher in high regard and with much affection (in a letter to Keith Sagar, Hughes states he was ‘in love with’ Fisher [39]).  However, Fisher’s influence on Hughes went beyond the usual ‘teacherly’ mentoring.  Barry Wademan saw Hughes as a Fisher ‘protégé’ and insists that Hughes’s hairstyle (floppy fringe falling across his eyes to be ‘swished’ out – which style he maintained into his adult life) was a style and mannerism copied from Fisher [40].  Alan Johnson, Hughes ‘best friend’ in the 1947-49 period, is in no doubt that Hughes ‘consciously modelled’ his look on Fisher, so closely they ‘could [have been] twins’ [41].  And certainly, Hughes does seem to have idolised Fisher.  In a lengthy, mock-serious (‘When Warriors Meet’), review of a staff-pupils hockey match  in the 1947 Don & Dearne, ‘Edward James Hughes’s’ treatment of Fisher is, despite the affectionate satire, scarcely less than adulatory. 

Every eye recognised the red and black battle jersey of Fisher, leader and first warrior […] the play was becoming tedious when […] with a loud and blood-curdling yell, a long red and black striped figure leapt from the fray […] and streaked up the field like a burnt god [42].

Under Fisher’s tutelage, Hughes threw himself into the literary life of the school, becoming sub-editor of The Don and Dearne and contributing several poems — his first published poem ‘Wild West’ appeared in the 1946 edition of the magazine — articles and reviews across the 1946-48 period.   Hughes wrote, cast and directed the sixth form Christmas Reviews of 1947 and 1948, both proto-Pythonesque affairs in which, for example, cowboys entered saloons to order coffins in which to place their victims and featuring such absurd spectacles such as Watkinson, the Headmaster dancing enthusiastically with buckskin clad sixth form ‘squaws’ [43].  Hughes’s lifelong love of Beethoven and Shakespeare developed under Fisher’s influence [44].  Hughes also played roles in school productions, most notably as David Charleston, the brooding lighthouse keeper in Robert Ardrey’s Thunder Rock [45].

Contact the curator
Who is eligible for this opportunity?
Artists
When is the deadline?
10th November 2016
How many works can I submit?
Up to two
When is the delivery date?
The work should be installed by Feb 2017
Are there payments to artists?
All costs, material and artist fees to be within the £3500 commission
Is there a private view / opening?
An opening event will happen in the new year with the date yet to be confirmed
Does the location have disabled access?
yes
What publicity will be provided as part of the opportunity?
Marketing of the trail along with PR will be managed by the ted Hughes Project.
How do you decide on proposals?
The scoring system will is within the guidelines avaliable at www.tedhughesproject.org
What happens if my proposal is chosen?
We will contact you and arrange a meeting to take the commission forward.

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