Dream Walking book is out!

The Dream Walking book is out! And we are pretty pleased with it. It has a lovely glossy front cover and 20 pages including lots of images from the Dream Walk. You can preview the book online here: http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/3222601
and we hope to have it available in some Nottingham outlets soon, we'll let you know where as soon as we can!

Dream Walking - The Space Station and the Key Brothers

Another instalment explaining the ideas behind the clues from our Dream Walking event. Last one next week!

Clue: The Key Brothers, know as the Flying Keys, broke the flight endurance record in 1935 by walking on the plane while still flying so they did not have to land for maintenance.
Crossed Keys are the symbol of St Peter's keys to heaven and are found on old tiles and buildings around Nottingham.  Can you find crossed keys here?

It's all about flying machines this week. Under the red brick pillars on St Mary's Gate, near St Mary's Church, we placed an image of the Key Brothers' plane, the Curtiss Robin, with a man walking on the wings! The Key Brothers constructed a catwalk so that they could walk across their plane whilst still airborne. An amazing, daring attempt!

We made the connection with the keys (put together with our theme of flying we discovered the story of the Flying Keys) when we saw the illustration of the crossed keys tile, found here in the 14th century.  The illustration is located on the wall just underneath where we placed our image.

There is also a Cross Keys pub near here, on Byard Street, which may have been the original  brewery and alehouse of the nearby 12th Century St Peter's Church.  For more on the long history of the Cross Keys Tavern, visit their website.

Clue: A permanent observatory to look down upon the Earth and out at the universe.

The Pod Office, at the junction of Fletcher Gate and Bottle Lane, is a brand new, award winning modern building. We looked at it for some time, it seems to be made of modular pieces and gleaming white walls overlapping walls, and irregularly placed windows. It's architecture is intentionally contemporary in style and suggests newness, the future. We started thinking about space exploration, the idea of the pod and the style of the building with its sections inspired the idea of the International Space Station.

I was lucky enough to visit NASA at the Kennedy Space Centre some years ago and see part of the Space Station being made and a section launched into space on its journey to connect with the rest of the Station under construction. The Space Station is built in parts, or pods, each country involved building a part on earth and then bolting it together up in space.  I saw the part built by the Italians! The idea of this working space centre of the future, built in pods, and the modern building of the Pod Offices seemed to fit well, so we placed an image of the Space Station on the Pod's curving wall.

There are some great images of the Pod Office building, inside and out, on their website, here.

We are planning a small book as a result of the Dream Walk, with images and words about walking and looking and thinking sideways! Follow this blog to keep up to date on our progress, you can subscribe by email, follow with Google Friends Connect or follow us on Facebook, all these can be found in the right hand column at the top of this blog.

Dream Walking - Icarus and the lacewing

The next weekly installment of my explanations for the images we created for Dream Walking.

Clue:  Friends of gardeners and lace makers.

Since our walk took you through the historic lace market area of Nottingham, where lace and textiles are still made in smaller ways, we had to have something about lace.

We asked Debbie Bryan's Studio & Shop in St Mary's Gate if we could place something to do with lace on their building.  Again, this is another instance where the business occupying the building influenced the creation of the image.

Debbie has a wonderful collection of original drawings of lace designs from historic Nottingham lace manufacturers.  Our idea reminded her of a drawing in the collection that looked a little like wings, and she showed us this drawing.

This is a draftman's drawing created by Fewkes, formerly Charles Farmer Lace, established around 1910.

I decided to use an adaptation of the lace design to create the wings of a lacewing, an insect that gardeners like because they eat the aphids that can infest plants.  This is one of my favourite images that I made, and well done to LJ for doing all the intricate cutting out!



Clue:  Don't fly too close to the sun!

Shining a torch at Icarus

Perspektiv Marketing on Stoney Street have a large, dark gateway into their building.

We spotted that their gate had a big octagonal shape in the middle that just begged for us to put an image on!

We imagined what might fit onto this octagonal shape... and came up with the idea of a sun ... by reversing the reflective image, we decided to have the silhouette of Icarus flying across a gleaming sun - very strange to see a sun glowing out at you at night!

Icarus is a character from Greek mythology, who attempted to escape from his imprisonment on the island of Crete by flying with wings constructed from wax and feathers.  But he ignored warnings from his father not to fly too close to the sun, and as he got too close to the heat of the sun it melted the wax that held his feathers together and he plunged to the earth.

We liked the image here by these big imposing gates which perhaps suggested imprisonment in this dark corner, but our Icarus was escaping!  I also like the imaginative link with Perspektiv Marketing, who use their own creative solutions to aim to fly high!  But not too high, I hope...

Dream Walking - the witch's ladder and Pegasus

Continuing the explanation behind the clues from our Dream Walk in Nottingham.

Clue: It was believed that witches cast a death spell over a person by tying the knots and then hiding the cord, and the only way to undo the spell was to find the secreted cord and untie each knot.

Hanging from a tree at the top of Bottle Lane we hung a number of feathers tied to a string.

This was inspired by The Witches Ladder, an art work by Klaus Weber that we had seen at Nottingham Contemporary, where he tied feathers to a rope.  When we looked into the idea of witches' ladders, we discovered the magic behind it of tying knots in string.  The feathers linked the idea to our theme of flying.

Clue:  Where travelling horses rest.

The image of Pegasus, the flying horse, was inspired by something that Managing Director David Glazebrook of CPMG Architects told us.  We had asked Mr Glazebrook if we could put one of our images behind the gate where they were storing their bins by their offices in Warser Gate, because it was a really dark space that could be seen from the street and would work really well with the reflective material that we made all the images from.  He said that that area would originally have been where horse drawn carriages would go in and out to transport the lace manufactured here, the original use for the buildings that CPMG now use.  So we felt we should have a horse image, but linking with our theme of flying it became Pegasus, the flying horse!

Photo by Matt Vaughan

To see pictures of our works glowing in the dark at Light Night, click here. 

Designs to dream

In one of our interventions for our Dream Walking event for Light Night, we are incorporating an adaption from this beautiful original draftsman's drawing of Nottingham lace.  Our walk takes place in part of the historic Lace Market area of Nottingham, so we thought it important to make this link.

This drawing was created by Fewkes, formerly Charles Farmer Lace, established around 1910 in Mapperley, Nottingham.  The lace drawing is part of a collection of original lace drawings available from Debbie Bryan Studio & Shop, 18 St Mary's Gate, The Lace Market, Nottingham, and still inspiring lace designs today.  Click here for Debbie Bryan's website and visit her heritage pages to find out more about lace in Nottingham, then and now!

We will be posting on this blog the story behind some of our other clues following the event.

Come along on Friday 10th February between 6pm and 9.30pm to pick up your map and torch from us and follow our clues to find all eleven of our interventions....  You will find us in the High Street by Barclays Bank.

See you there!

All the events and artists' commissions, including our Dream Walking event, are now listed on the Light Night website here.

Dream Walking takes place from 6 to 9.30pm.

See you there!

Realising our dream...

Plans for Dream Walking, our first walk to take place in Nottingham on 10th Feb 2012 as part of Nottingham's Light Night, are coming on really well.

We have been planning where we can install our secret interventions around the streets of the city, it's a lot of fun poking our noses into dark spaces and wondering if we're getting caught on cameras!

Everybody we have spoken to has been really supportive and quite excited about our project, and we would especially like to thank all the following local businesses who are helping us to realise our first walk:
Waterstones books, NG Chartered Surveyors, CPMG Architects, Debbie Bryan Studio & Shop, New College Nottingham, Perspektiv Marketing Group, Old Angel Inn, Tanners Chartered Surveyors, Valuers and Estate Agents and Nottingham City Council.

"In one respect, at least, I may boast of a resemblance to the simplicity of the ancient sages:  I pursue my meditations on foot."

John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, 1793

Dream Walking

We are pleased to announce that Sidelong's first walk will take place in Nottingham as part of Light Night festival.

Light Night is a national festival that celebrates individual cities' identities through hosting a variety of participatory night-time performances, installations and events. This year it will take place in Nottingham on February 10th 2012.

During our walks around Nottingham we have discovered many unusual and hidden places. In our new commission, 'Dream Walking', you can also explore the city in new ways. We will provide you with a torch and a map so you can find our glowing dream images in forgotten dark corners.

Here are a few interesting images of Nottingham...