An abbreviated version of a quote from Morgan Friedland, C20th economist used to illustrate that now might be the moment to take up the idea of  a universal basic income for all.

A potentially less costly system than our current benefits schemes.

The corona virus, Covid 19, was looking for connections is this one?

During the Covid-19 lockdown, we 3 Larks & Ravens have created space 2 days a week to work together/apart in exploring and responding to Covid-19 life in all its pain, weirdness and disruptive possibilities.

We are staying focussed on our core interests of value, money and how to upend and rework capitalism away from economic growth fuelled by material consumption and towards better redistribution of wealth to support the common good.

We are trusting in art as “resistance to the logic of making sense” and in drawing and making as a way to gain insight.

We hope our work may trigger different thinking and conversations across a wider audience.

We started by exploring ways to make connection with the outside world from our individual locked down isolated states – high chairs, prancing lambs, sunflower seeds, high rise flats and floating messages on a canal.

Then, rather than concentrating on what we were cut off from, our interest shifted to how we could use this beached and cut-off state to explore the opportunities for change – in valuing, money and capitalist policies – which Covid-19 might enable….

How could we ask people what they would like to see change post Covid-19?

What would their language tell us?

What sacred cows  are getting burned?

What might the new forms of value exchange happening between neighbours and friends point to?

How would the recognition of who our key workers actually are change how society pays them?

How might Priti Patel’s point based immigration system change?

Might Universal Basic Income actually happen? What would it change?

What can we, as artists, do to help trigger wider conversations?

For a while, as a cognitive psychologist, I’ve been working with my 2 artist colleagues to explore questions and trigger new thinking and conversations. They have introduced me to a different, arguably more visceral, language of drawing and making as a way of exploring and understanding the world. Outside the safety net of words, it often feels alien for me, uncomfortable and even crazy but insights emerge which I know I wouldn’t have encountered through my normal, more analytical, roots.

In the Autumn we had the privilege of meeting two South Koreans from the Science Walden Insititute at the Hothouse residency at Dartington Hall. We were fascinated by their Faecal Standard Money project capturing people’s faeces in their specially designed toilet and converting it into biofuel which is worth money and the people can be paid in kind for their natural excreted “waste”. What a wonderful challenge to our capitalistic models of value.

We, the Larks & Ravens would like to continue those conversations. Today, I tried to express that by asking Google to translate our wish into South Korean. I then attempted to draw by hand the (to me) alien script character by character. It was hard. It required intense concentration. Was I copying the shapes, the length of each line, the spacing accurately enough? Was I conveying the right meaning or had I just changed it inadvertently? Was I missing some subtlety of expression? Had I said something offensive or wrong or just difficult to understand? How distorted would my message be when it reached a native speaker? I don’t know.

And then I puzzled why we think we understand each other when we listen or read each other in English. We say it’s our shared or “native” language but to what extent is the meaning intended really shared? I certainly never attend as carefully and anxiously as I did with these unfamiliar characters? I usually think “that’s OK, I caught ‘the drift’ … but did I?

What can we, the Larks and Ravens, learn from sharing questions about value, money and Capitalism with those who speak to us in other tongues? What does it teach us about drawing as a language to be shared and understood by others?

(Original Translation: A desire to work with others who share similar questions but explore in different languages – drawing, words, music, making, doing..)

The Larks & ravens are exploring (remotely) ways to connect with the outside world from our different isolated locations.

I walked along the canal path that runs through my village and left a floating message of hope and sunshine for any other passer-by.

So when down at Dartington Hall spending time ‘Hothousing’ what non-capitalism might look like, I was interested in working on the Tiltyard, a pristine area of grass visible from most of the surrounding paths.

A place of exposure, any activity would be seen

A place where leaves would easily be caught by the wind and blown around

A place where I might make a leaf drawing to an enlarged scale of the Lane Room conference table

I asked the gardeners’ permission and began to gather leaves where I first entered the space at one edge, slightly stealthily because I felt self conscious. Then as I continued to gather the leaves they became the focus of my attention. Why did I chose one rather than another? Why did I not pick up the dowdy leaves buried more deeply in the grass? Was it size, or colour or ease for me? If I was making a conference table surely the democratic thing was to include all the leaves? Then I was asked by child what was I doing, my reply was that I was using the leaves to make a drawing to try to understand the muddled thoughts in my head. The muddle came from a day of subverting the formality of the Lane Room in an attempt to make a piece of work in the space I found myself in which represented non-capitalism.

Today I have been gathering leaves to compose them in my own garden and I suddenly became aware of  the different e way I viewed and handled the leaves. Today’s leaves are actual capital, for me, saved energy that will, in time, turn into rich compost to feed the plants in my garden, some of which will, in turn will feed me. Yet I gathered today’s leaves greedily, in armfuls with the excited thought of compost to come not considering what else they might offer. It was a different way of relating to the time I was on the Tiltyard. Then the leaves directed and informed my thinking, guiding new work.

The value of dead leaves.

So we worked together to explore a representation of ourselves, one to offer by way of introduction.

Our materials were paper, card and tape,

So why did I want to create a trumpet as mask?

To get the mouthpiece to cover my face would have meant a very long trumpet, I did try but got all my arithmetic wrong. Nevertheless a trumpet emerged and Alison photographed me trying to blow it.

Why? was I trying to say something about my need or inability to blow my own trumpet?  was it an attempt to present a way of being heard? or did it subconsciously connect to  metaphors of war, triumphalism and power?

Today I read about the wall of Jericho, a neolithic structure much later used in the story of Joshua in the bible to terrify the Cannanites. A story which resembles elements of the smoke and mirrors of our current politics. I went on to explore the work of Miles Davies, seminal musician whose music had profound influences through its rejection of the limitations of chords in favour of exploring the creative potential of atonality.

Seems that there are many possible metaphors that might inform ‘doing’ non-capitalism…………

Doing is nearly always rewarding but uncomfortable when someone asks you “what you are doing?” and you simply have no rational answer.