One of the first Culture Vultures events I attended was a Cultural Conversation at Armley Mills in Leeds in May 2011. The idea was to meet different artists and hear about their work. That’s how I came across Kirsty Hall and her charming 365 jars project. Kirsty, who by her own admission is a “purveyor of mad obsessive projects”, was telling us about the jam jar she’d brought with her. It was customised with a unique piece of art – four ink drawings on tags, suspended at different lengths from the underside of the lid. On the lid itself, Kirsty had inscribed the following:
Jar No. 129
http://365jars.com
If you like me, you can take me
You see, Kirsty planned to create an art jar for (almost) every day of 2011. The bit that really caught my imagination was that each art jar was being released into the wild, so to speak, for someone to find and keep. When a jar was located, it came with instructions to log onto Kirsty’s website to confirm the find, enabling the artist to keep track of all the jars she had released, up and down the country.
When Kirsty revealed her plans to release jar no. 129 somewhere in Bradford later that day, I decided there and then that this jar would be mine. I waited with baited breath for Kirsty to make an announcement on Twitter once the jar had been released. The announcement came with a picture of the jar in situ to help locate it. I studied it carefully. I’d imagined Kirsty would leave it in the woods somewhere – probably all that talk of “the wild” – but this image seemed more hopeful. The jar was sitting in a hole in a wall, the sort of hole you’d burn a tealight in. The view in the distance looked familiar. I spotted a multi-storey car park in the background but I couldn’t work out where it was. In desperation, I tweeted the picture. “Someone must recognise this car park,” I thought.
It was Simon Cantrill who replied almost immediately, telling me it was the multi-storey at the bottom of Thornton Road, in Bradford city centre. He also tweeted that he was certain the wall was near the Love Apple, that lovely eatery in Bradford which is still sorely missed. It was now 10.30pm and my child was in bed. I would just have to drive into the city centre at the crack of dawn to collect the jar, I reasoned. Alas, within the hour, I spotted a jubilant tweet from Phill Harding confirming that he had already nabbed it. He’d recognised the location from the picture, but then he did have an unfair advantage. It turned out the wall was directly opposite the Love Apple, where Phill had once worked.
So Phill had the jar. I sent a tweet begrudgingly offering my congratulations. Phill replied, rather nobly I thought, that art is for sharing and that he’d be happy to pass the jar on to me at some point, as part of a chain, so that as many people as possible can enjoy it. When I met Phill many months later, he introduced himself as “the man with the jar”. And the last time we met, he handed the jar over to me. We’d met to share some ideas about the different ways in which we use sound in our work. As I admired jar number 129, Phill made a poignant observation – that the jar could be enjoyed not just for its physical aesthetic but also for the sound it makes when the hanging tags chime softly against each other.
It always feels like a privilege to me, to be so intrinsically involved in an artist’s mission, and I’ve loved being a part of jar number 129’s ongoing journey. And in the spirit in which I received the art jar from Phill, I’m ready to pass it on now. Let me know (in the comments box below) if you’d like to be its new custodian.
Irna Qureshi blogs about being British, Pakistani, Muslim and female in Bradford.