Residencies & Projects
As well as working on commissions and work for sale, I make conceptual pieces for exhibition and installations. This is a really important aspect of what I do, as the experimental work feeds into the rest of my practice, refreshing and inspiring it, and I love responding to places and their history.
My starting point is often text, focussing on text found in or connected with a place, and is also grounded in a sense of place and the history of a place. I am inspired by the relationship between words and the place they were written, or spoken in. I generally begin with a process of research, which may be reading in archives, drawing on location, and also through conversations and listening to the people connected with the place.
That 'sense of place', its resonance perhaps, that special feeling you get in a particular place is one which is difficult to define but as the artist Paul Nash put it: “something more than its natural features seemed to contain, something which the ancients spoke of as genius loci – the spirit of a place”.
I have highlighted some residencies and projects here which have been particularly important in my ongoing fascination with place. The first was at the Georgian Theatre in Richmond, where I spent time in the theatre drawing, listening to the guides, working in the theatre archive and researching. That culminated in an installation in the theatre called ‘A Theatre of Words’. My residency on Mull resulted in a solo exhibition at An Tobar, the arts centre in Tobermory. That was a wonderful opportunity to pursue my ongoing fascination (obsession !) with the film ‘I Know Where I’m Going’. The film was made on Mull in 1945, and the new work became all about the locations and the words spoken in those locations.
My project ‘Unreadable Books’ began with a visit to Lyme Park; I became interested in the Legh family who were the owners and that took me to their archives and writing. One letter in the archive which begged the recipient to burn it - a request which had not been honoured - took me to experimenting with ways of making books which were inaccessible to the reader.
As a last very recent example, I was invited to make work for an exhibition at the North York Moors National Park Centre around the theme of ‘Hedgerows’. I started with visiting the place, and we had a wonderful tour with ecologists, Land Managers and local farmers. This led me to some research about the importance of hedgerows and to make a series of pieces that reflected both my experience of the place and the importance of the hedgerow for supporting diversity, particularly lepidoptera. Sometimes it can just be one thing that someone says - that becomes the inspiration for a body of work.
