We’re all being watched and we’re all watching each other’ - lately this has grown as a key concern within my writing, considering how we collectively and individually inhabit the city and landscapes, how we interact and intervene with them, and how observation affects this. This is the theme of my dissertation, which I am currently in the process of writing.
The city
as surveillance
as a power strucutre
as a landscape
and it's 'edgelands'
Art as a means
to communicate to anyone
to disrupt
to subvert an authority
Writing as
a walk, a view, a poem,
a story
In march this year I went on a residency to Granada, the influence on my work was significant. From this I created the piece ‘The city builds it’s skyscrapers / as the conquerors built their high castles’. The town I stayed near was overshadowed by a Moorish castle, that influenced much of my writing out there. This work compared the power structures associated with both buildings, with the key lens of ‘to see and to be seen’.
I grew up between parent’s homes in the Lake District and North Yorkshire Moors; to go from areas where landscape is tied to life -shaping our travel and time- to the city, made landscape a forefront in my written work. Much of my writing of cities is framed by natural imagery and style based on romanticism and landscape painting.
I am drawn to spaces that evade ‘design’ and burst against human intervention. In the city this leads me to the ‘edgelands’; spaces on the periphery that allow for childish exploring, nature against concrete and the overlooked to return to view.
Over the past years my practice has fluctuated between the gallery and the ‘outside’, to allow my work to speak of the world and to anyone it often exists outside of an ‘art’ setting
I use my writings to disrupt how view the city around us; a walk I created that was led by a written map represented the city fluidly between present and future, asking the reader to critically study the landscape around them.
Much of my writing is displayed as booklets or prints, ranging from postcard size to A3, that allow the viewer to take the work away with them, for free. I reject the idea that art should only be appreciated by the wealthy and want everyone to have art in their homes and lives.
My practice includes poems, stories, short narratives, plays, paintings and drawings. Each medium feeds into the next, though recently I have worked on more writing t!han the others. My approach to writing is broad - much like ‘writing in the expanded field’ - and many are displayed in sculptural forms or ask the viewer to participate in order to activate them.
I am interested how this will grow within my practice, and the opportunity to work in the landscape would influence both the content and the form my pieces would take.