This blog documents the development of a project by Lisa Wigham, which has been commissioned by In Certain Places. Lisa is one of five artists selected to create new artworks in response to the city of Preston, which will be presented as part of the Guild celebrations in September 2012-an historic event that takes place once every twenty years. For more information, visit www.incertainplaces.org
Location seeking
Historical contexts
800 of the PRESTON ‘GILD’
collaboration with EXISTING information
Librarys Museums and streets
Souvenir programmes and catalogues, monuments and signage in the city
Editing and reducing texts
Planning a site specific installation
Collaboration with historic Preston based sign makers
Design and proposal of a temporary public art work
A description of a place
If Lost Please Return
Winter turns to spring
Express meetings
Radio towers
Chimneys in a field, the train does not stop until Coventry
Lou Reed songs in your sleep
Seathwaite stepping stones
Barrow in Furness, Keswick, Coniston
The temporary company of the river
Saturday night on the way home, S was gurning outside the Winter Gardens
Ralf throws a javelin on London Fields
Someone spits ice
A Vote Conservative placard in a field
Everything tastes of Cuppasoup
She took my heart, she took my keys
nickedtravelcards.co.uk
Walking home, smelling flowers
Anthony Hopkins as Picasso
Art exists in a social or cultural matrix
Richard Long, Hamish Fulton
Walking and recording
The natural and the inevitable
My recorded experience of being there
In the English landscape
May 2003
JANUARY TO JUNE
Ten miles there and ten miles back
Revising journals from travels around the UK and over seas from the past 20 years, since that last Preston Guild.
Observations conversations reflections and projections.
All roads lead to Preston Station.
In Certain Places January 2012
Field Research leading to Collating and Editing
Today there is rain, gales and weather warnings in the north west of England; the sky is dark before I even wake up.
In this project I will seek to reflect upon my relationship with northern English landscape, this will explore autobiographical relationships with the city of Preston and the significance of its sites and role in my stories.
Moor Lane flats never looked like this before, it’s the middle of the night in May, we gather on the previously unnoticed lawn, the sky like a net for our collective laughter
Stories have been collected, like ephemera whilst in transit around the city- on foot or in the fast motion of vehicles on the ‘A’ roads, motorways and rail-roads leading back and forth to the city from the early 1990’s to present day.
My practice uses drawing, printmaking and the written word in pursuit of the description of landscapes: their defining features/ people /actions and essence. This essence is gleaned through reduction and distillation of information, after a period of collating and editing the many note books and journals carried with me while in transit.
All roads lead to Preston Station
