A bit of a mixed week… lots of ideas earlier in the week which are all scribbled down so they don't get lost.
I've pushed ahead with the background research… I've been trawling through 19th century census results and apportionments in the Cornish Studies Library. That was a really strange experience as they are all on microfiche, something I haven't used for over 20 years.
Also been in the National Trust office playing around with Map Info, a GIS mapping programme they use for landscape based work-planning and trawling through their Intranet looking at strategies etc… This project is very much about working within relationships whether that be conversations with tenant farmers and wardens, or the wider working of the organisation. Interested in layers and layering… layers of history and pre-history and also interested in using the tools that the Trust uses in its day-to-day work within the making process.
Reading what I've just written I am wondering why I started by saying its been a mixed week… probably the effect of going down with a cold! The week was overshadowed by ongoing discussions around a relationship central to the project – it looked as if we were just going round in circles. But tonight I heard that the problems were due to nothing more than a misunderstanding and are resolved! Great as it now means I am going to be able to push on with the real research, meeting people, developing relationships, listening and seeing where it goes…
So Re-Connections then… Sounds good! Its that getting started thing, the blank canvas. But now its a blank screen with an even more unknown audience.
This blog has come about as a result of putting together a proposal to the Arts Council G4A to develop my practice… with particular reference to a residency I have developed with the National Trust in West Penwith: The Bosigran Project.
On one level this blog is about the development of the Bosigran Project, on another and perhaps more fundamentally it is about the development of my practice.
Firstly a bit about the Bosigran Project, then I can put it to one side and focus on my practice (if it is possible to make such a divide…).
Bosigran is an area of land sitting on a shelf above the sea under the harsh granite shrewn moorlands of West Penwith, dominated by Carn Galva (protector in Cornish). So if you take a trip west down the A30 as far as you can go without getting your feet wet, well you'll be close by. It is a magical landscape with layers of history going back to Early Neolithic times c. 3800BC when Galva was probably an ancient Tor Enclosure, the most westerly of a chain of Tor Enclosures covering Cornwall that acted as a central point of exchange for the area.
The residency involves developing context specific work – working in the space of conversation, becoming as deeply embedded in the layers of socio-cultural history/contemporaenity as possible; a process of research and engagement that will result in a fortnight of site specific work in September based in and around Bosigran. Aware of the possibilities to extend this into a much wider project involving other artists and creating a real sense of critical dialogue around the project, we are looking for funding to commission a small group of other artists to work on the project leading to an ALIAS Seminar at the end of the fortnight… and have set up Bosigran Arts an artist-led group to this end.
So that is it for the project management bit, the over view etc … now to put the focus clearly back on that part of Re-Connections that is around the development of my own practice. I am absolutely determined that what ever the pulls of funding applications etc, I am going to use this funded(!!) time to take my work somewhere its not been before, and this blog is going to be a process alongside mentoring that will help keep that on track. So you'll not hear much more about Bosigran Arts, about funding or any of that side of the project but you will hear about my own practice and the role that working collaboratively plays in it. This is a promise to myself. Please, anyone reading this, call me on it if I depart into the realms of project management!
