Over the last three years I have been working with Poole museum archives and with archives at Devon Records Office. Through this working with archival material has become a bit of an obsession within my artistic practice. It is a passion, a commitment. As my friend Luís Antero, said; “tradition is like a huge file and a stimulating point of departure for exploration and work. One can use it to build entirely new things.”
I have designed and produced this book for digital:works project ‘Our Working Lives’.
In the research for my recent residency in Dartmoor, two things stood out that formed the basis for the work produced. One was how culturally we tend to think of landscapes as natural phenomenon, with some inherent quality that exists outside our understanding and ownership of them, even though humans have altered almost all of the British landscape in some way. The other was this quote: “Geography imposes arbitrary lines upon territories that are essentially continuous. Everyday life fixes these lines in place by reiterating the performance on which the permanence of this delimitation depends.”
Just finished reading the brilliant Edgelands by Michael Symmons Roberts, Paul Farley. Really enjoyable read. i loved the way they constructed thought patterns through their use of language to explore the edgelands. Their sentence construction, short chapters, made it hugely informative and enjoyable.
