Summer in Newcastle

Firstly I’ve like to say a big thank you to the ladies at SHE choir and Hannah Ashman who were extremely generous with their time, ideas and enthusiasm for the workshops, through sun, wind and torrential rain. It was such a powerful experience using our voices together in the landscape. The NewBridge Project were extremely supportive and enabled me to make many meaningful connections with the resident artists, sparking ongoing relationships and future collaborations.

Throughout the residency, I have been experimenting with various media and generating texts, objects, paintings, sound and footage. I’m now working through various assemblages of these materials and reflecting on some longer term ideas, with a return to Newcastle on the horizon. The Northumberland landscape is still haunting me, with its ancient stones and callous winds. Its an incredibly unique and sinister place. It takes time to digest the many encounters and spaces experienced there and its good to be deterritorialised like this, my time there has now taken on a dreamlike quality, which will be reflected in the work.

“Transparent things, through which the past shines!
Man-made objects, or natural ones,
inert in themselves but much used by careless life
(you are thinking, and quite rightly so,
of a hillside stone over which a multitude
of small animals have scurried in the course of incalculable seasons)
are particularly difficult to keep in surface focus:
novices fall through the surface,
humming happily to themselves,
and are soon reveling with childish abandon
in the story of this stone, of that heath.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent things