transition 10, newlyn art gallery, cornwall, november 2013

in November, 2013 I was resident over a five day period in the Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall, as part of their Transition 10 series.This was an opportunity to use the gallery space as an open studio, to talk to gallery visitors about the Trevisa Project and to absorb them, if they were wiling, into the piece

I used the gallery as an open book, with contents, like short stories, displayed on the walls and installed on shelving

an interactive e-book version of the room could be accessed via an iPad

in the centre of the room I started to weave a willow structure , stopping only to tell people one of the stories on display. A single length of drafting film, like a giant blank page, was suspended behind me as I worked. Everyone who stopped to chat with me about the project was invited to stand behind this screen and be photographed while they tried to remember how to make a shadow bird with their hands.

At the end of the week I animated these individual portraits so that they became an aggregated record of the shadows of all the people who had passed throughthe space that week. The willow structure evolved into an shadow hide with an aperture through which to view the shadow birds

the willow structure - the last to be harvested from the Somerset Levels before the great floods of 2014 - became another kind of memorial and the performative text of the Newlyn event

documentation of the residency will be added to the e-book, which will be re-installed at SensingSite in April 2014 at Falmouth University

it is my intention that this digital and real world archive will evolve into a chorographic survey that reponds to the life of John Trevisa, the site of Glasney College and how we remember, re-imagine and re-invent our histories