Springs Farm
Through many conversations, I have become aware that people in West Cornwall often ‘feel like they are living in a museum’.
I became fascinated with the derelict houses up amongst the moors of West Penwith, looking to tell a different story to the one of tin mines and bottled heritage. This work is part of a series of paintings and installations that have come out of this enquiry.
As I worked I found myself becoming absorbed by one particular site – Springs Farm, returning to it again and again, fascinated by the detritus of living that was strewn about the crumbling building. Initially I approached the site through photography. Gradually however I was led back to painting - the materiality of the site demanding a visceral reworking or re-presentation that avoids the impersonal gaze of the lens and the commodification of heritage.
The processes involved in painting, the life of the material itself have become a metaphor to deal with our shifting relationships to time and place, to those allusive memories that one moment we can catch and the next are gone only to re-emerge in some other shape at some other moment in time.
Life itself is a bit like that.
Springs Farm: A Peopled Place (download pdf)
Biography
Originally from Somerset, I am now based with my four children in the far west of Cornwall. I am an artist and curator, and currently co-director of BOSarts. This ongoing artist project was developed as part of an MA at University College Falmouth (2010).
My work is research-led and project based with an underlying socio-political motivation. It has been included in exhibitions at Newlyn Art Gallery
(The Exchange) 2008 & 2007, The Bosigran Project 2008 and More Cornwall 2007. In 2008 she undertook a year-long residency with the National Trust and received an ACE research and development award.
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BOSarts is an artist-led partnership with the National Trust, based in Cornwall, making and commissioning contemporary arts projects, particularly focusing on issues to do with change and local context(s). Our current focus looks at the construction of place and identity in rural areas as heritage or cultural product; it explores the relationship between lived-in-place and tourism or heritage site.
Contact BOSarts
www.bosarts.org