LATEST PROJECT: track
Using images of ‘migrant’ plant life found along a disused railway line in Oxfordshire over which I am superimposing sets of three words which reflect on not only the migrant plant histories but also reflect wider current concerns with displacement, nationality and sense of place.
The Didcot to Newbury and Southampton railway line was axed by Beeching but carried freight until the late 1960’s and I remember it being in use as a small child. Indeed the track represents a key component of my own personal ‘psychogeography’ thus enabling a serious meditation on aspects of rural life, diaspora and the changing role and use of the english landscape.
I hope to publish a very limited edition photograph and poetry volume containing not only the 12 ‘track’ images but also 12 ‘Downland ballads‘ which I am writing concurrently for the project. The poems are a part of the process reflecting on historical links and indeed ‘tracking’ aspects of my life and the history of this small and unremarkable part of the South Oxfordshire landscape that does not conform to ‘idealist’ notions of art and landscape.
Should an application to the recently opened Cornerhouse Arts Centre in Didcot be successful I hope to display the entire series as a digital series and also present the documentation and original paintings which will grow out of this project.
This is hopefully to be sometime in 2011/12.
