A Sense of Place was a group exhibition at Scarborough's Woodend Gallery showcasing the work of eight North-East England-based artists: Estar May, Donna Mindart, Mouse, Jenny Sutton, Alice Kin, Miriam Hemingway, David Kenney and me.
The theme of the show was exactly what the title says - place, how we define it, what it means to us. I found myself thinking about the legal definitions of place, and specifically about freeports, special economic zones where the host country's rules regarding trade and taxation can be locally suspended.
I also found out about the ritual of Beating the Bounds, where citizens would wander the limits of their county each year whipping the boundaries with willow sticks. It seemed to me to be the exact opposite of the top-down, legalistic way of defining place embodied by the freeports: here, the community get to decide where their land's limits lie.
It was but a small step to combine the two and wander the border of the Teesside Freeport wearing a latex pigeon mask, in my video piece Beating the Bounds at Teesworks. Once again, many thanks to Ian Paine for getting up very early to capture this.
Beating the Bounds at Teesworks was accompanied by two other pieces. One, called No Nation Without Imagination, was a circle where visitors could sit and imagine themselves to be in a different territory. They could then record their feelings about this new place and what it might represent to them in a notebook provided.
The final piece, Reconstructed Domestics, took a more small-scale look at what place might mean. In this sound piece, I used objects around the house to re-create sounds I remembered from my childhood. Specifically, they were sounds which told me I was no longer in my parents' house: the pets of friends and relatives, my paternal grandmother's clock, my maternal grandmother's kettle. None of the sounds are exact replicas, they're just the best I could do to bring these things back into existence in a different time and place - much like all memory.
As well as the sound piece, Reconstructed Domestics also included an accompanying video which showed me in the process of recording these sounds. It is a beautiful tribute to the innate dignity of making art.