why place?

When bulldozers deface a landscape, erasing territory and identity itself we experience a strong sense of loss. Our natural impulses are to want to return to the past, or to forget it completely, but our sense of self rests on our experience of the past and so both should be encouraged. It is this maintenance of connection that creates the full story; an act of making meaning in, and for, the present.

My practice focuses on the connections we have to place, questioning how things; objects, documents and images shape our understanding, forming a significant part of our memory and our identity; who we are, in a place.

pause and reflect . . . 

---

Each one of us should speak of his roads,
his crossroads, his roadside benches.
Each one of us should make a surveyors
​map of his lost fields and meadows

Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space

The traveller gets down 
onto a midnight platform 
and knows from the rustle 
of unseen water-falls ​
he has come home
​RS Thomas, Afallon

In this way the language, and the maps, had become decorated with mutually foreign-sounding words, words that might have seemed antithetical to one another, but together had come to define the linguistic terrain of the region
​Roo Borson, Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida

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 by place                 

LAKES & DALES
Fort Walney Uncovered
Seedlings
​Single-Use Planet?

LEEDS-LIVERPOOL CANAL
Dining Out on George 
Tell it to the Water 

MERSEYSIDE, ​​WARRINGTON & HALTON
demolition | emotion
Exploring Halton's Collections
Inspired Responses
Not in My Place
The Owl and the Pussy-Cat
Wandering the Green Ways
​Working Lives

WALES
Dolbelydr

NORTH EAST
​Dementia & Imagination

LANCASHIRE 
from Cordwainers & Curriers
Exploring the Distaff Effect
in-situ in-residence in-pendle
Thirty Instruments Loaned by Ladies
Scratch the Surface, Dig a Little Deeper

GREATER MANCHESTER
Archiving the Little Things
The Homeless Library
Stories of Chat Moss

​LONDON
stonepaperwater, and us

​EUROPE
Looking at the Gates of Paradise
Talking with Strangers