Traces I (Messenger) 2022. A work for a restricted space. The work concerns three words said at both ends of a line that traverses a National Park (Sanctuary) and concerns deaths of family members in two locations (communities as sanctuaries). The work started in 2018.
Traces I (Messenger) 2022 is an intervention into a suitcase and is a work about a line and the events encountered along the line that traverses a Sanctuary (National Park). The line is a 13km walking line that is traced across the surface of the land over the South Downs in England from the coast at Bishopstone inland to Firle. The line traces a probable route (bridleway and footpaths) of family members to announce unexpected deaths of key members of the family (the three words) that occurred at both ends of that line and which produced significant changes in the lives that experienced those words. In that sense the landscape becomes a metaphor for what they felt.
Although that line was made in both directions to utter those words, this work only makes a one way direction so as to offer a sense of clarity in a complex situation.
The emotion the messengers felt before delivering those three words is reflected in the landscape that the family engaged intimately with, both through the differences of wind, details seen, such as prehistoric tombs, quietness encountered and broken, the lack of water in dew ponds, and the method of controlling access to the land (since WWII), and is contrasted with the more abstracted structure of recording events only from a forward looking position at every crossing of each contour line spaced at 20m height intervals (except at those places where the route was impracticable thus the word, ‘traces’, which implies a hidden or lost area of the line). This more abstracted understanding of landscape is what we use when we go beyond our lived in boundaries. This approach gave a vertical rather than horizontal or time based understanding for recording and determined length of time for recording each point..
The work uses film for a small screen (B+W and colour with edited found sound); boxed collections of found objects (uncombed sheeps wool, flint, White Bryony, Ragwort and Tansy, in the case of ‘Traces I’, (all now desicated)) and these are also reflected in the film (as flourishing elements). The film along with documentation of the work, and unframed digital prints worked over in earth based materials (Conté) are all contained in a suitcase that once held family records.
The intention of these new contents are that they can be removed and laid out for inspection in the manner of a customs inspection (the controlling of access into the Sanctuary?). However, the film to be active, also tethers the content to the space of inspection, which then quietly challenges the concept of sanctuary as freedom, as freedom remains controlled.
‘Traces I’ is complemented by ‘Traces II’ that concerns other lines also with three words but from a different region but is still contained in the same intervention.
