My 12 month residency with the Watershed Landscape Project begins this month. I am Year 3 artist on this Pennine Prospects programme, following in the distinguished footsteps of Sally Barker, Andrew Macmillan, Angie Rogers and Char March.
I am working in partnership with the Brontë Parsonage Museum to produce video installations for an exhibition that opens there in September. The show will include a display of landscape photographs taken by community groups under my auspices, and a room devoted to images of Top Withens through the 20th century.
We are also planning a Symposium on the subject of Landscape and Literature, to be held in Haworth on 6 October as part of the Ilkley Literature Festival.
So plenty to do. I have developed an early focus on Top Withens, where remedial pointing and consolidation work took place last autumn, partly funded by Pennine Prospects. I wanted to convey the exposed situation of the builders, and also the incongruity of repointing such a ruined edifice. Snow arrived just before the work was completed, making it impossible for the contractors’ pick-up to reach the building. So scaffolding, tools and materials were carried and barrowed for several hundred yards down the Pennine Way.
