Imagined Village: February 2016

Monday 29 February 2016

The Village People

the drawn village people

The Village People:

I walked through my workshop this evening and saw these figures standing on the table exactly where I left them about two months ago!

The Imagined Villagers,
I was going to take them down to the beach and try and make an animated video experimenting with styles an techniques.
I wanted the sea moving in the background behind them
I was going to try and realise imagined characters from the origininal Hampton Community.
A working oyster and fishing community in the 1900's
I wanted to see if they developed their own life stories.
Stories and feed back from people who saw the video or saw the figures exhibited, moved them about, rearranged them.
I might have made some 'props' things to group together make scenes with, regroup with different items to generate new stories.

Adding to their lives and re-creating the community

I havn't got the time to do that now and things have moved on anyway.

the filtered village people

They would be giants, if they walked amongst the imagined village model of white houses.

Saturday 6 February 2016

Memory Houses and Radio Lines

Memory Houses

As an exhibition with no specific theme into which I entered my ‘Memory Houses’, houses made from old family maps used on walks, cycle rides and camping holidays, comes to an end, another starts this time themed, Radio Heads, into which I am entering my ‘Inside - Out’ houses, thus named as they are made from wallpaper, with the addition of lines from radio programmes and dramas coming out of the windows fading away into the atmosphere…

Radio Lines

The ‘Memory Houses’ attracted a lot of interest, I’m not sure if it’s because they are made from maps or because they are quaint little houses, so it will be interesting to see how people react to the Inside - Out, Radio Lines ones.

Imagined Village

A community project led by two local artists (Rob Turner and Karen Simpson), which will look at the history and heritage of Studd Hill/Hampton in Herne Bay on the North Kent Coast and the sister estate of Jaywick in Essex. The two communities were built at the same time by the same developer but have had different unfolding fortunes over the passage of time.

We aim to look into local history and explore the folk art culture that exists at both locations, through a series of community workshops, open exhibitions, writing and history projects. The start of the story begins with the Hampton oyster fishing community in the1860's who had their houses taken by the sea, the result of rapid coastal erosion between 1909 -1911.