“Everything interesting begins with one person in one place, though the places become many, and many persons in the form of influences will have gone into the making of that single woman or man. No one comes out of nowhere; one room or town or locality can be made into an everywhere. The universal is the local, but with the walls taken away.” John McGahern
Local is a concept often perceived as a purely geographical construct. It is also where the nuances and complexity of daily life are found and replayed and where rituals and relationships are formed. ‘Around Here’ is an ongoing body of work formed over eleven years, consisting of different threads that together have enabled me to negotiate these ideas and build visual conversations from the perspective of a village in the south-west of England.
Even from afar, my relationship with this place is enduring. The family home holds the physical remnants of childhood, where the intimacy and comfort of interior domestic space belies the exterior landscape it is situated within. The woodlands are uncultivated spaces that, while temporal, remain timeless reference points, and contrast with the highly cultivated culture of village life. As the woods delineate the village borders, community groups form the threads and networks providing a psychological framework for the village. From the whisky men who meet each month, where a different bottle of whisky is tasted and its merits debated, to the gardeners whose cultivated spaces reflect the characters of those who inhabit them.
It is through this work that I consider what binds people and place, and what makes us ‘local’. It has been a slow process, with periods of reflection punctuating the creation of different components, which has, in hindsight, been fundamental to the thematic development of the work.
