A couple of weeks of bad UC symptoms means I’ve recently spent a lot of time indoors, doing what I usually do when my chronic health stuff is bad: resting, reading and researching.
I’ve been looking a lot at maps- both real and imagined, new and modern, taking in ley lines and how we might map our internal spaces.
Whilst doing this, alongside watching and reading a lot of fantasy (more maps!), I received a message from Roni at Marlborough Productions letting me know that The Safety Map I created with them back in 2016 was being repurposed for a Queer in Brighton event to document an intergenerational lesbian archive of Brighton memories. The original map was a group piece- my task was designing and painting the actual map, and many people were involved in its conception, transportation and invigilation.
There’s a pretty good write up of the original Safety Map here on their website, and below is a description from the Brighton Dome, where I invigilated the map myself as part of its appearance at Pride that year:
“The Safety Map encouraged victims of hate crime to come forward with their stories. A large quilt with a hand-drawn map of the city on it, allowing visitors to tag their own experiences onto relevant parts of Brighton, this safe space enabled LGBTQ+ people to share their stories and offer support to one another. A collaboration between LGBTQ+ arts producers Pink Fringe, local artist Kate Shields and Glaswegian performance artist Rosana Cade, the installation was not just intended to highlight unsavoury incidents around Brighton, but also to map queer and trans identity in the city generally.”
It was really great to have the map repurposed in this way, and to see something we made take on a new form for the community. Thanks to Roni for the photos below:
I’m reminded also of the recent screenshots of Palestine I’ve seen on social media, taken from Queering the Map, a really beautiful online project that’s been going since 2017.
Internal maps
I recently finished reading Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books, and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything quite so engrossing- I’m sad to have finished it. I also decided to read The Silmarillion, as I really enjoyed the Rings of Power, having resisted Tolkien for so long. I can’t deny the brilliance of Tolkien’s world-building, and personally I think Rings of Power including more diversity in its characters and stories (both lore and non-lore) was what I needed to be engaged properly in the world of Middle Earth. I’m aware that statement will upset some angry boys on the internet so I have put it in bold. :)
Anyway, I’m increasingly drawn to fantasy (the reasons behind this which might require a dedicated blog post!) and in particular, the world-building aspects and maps of fantasy worlds. Middle Earth, Westeros, Skyrim and Earthsea…all have beautiful maps which I love looking at.
Whilst unwell, I started drawing an ‘internal map’- an imagined land that someone might travel through whilst recovering from illness. It’s certainly not a finished work, but it was good to work on something like this whilst unwell. I drew it without a specific plan, and just went with what felt instinctive at the time- almost like an automatic drawing, and here’s what came out:
I really enjoyed this article in the ToeRag art paper by Ella Slater, ‘Speculative Cartographies’, which covers dream maps, specifically those of Kathy Acker.
World-building is something I want to explore more in my practice, and I’m delighted that this weekend I will be joining Christian Jago for a world-building workshop. This is the last thing on my DYCP mentoring list, and I feel it’ll be a good way to close the door on my arts council-funded chapter.
Dreamy Place: Nightwatch film trail
Last week my short film ‘a stone circle for the future’ was chosen as one of six films to be shown on the Dream Place Festival ‘Nightwatch Film Trail’ through Crawley town centre. (You can watch it here if you haven’t seen it yet!)
I went along to join the trail, which was such a unique event. A crowd of 20-30 people followed the festival team throughout the town centre on a Saturday night to watch a diverse selection of digital films, and by the end the crowd was even larger, with many curious members of the public joining in. The festival comes to Brighton from 25 Oct and there’s some great events and exhibitions happening.
…spookily, whilst wandering the town centre, I stumbled across a contemporary stone circle (I am magnetically attracted to them at this point!). A quick google let me know that it was a piece of public art by none other than Jane Fordham & David Parfitt. I’ve modelled for Jane’s brilliant experimental life drawing classes at Fabrica for well over a decade now, and so it was wonderful to come across one of her artworks in the wild (and a stone circle, no less!) I love when the universe brings up connections like these!
Jane and David also created the Shoreham Airshow Memorial, which is really worth a visit if you are ever in the area.
Returning to the London Road Stone Circle
Back to stone circles again, and I recently did a second walk (solo this time) around the London Road Stone Circle, aiming to create a pencil rubbing of each numbered stone I found, as a kind of record. Here’s the final piece:
I felt a little weird at first, getting on my hands and knees with a piece of paper and a pencil in the street, but after the first few were done, I became quite immersed in the task! I’d been informed by my friend Fiona, who came with me on the last walk around the circle, that stone #42 had possibly been re-installed near the back of the station, by the creepy outdoor lift- and therefore it was possibly now outside of the original circle (and also, the wrong way round).
I found it on this walk, and really like that someone took the time to re-incorporate this stone into the development of this area, whilst (maybe unknowingly) getting it ‘wrong’. The original intention of this piece of art was to create a ‘new myth’ for the area, and a kind of oral folklore has certainly emerged around it.
The word ‘folklore’, meaning ‘the traditional beliefs, customs, and stories of a community, passed through the generations by word of mouth’ can become fixated on the traditional aspect, rather than the passing-on and remaking. To misquote Ursula K Le Guin, folklore “doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
So, misquote a writer, exaggerate a story, create a myth. Memory is fleeting and often unreliable. The stories we tell and the places we imagine are often much more interesting.
Links + Resources
https://marlboroughproductions.org.uk/event/the-safety-map/
https://www.queerheritagesouth.co.uk/s/queer-heritage-south/page/home
https://www.queeringthemap.com/
https://ellacslater.com/The-Toe-Rag
https://christianjago.co.uk/Workshops
https://dreamy-place.com/events/brighton/
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/crawley-peoples-monument-275498