In March 2024, I was artist-in-residence at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, responding to Silences & Stories: an exhibition of the work of artist Pia Arke, “the first major survey of the Danish-Greenlandic artist (1958–2007) to be shown outside of Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and the Nordic countries”.

The call was for an artist to spend five days in the gallery, making “an open access encounter, where the public are invited to explore your practice and your response to Pia Arke’s work.” My own work connects with Arke’s in terms of self-portraiture, landscape, and feminism; and specifically on the subject of hysteria and the process of working with archives and family histories.

For the residency, I proposed an installation of landscape elements, which could be selected and easily re-arranged to create environments within which the public and I could interact. My invitation to gallery visitors: tell me about an outdoor place that’s important to you, then we’ll make it. You can photograph yourself in that place, or photograph me, or ask me to photograph you. My intention: gently, to ask questions about colonialism and representation:

What does it mean to stand in, to occupy a landscape?

How might landscapes be constructed spaces?

What does it mean to be photographed or recorded in that space?

Over five days, more than 60 adults and children came to play with me, including a family drop-in session, the gallery’s youth group, the South West Visitor Group of refugees and asylum seekers, school groups, artist friends, family, neighbours, and gallery staff. They brought with them connections to places real and imagined, and worked singly or in collaboration with others.

I have produced a publication about the project, in a limited edition of 50 signed copies, which will soon be available in my shop

You can find my research and listen to my project playlist here