Here and There

Artist Statement

It would take a thesis chapter to elaborate, but it’s not difficult to comprehend this work as a visualisation of some “nowhere” in-between inland somewhere and coastal somewhere. It is also easy to connect how the notion of somewhere and nowhere shifts as foreground and background in different place-making approaches embedded in expectations shaped by tourist gaze, or in the writings of fashionable anthropology and ethnography studies that forget about the people once the degree is put on the resumé, or in the tradition of seaside artist colonies - that the profiling of identity, such as Cornish, is mediated through the articulation of what is not Cornish. If there were an indicator that effectively measured the Cornishness of each place then it would leave space for liminality to grow, which hopefully goes beyond the geographic limitations and linearity as in a road movie. Such liminality grows in the repetitive landscape and blurry sequential drawings, it draws people to contemplate while they are on the way to somewhere.

I collected plastic waste through my walks from Falmouth to Fowey, along the seaside until I was drawn inland and eventually lost. I was attracted to sudden reflections on treetops, hedges, and of course, on plastic waste on the ground. As I realised how quickly the theoretical part would be forgotten, I figured, hey, what about capturing something that cannot be captured, something that motivates such reflections, the wind breezed my walk and swept my footprints, say – something already in the past. I can, in a way, perform the Cornishness that some would argue I can never grasp, but have learned to reanimate, just as these plastic strips reanimate the wind of the past. This hopefully guides the project forward – the performance as a re-animation of something that cannot be grasped: the wind, the past, the Cornish identity, by someone who is in between here and there – the ending tips of this landmass.