I have three jobs at the moment. I have often thought you can’t serve two masters but now I think you can serve three mistresses. Mistress One Since I last wrote I have been working on writing towards a publication about The House with Jenny Hughes which will come out next January in a journal called Studies in Theatre …
Enter the sixth lady (Edith) Constance Holme (Punchard) “The sea was always there and though it came quietly perhaps and inoffensively there would be many a night when it would come like a beast of prey, ravening its path between narrow shores, devouring the watery desert.” Constance Holme “The Lonely Plough” The last woman to enter the landscape has written …
I made the film Tree Fall which I tried out on Audrey Steeley (Manager at Heron Corn Mill), Nell Dale (Visual Artist) and my students (Manchester University Devising Module). Film moving to YouTube soon. The digression into workmen’s activities became the focus this February working on the project at Heron Corn Mill. It will form Mill Mechanics which I won’t …
This image does not come from Cumbria, it comes from Norfolk and is in the grounds of Gressenhall Workhouse, not too far from the location of the paupers’ unmarked graves in the apple orchard there. The Resting Place of the Disappeared I have been studying the lives of the saints this week whilst at the mill in Cumbria and …
Been troubled by these three this week. They are part of a commemorative window in the church at Beetham, Cumbria, (the village near the mill where I am resident artist). The church is now named St Michael’s and All Angels, but the church might have taken any one of these women’s names had history telling been different following the conqueror’s 11th …
Spent two days at Heron Corn Mill pursuing hunches. The Matilda Betham research has steered me into reading about women and insanity. As mentioned in a previous post, Elaine Bailey has written about this in Insanity and the Lunatic Asylum in the Nineteenth Century ed. by Thomas Knowles and Serena Trowbridge in respect of (Mary) Matilda Betham, (the poet, diarist …
I wrote something new on The House working diary pages about books. It’s a bit of a meandering around the word approaching its uses in that piece of work which I have just performed for the Gendered Citizenship and Performance Conference at the University of Warwick (that is actually in Coventry) – old tramping ground (Note: I use tramping in …
Dear Carran I was so glad I came to see your piece in Wootton Fitzpaine What I really enjoyed about it: The range of different environments, living room, back garden, football pitch, car park, field, village hall, road. The performed content stay mostly in a (familiar) similar ‘voice’, but the shifting of sites meant that that ‘voice’ echoed and resonated …