Heron Corn Mill Residency
The Heron Corn Mill residency marked a turning point in my creative practice. It was here that many of the separate strands of my work—performance, place, history, landscape, collaboration and embodied enquiry—began to converge into what has since become my integrated performance methodology.
I first met Audrey Steeley, Director of Heron Corn Mill, while teaching for the Arvon Foundation at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire. Around a decade later, after moving to the North West, Audrey invited me to create a performance to mark the reopening of Heron Corn Mill following its major restoration. The resulting performance, Threshold (2014), led to an extended residency that continued for several years.
During the residency my practice unfolded in four interconnected strands:
- Performance — presenting The House and facilitating post-show discussions that explored questions of memory, home and identity.
- Place research — investigating the history, landscape and ecology of Heron Corn Mill and the River Bela through film, walking and creative enquiry.
- Creative methodology — developing Recharging Your Creativity, a year-long devising programme that brought together artists from a range of disciplines and later travelled to the Universities of York and Salford.
- Literary response — creating new work inspired by the writing of Constance Holme, culminating in explorations of Beautiful End and the Kent Estuary landscape.
The residency also led directly to the collaboration with bassoonist Luke Crookes, whose participation in Recharging Your Creativity developed into the three-year Body Voice Bassoon project.
Looking back, Heron Corn Mill became the bridge between my theatre-based work and the landscape practice that would later evolve into Follow the Stone, Walking Words and my current Brinepoint projects.
Use the links below to explore the residency through films, research posts and published writing.
