Walking Research

I spend a lot of my time teaching people how to make a piece of work from scratch. I am finding that I know less and less about this the more I make my own work. So it is now a year since I was asked to think about doing something for Heron Corn Mill as part of my residency there and it is only these last couple of months that what to do has become clearer. For a long time I was gathering stuff, just gathering, filing and forgetting. Then some how the forgetting bit kept popping up – again and again – making me not forget it – those early walks following routes to and from the mill, and observing upturned tree roots on my own route down the A6.  Then I finally found out how to get from Milnthorpe to Heron Corn Mill and back again but not along the A6.  Then I got braver and went over the marsh…

…treading footpaths, witnessing floods and fallen trees, helping with a post flood Christmas party and filming three generations of mill fixers fixing the mill wheel, then bouncing along Marsh Road with a local historian nearly going into the ditch or the dyke as they call it, getting a complete guided tour of Arnside from a 90 year old man who went to school there and whose father was the doctor for the woman I have now tried to forget but who won’t let me forget her. ..the gathering goes on and on and on.  But at some point you have to start doing something. It’s all very well researching but what about actually doing something?  Well I have begun.  I have begun forming the project we are calling Beautiful End.

Constance Research