I have started writing my arts council funding application and as part of the pre-application research I have been sending out emails to various people to ask permissions, and to present my ideas. 

I have said before in this blog that it will be about revisiting my childhood relationship with the woods opposite my home. My original intention was just for that and I was fairly happy with what I had written as a brief introduction to the project on the application form. There would be lots of trampling about and drawing.

But it turns out after a couple of emails and conversations that I’m missing the main point. I have mentioned it briefly further down the form but I think it needs a more direct approach.

There always was a class division in the village, a them and us. Between the landowners, the people who owned everything else, and the people who did the work. My family were definitely on the working side. I felt other divisions too as a child: I did not go to the village school, so my friends were not from the village I lived in. And yet my school – the catholic school – was about three miles away. Too far for my school friends to pop round at the weekend and after school. There were other divisions I became more conscious of later: my parents’ foreign-ness. The food we ate was different often to the food my friends ate. Anyway, as a child I don’t think I felt these things, but I did occasionally feel that I didn’t have many friends, and much of my time was spent on my own. Of course it’s difficult to understand now whether my happiness in my own company, content with solitude is the result of that, or that it was in my nature anyway. I was always happy with a book, a drawing pad, pencils and pens.

In talking to the people in the village, it has become obvious that some of those divisions have deepened. The village doesn’t have a pub, or a shop to draw people together and bring money in. It has a school of about 100 children, and a private day nursery, but the population of these two establishments don’t cross over much. When I called the estate to ask if I could talk to someone about the woods where I wanted to work, the person most useful was sorting out something to do with a shooting party. The shooting and hunting that happened in my youth, is still happening up at the Big House, but has nothing to do with the village. The food that is farmed on their land doesn’t feed the village, because it feeds a very smart restaurant. In fact, the village is now sparsely populated, many of the houses being second homes, or Airbnb properties. 

I know this is happening all over the country. 

Another fact is that the spreading of the nearby town is stopped along a hard line along the edge of the land owned by the same estate owners. The village exists in a bubble.

I suspect this art project I am embarking on will be more about the social geography and economics than my original intention. 

Yes, I will still be working, playing and making in those woods… but I will have an ear out for the activity around me. I want to establish a sense of this place, and also gather up how other people feel about it. And I have started making maps. I’m making a map of the things that I knew about the village and the people in it more than 50 years ago. I will then make another map while I am working, about the place as it is now. Then we will see where that gets us.

I will do this project anyway, but funding makes it possible for me to work more in the community that is there, and to do so on a regular basis and will pay for the fuel needed for the 60 mile round trip. I am also hoping to involve other artists, this will only happen if I can pay them for the time, and expenses.