Place Space & Identity Commission 29th October - 12th November 2007

In 2006 I was commissioned by Longhouse to carry out a year of Action Research with a view to creating a collection of evidence to document real peoples’ experiences of living within a Stoke-on-Trent clearance area and to explore my role as an Artist within this context.

Through the research I was led to the Wellington Street area of Hanley, the city centre of Stoke-on-Trent. This terraced housing area, like most clearance sites, is one that has changed little in physical appearance over the years and yet in term of its culture and community dynamics it would probably be unrecognisable to those that knew it in its early years.

When I began my research residents had just received the news that that the area was to be declared a clearance zone, by the end of the research in 2007 many homes had been abandoned and the clearance had begun. At the same time I was offered a commission as part of ‘Place Space & Identity’. A unique collaboration led by Arts Council England West Midlands, co-funded by Renew North Staffordshire and delivered in partnership with B arts, AirSpace and others. It is a new programme of temporary arts projects providing opportunities for artists and the general public to respond to the social, economic and environmental changes taking place in North Staffordshire.

I saw this as an opportunity to return the visual work that was created in response to the Longhouse action research, to the homes and community that inspired it and so created fifteen stitched and mixed-media panels which were exhibited on exterior walls of homes awaiting demolition, creating a trail that could be followed using a printed map showing the locations of the art work.

I wanted to use the work to create a reason to come and see the area for the last time, to engage with it, to consider its history, its future and to challenge peoples’ previous perceptions of it.

The most rewarding moment of this commission, for me, was when I took a group of young people around the trail and finished the walk with a look at a semi-demolished terrace, the scene that inspired the very core of my current practice and, just like me at that time, they had never seen anything like it before. One young girl in particular was noticeably moved and expressed her shock,

“..that was actually the inside of someone’s house…right there? No! ”

This indicated to me that not only was the physical journey around the site complete but also the intergenerational exchange of historical understanding and the journey that I had taken to express this path of heritage that weaves itself in and out of the labyrinth of streets and back alleys while they live out their final days.