As my fascination with weaving develops I realise that, at least for now, landscape draws me like no other subject. This might be represented in a very naturalistic way, or end up as something quite abstract.
I think I was always a psychogeographer, even before I knew what it meant. My background as an historian always dovetailed with my own sense of place. I can't go for a stroll without noticing what is around me - plants I can't name, streets I've never walked down before, details in buildings. If psychogeography is about how our sense of self and sense of place is affected by an environment or landscape, then this covers such a multitude. Places we know, places we don't know, huge expanses, handkerchief sized areas.
But my sense of place has always been swayed by the fact that nowhere is 'familiar' in the sense that nowhere is 'home'. I know that the more I discover about a place the more my connection deepens. I didn't know Sheffield at all until I moved there in 1992. But my PhD in the history department at the University of Sheffield was based on local history and I came to feel a really deep connection to the city.
I feel that the same thing is happening with Lancashire - a county I didn't know at all until 2025. So I have the sense that a connection doesn't have to be wordless and visceral - it can be developed. My work on Lancashire has, at the moment, two main strands both of which twine together.
The first is the broadest brush of place and landscape. The wild scarred landscape, the brick walls ending in nothing, the terraces and cottages clinging to hillsides, the 'isolated' farmhouses not five miles from Manchester, chimneys and wind turbines and retail parks and huge Victorian town halls and cemeteries and play grounds. On and on. Contradiction and paradox. I want to capture all this in my weaving and I sketch and daydream and sample.
The second strand of my interest in east Lancashire is much more obviously personal. It comes from two old suitcases of photographs and papers that were left to me last autumn. They came from a relative on my mothers side of the family. I have been writing and making art based on what I've found, where I've been and how it makes me feel. I've tried to put aside my hat as a 'professional' historian and focus on sense, impression and feeling. In the end the historian in me, the one who 'knows' and the daughter, granddaughter etc, the one who feels have to dovetail. The power lies in the symbiosis of knowing and feeling. And wondering how to represent that in my art.