A Day In A Life.

The idea for this new work came out of my progress through the Body of Work Module.  It is still a work in progress and as such, is, as yet, unresolved.  When I was walking the Viking Way from Lincoln through the Witham Valley and along footpaths through the Lincolnshire Limewoods, which resulted in the publication of my major project Shul, I became entranced by the idea that footpaths and the landscape itself hold memories of those that have gone before. I then began to wonder how to represent this idea photographically. I came up with the idea that if I could follow a journey that someone had written about, I could photograph it as it is now and pair that with written description from the past. I was aware that Robert Louis Stevenson was a big walker and had written about his long distance walks in France in his book Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes. I thought that this would make an ideal project as the route is now a French long distance foot path, The Stevenson Trail. With time constraints this was a project for the future, though. Whilst reading Stevenson’s book, however, I remembered that I had inherited a piece of my mother’s original handwritten script from the 1960s describing a day out with her father in 1930 when she was eight. My grandfather was a journeyman baker, baking the bread in the early hours of the morning and then delivering around the local villages on his horse-drawn bread cart. My mother’s writing describes a day accompanying him on this round. This was a perfect project as I was able to follow in their tracks photographing landscapes and buildings that are described in the writing as they are today. I would be able to combine my contemporary photographs with my mother’s writing, archive photographs and old maps of the area. So this has become a project, not just exploring the fact that the landscape holds memories of those that have gone before, but also family memory, collective memory and the use of archives. I think that, like all memory, my mother’s writing is a memory construct and I have made those memories my own by recreating the journey and what I have selected from my mother’s script. The beauty of this project as well is that, through my networking and contact with Arts Meridian, I have become involved in a project entitled A Day in the Life, inspired by the Beatles song. My project fits this brief perfectly and hopefully, when complete, the work will be exhibited along with work from the rest of the group at Grimsby Minster.

The first task, then, was to gather together archive images, old maps and my mother’s writing and then retrace and photograph the journey.  Much of what was there in 1930 is no longer there.  The ‘Red Lion’ pub has been demolished and is now the site of a sheltered housing complex.  Most of the other pubs are private houses but I enjoyed researching and talking to local people and discovering their current locations. The old footbridge called The Pier mentioned in the writing has long gone but the foundations remain. And Pincher Francis’s Shop is now a private house.  I was fortunate in that I was able to make my journey at the same time of year as my mother: early summer.

This is a work in progress and I am still experimenting with the combination of my own images taken recently, my mother's text, old maps from the time, my own family archive photographs and others I have found on the internet.  I am also experimenting with how my the text might be used.  In the first of the two examples  below, the text is part of the image.  In the second I have displayed it as it might be if I published the work in book format.

If the first image is clicked it can be viewed large and then will run as a slide show.  I have numbered the images for identification purposes only.

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