Soft Drive was the 2019-20 Artspace project. and a major progression from our work in 2018. this is the blog introduction...written pre Covid...

4 artists will explore the roots and mediators of communal memory and identity in Ulverston and South Cumbria.
From our base at the Sir John Barrow cottage  in Ulverston, our artists will curate
introductory micro-exhibitions drawing on the domestic and civic artefacts and ephemera stored there. These will act as the locus for public engagement with appearance and function, provenance, materiality and curatorship. In response, our artists will produce sculpture and assemblage, audio, text and visual work for exhibition and publication.

Through walks, conversation, workshops, schools projects and associative analysis of archive material we will explore  the shifting significance of key sites and routes in the  life of the community.
Our artists Alex Blackmore, Ellie Chaney and John Hall will be joined by Dr Jamie McPhie. Jamie lectures in Cultural Landscapes and Aesthetics in the Outdoors at the University of Cumbria where his work involves the dissemination of research through performance. He will share his interest in ontology and the vital materiality of land and artefacts, lead research events and walks, and collaborate on work for broadcast and performance.
   Later, Soft Drive will involve young people in collaborative work with Oral Tradition Storyteller Dominic Kelly. Our thanks to our supporters,to our friends at Green Lane Archaeology  to Jan Hancock from Ulverston Civic Society, and to the people we will meet on the way..

 

The project began as planned, and work began to emerge from an examination  of objects found in the Civic Society collection, but as Covid began to bite it was clear that the project would respond to - and be shaped by - its material and psychological presence,  the situations it created and  its impact on  our negotiations of  public space and on the inner space it would occupy in our recollection of the period.

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The link below takes you to the project blog and describes our artists progress, workshops, public events within the project and includes links to audio and video.