About Bordering
Located three miles to the east of the Welsh border, Oswestry has been deeply shaped by its position as a Marcher settlement. Historical border narratives of movement and conflict are written across the town and surrounding rural landscape. Evidence can be found in place names, ruined castles, buried walls, drovers' roads and ancient earthworks such as Offa's Dyke. Yet the ways in which borders have, and continue to, influence the character of the area are not always identifiable, existing in fragments of stories, fleeting moments, daily rhythms and interactions as well as historical and archaeological evidence.
Bordering responds to the material and imaginative geographies of this border locality through the development of three site-responsive public artworks. In doing so, it builds upon a rich history of situated art practice that engages with the politics and poetics of borderlands, but which has seldom addressed the lived complexities of 'fossilised' frontier zones, where geographical borders are non-visible or exist only as relics.
Each artwork draws upon different aspects of the Oswestry area, and by doing so suggests multiple articulations of 'the border', as a physical boundary that blocks or restricts movement; as an abstract line of separation between 'insider' and 'outsider'; as a meeting point or site of exchange; and as a liminal (in-between) space or threshold state.
Through live performance, installation and audio and visual representations, Bordering explores and reinterprets the narratives and socio-spatial practices associated with this place, opening up alternative understandings of familiar locations around the town and creating space for new borderland narratives. In this way, the project extends recent cultural geographical scholarship that engages with borders as dynamic phenomena, and which is pushing for alternative modes of communicating the complex spatialities of 'everyday' border life.
Collaboration
Bordering has been devised by Holly McLaren, a doctoral student working in the field of cultural geography. Commissioned artists are Ruth Jones, Stefhan Caddick and Simon Whitehead, and TEA. Holly is working collaboratively with these artists in the development and public realisation of this programme of work.
Bordering builds upon a burgeoning field of collaborative practice between academic geographers and fine art practitioners, including Visualising Geography, Chat Moss and Bio/Geo/Graphy. These projects have evolved through a variety of shared interests and practices, including the nature of urban experience, identity politics and questions of belonging, human relations with other species, and landscape representation. They are also indicative of a desire to generate new narratives for creative research practices. Bordering is similarly concerned with expanding creative research methods through a trans-disciplinary approach.
Beyond the creation of three new artworks, Bordering also informs wider doctoral research concerning geographical research methods and artistic practices. That is to say, it functions not only as a means through which to realise and exhibit a programme of work, but also as a researchable process in itself, a process that will offer considerable insight into:
- curatorial practice
- the spatialities of art production and consumption
- the 'modus operandi' of cross-disciplinary collaboration
- art as embodied, socio-spatial practice.
The provisional title of this wider research is Bordering Art: Geography, Collaboration and Creative Practices.
