TEA in Oswestry
Two videos, Qube
Installation, Powis Hall Indoor Market
Distributed postcards and bags
About the work
This project explores Oswestry as it is encountered by 'the visitor'.
Taking as their starting point how Oswestry is portrayed as a tourist destination, the artists have worked at two sites that embody important aspects of the town's marketed identity - the Castle Mound and the Market.
TEA have used performance, photography, video and model-making to explore the relationship between the marketed image and the reality that visitors encounter. Two videos document their evolving, temporary engagements with these localities. The first video, a panorama shot on the high vantage point of the Castle Mound, presents a performance based on partial knowledge of its history and use. Descending from this overview into the internal spaces of the adjacent Market, the second video documents a more interactive engagement. In brief encounters with stallholders, the artists used a "model" to explain their activities on the mound and to explore the market as a place of exchange.
Records of these encounters have been used to reconstruct the market as a series of "stage sets" with the stallholders and the artists as "performers". This representation is displayed on a stall temporarily occupied by TEA.
In the spirit of promotion and tourism TEA have also produced carrier bags and postcards, which the viewer is invited to take. Featuring different promotional images of the town as well as a representation of the artists' engagements, TEA intervene in, and reflect upon, the multiple ways that place is marketed to different audiences.
