Project 1: Ruth Jones
Building on recent work that explores liminal or threshold states, I am developing a public event for Bordering Art that explores the relationship between humans, horses and the borderlands. The site for the project will be the old Racecourse just outside Oswestry.
The town of Oswestry has a strong historical relationship with horses through agriculture, racing and through its location on the London to Holyhead mail coach route. I approached Jane Lloyd Francis from Equilibre Horse Theatre to see whether she would be interested in collaborating with me on the project and ideas have been developing since then.
Project 2: Simon Whitehead and Stefhan Caddick
This project will explore ways in which borders are physically manifest. Using sculpture, performance or sound, the artists will create a physical border or a 'mock-up' of it, on or near the site of the 'invisible' Welsh / English border.
The artists will establish a situation in which the viewer is physically confronted by a structure or experience that transforms the benign nature of the western experience of the border into something much more challenging. This structure may take a physical, sonic or digital form.
Project 3: TEA
We are visitors to Oswestry but we are not tourists, this is not a holiday but an investigation into Oswestry as a specific place.
We were invited to visit this town on account of what we do as a group of artists, how we conduct an investigation into a particular place and how we represent our thoughts on what we discover. The containing and guiding concept is that of Borders, lines of demarcation between one thing and another, edges, divisions, ancient and modern, for convenience, allocation of resources, physical, emotional and intellectual territory, attempts to control, to order and define.