Processional State

For a week in November 2024, the project space in Grow Studios Plymouth was taken over by Dr Louise Bell, Dr Laura Rosser, and Dr Laura Hopes, three early career researchers and artists. We playfully engaged with the pseudo-archaeological strategies of identification, excavation, and interpretation and its speculative potential.

This week residency and show presented artistic research made at, and of, Maker Heights in Cornwall and ideas of care, slowness, knowing, not and un-knowing, empathy, relation, and receptivity.

“Since March 2024, we had recognised and foregrounded the commonalities of our intersecting creative practices and research interests. This had been situated within an ongoing collaborative project concerned with ideas of care, slowness, knowing, not and un-knowing, empathy, relation, and receptivity. Our shared methodology emphasised sensitivity, participation, and responsiveness, allowing for a porous exchange of ideas and a rejection of rigid academic expectations. Our practice mirrored archaeological behaviours, focusing on artefacts and documentation as we engaged in this evolving experiment.”

Additionally, we co-presented ‘Processional State’, a performance-lecture for activateCHAT (Contemporary & Archaeology in Theory) conference. Through multiple forms of telling - image, text, live and pre-recorded - we articulated our unfolding shared experiment in slow research and our evolving understandings of what we considered to be the ‘processional state’ of Maker Heights.

The practice made within this collaborative project was characterised by exploratory observation, invested attention and taxonomic systeming. Ordering principles and methods are often used to elicit understanding and to present data with clarity. 

This practice illustrates a methodological borrowing however, a simplification of images to the point of abstraction with a lack of contextual labelling creates an ambiguous visual communication. While I may appropriate ways of working from disciplines that attempt to unpick, elucidate, or ‘resolve’ a site, as an artist I am interested in demonstrating how the inherent unruliness of a site will always subvert such ordering by what Doreen Massey describes as the ever-evolving “constellation of trajectories.”