Hello, I'm Catherine Clarke. In this week on the course, we're thinking about applied public history and creative practice. In this film, we're going to be thinking about history and working, collaborating with artists. I've been lucky enough to work with artists on several occasions, connecting history with creative practice in a number of different ways. In this film, I want to share some experiences, reflections, and insights, drawing on a couple of key examples. For me, working with an artist or bringing a creative approach to history can help us to see stories from the past, in new ways, and to share them imaginatively with new communities. First, I'm going to think about a project in Chester a few years ago working with the brilliant site-specific artist named Kulkarni. Nayan works with places and their stories. You might know his work blade for Hull City of Culture. He installed a huge wind turbine blade in the City Central Square as a way of reflecting on the city's industrial past and present, and bringing different elements of the city's history together. More often, Nayan tends to work with light installations and projections. For example, a wonderful installation in Shetland projecting light through locally made Shetland Lace called Mirrie Dancers. In Chester, I collaborated with Nayan on a permanent public art installation at the Medieval St. John's ruins at the east end of the Church of Saint John in the center of the city. The project was partly funded by Cheshire Western Chester Council local government, and had a very practical application. St. John's ruins was a dark, not terribly appealing place, not widely appreciated for its heritage value, and increasingly associated with what the Council described as anti-social behavior. Nayan and I wanted to work with medieval texts written in Chester, which had been researched and edited as part of the mapping medieval Chester project, which had led. We worked with local community groups to explore the texts and identify words and phrases which had some kind of resonance with the sight of St. John's ruins. As we explored the texts together, we were particularly drawn to words and phrases which resonated with the idea of the ruin, decay, loss, transients, and the passing of time, as well as endurance and survival memory. For example, the medieval writer Henry Bradshaw compares a great destructive fire in Chester in the Middle Ages to the destruction of the great cities of Troy and Rome. Ranulf Higden, a medieval monk at Chester's abbeys of Werburg celebrates the city's famous walls and compares them to a work of the mighty hero Hercules. But that becomes a really poignant when thought about alongside that ruins stonework at Saint John's. Medieval poems in Welsh about Chester are often insulting and derogatory. The city was a site of English colonialist control over North Wales. But as well as insults and calls for the destruction of the city, a poem by Lewis Glyn Cothi also says, [inaudible] That the churches stay in a greener land standing the test of time. The monk Lucian, who often visited St. John's Church, writes that it's a place of [inaudible] or consolation removed from the storms and tempest of life. So lots to think about in those medieval texts. We visited the Ruins Site together and reflected on how the different texts would fit into the space and illuminated. Nayan, then develop the lighting installation, drawing on our shared ideas. This involved creating intricate hand-drawn slides like theatrical gobos, tracing medieval texts and manuscripts. It couldn't be done digitally by taking digital photos because the slide images were projected and magnified at such scale, they would have been pixelated. So it was a painstaking process and working with Nayan, I learned so much about both the creative and we'll say the technical practice of an artist. The final installation brought together medieval words and phrases from texts in English, Latin, and Welsh are really powerful visual, artistic representation of this multicultural medieval city. It's a dynamic installation. The words and phrases shift, appear and disappear as you watch, and it's an amazing creative way of bringing these silent medieval voices back to life and sharing the cities medieval heritage with the public. The installation, I'm pleased to say, is now a regular feature in Chester's famous ghost tours. Working with Nayan as an artist, also helped me to ask new questions about this place, about the medieval texts and the stories they tell. It led me to further research on ruins as a way into understanding the past. So the artwork wasn't just an end result, but that collaboration with Nayan helped me frame new questions and take my work in new directions. The installation still there in Chester, if you want to go and visit, or you can view a range of images and interpretation on the project website. The second project I want to share with you was as part of a project I led called the St. Thomas Way a new heritage route from Swansea to Hereford, inspired by a real medieval pilgrimage. We worked with a professional artist and illustrator, Tom Willie, to produce the route map for the way. Tom took inspiration from the medieval mappa Mundi or map of the world at Hereford Cathedral for this artwork, and you'll hear more from him and about that in an interview in Master class With Tom later in this module. We also received some extra funding from the University of Southampton, their public engagement with research units to appoint an artist in residence on the project. This gave us the opportunity to work with the brilliant artist, Michelle Rumney. That's allowed us to explore the medieval pilgrimage and modern heritage root in new creative ways. This project also involved our research fellow, Chloe Mackenzie, who worked very closely with Michelle on the art. What was really interesting about this project is that Michelle took the artwork in a direction I completely didn't expect and foresee. I thought Michelle might also draw inspiration from the medieval Mappa Mundi and make that central to her work. Well, ideas of mapping and journeying did feature strongly, but the centerpiece of Michelle's art exhibition took inspiration from somewhere quite different and unexpected. The St. Thomas ways inspired by the pilgrimage made from Swansea to Hereford in 1290 by a Welsh outlaw, William Craig. Craig had been hanged by the local Anglo-Norman Lord, but he came back to life. What local people understood as a miracle of the putative new saint, Saint Thomas of Hereford. After he recovered, Craig went on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas in Hereford Cathedral to give thanks. Actually, he went there with the Lord and Lady who'd ordered his hanging. I always think that must have been the most awkward road trip of all time. Anyway, there's one particular detail of the story which really captured Michelle's imagination. As Craig's body lay apparently lifeless after his hanging, Lady Mary Debrios, wife of the Anglo-Norman Lord, had him measured to the saint according to the English custom. Now, this medieval devotional practice involved cutting a piece of string the length of the person's body. The string was then sent to the saint's shrine to be made into the wick of a votive candle as a devotional offering. It was a way of asking for the saints' help, in this case, to bring William Craig back to life. Michelle took inspiration from this particular moment in the historical story and turned it into the basis for her artwork and a fantastic participatory activity, which is still continuing even now. Michelle involved people all along the St. Thomas way root and beyond in this practice of measuring to the saint. It's no longer a specifically religious ritual, but a way of connecting with other people, engaging in a creative, reflective practice, and creating a very special kind of self-portrait in the length of string. These lengths, these coils of string, each one representing an individual person, became the focal point of Michelle's art exhibition. Huge hanging banners made by the hundreds of people who had measured themselves to the saint. Michelle also developed other participatory activities from this idea, like inviting people to follow threads around historic places like Hereford Cathedral to arrive at new details and see them in fresh and unexpected ways. Working with Michelle was a surprising and incredibly illuminating experience for me. Her work took a distant, strange detail from the past and brought it to life as an experience which could be shared today. It also encouraged me to think about big questions like identity, faith and belief, pilgrimage and journeying in new ways. Michelle took what I thought was a small detail in the story we were looking at and reflected it back to me as a researcher in an entirely new way. Michelle's exhibition has now toured locations along the St. Thomas way and beyond from Ewenny Priory in South Wales to the Lighthouse Art Center in Poole, Dorset. Michelle's also now working with new partners to extend and develop this brilliant practice of measuring whether that's people or places, and she's getting more and more people involved in the project. I heard that a few weeks ago she actually managed to measure the Archbishop of Canterbury. You can see lots more of Michelle's work for the map of Mundi and remaking maps of the mind on her website. Working with artists has helped me see my research in new ways and ask fresh questions about the past and its connection with the present. It's also being a fantastic route into applied public history involving wider communities with our projects and developing opportunities for co-creation and participation. With both Naya and Michelle, creative workshops were brilliant way to involve local people and their expert knowledge of places and to connect people and stories. Other interesting details I wonder, relating to your place, which could be the basis for a creative exploration. Are there creative partners or people with creative talents in your own community you could work with to explore your stories in new ways? How could you involve your communities and participatory creative activities? Working with artists to something I'm now doing more and more, it's helped me look beyond just facts to the potential for imagination, emotion, and creativity to make a difference in our research and our applied public history.
