in collaboration with Jeffrey Knopf and Mark Devereux
Rogue Project Space, Manchester, January 2025
Inspired by the ‘La Vojo Returne’ project started in the first Covid lockdown (2020) to identify the location of a WWI German photographic negative, Nothing remained unchanged but the clouds tells the story of community, rebuilding and memory in the small French town of Grandpré in the rural Ardennes.
Using the photographic negative and subsequent collecting of German postcards written home from Grandpré, I established an online repository of memory and artefact, aiming to reflect the importance of the town’s local and everyday history. Growing my connections and relationships with people now living in Grandpré, he has gone on to undertake a series of residencies supported by the municipal council. I created pop-up studios, scripted an alternative artist walk of the town with academics from the UK and Germany, and resident’s have shared their special places, familial memories, postcard collections and ephemera.
During 2023 I was granted Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice funding to further explore both professional and creative partnerships with a focus on this project. I has been working with artist Jeffrey Knopf and curator Mark Devereux to examine the liminal spaces of those postcards, the cross fertilisation of art, heritage and artefact, and consider how these inform an understanding of Grandpré’s past, present and future.
This pilot exhibition represented the first presentation of this brand-new body of work we are aiming to show in future resolved exhibitions across the UK.
My thanks to David Gledhill and Rogue Studios for the opportunity to have the project space for an experimental curation of the ‘La Vojo Returne’ works created to date, it enabled us get it out of the boxes from the studio, to see what might work, and how things could be combined and knitted together to tell a story, exploring the minutiae of my Grandpré postcard collection and engagement, both community and personal.
For further enquiries about this project please email me through the site.
