Projections into LLwyn Celyn

Llwyn Celyn is a Grade 1 listed building, regarded by Cadw as one of the finest medieval hall houses in Wales.

The Landmark Trust with PEAK created an artist in residency project around its restoration. As well as the residency artists, some others, including me, have been given access to this special place.

image courtesy Landmark Trust

Like human beings, dwellings throw out a kind of penumbra of physical and psychological noise around themselves. A farmhouse such as Llwyn Celyn, spreads its influence into the fields around it - in this case a process that has been going on for centuries. 

It's not merely a case of objects which have been used and abandoned: it is the landscape itself which is changed - refuse heaps, footpaths, different forms of enclosure and so on.

Perhaps when a place is in a state of flux - being gutted ready for restoration, this shadowing effect becomes temporarily stronger and more chaotic.

I'm interested in the detritus or frass around the periphery - elements and processes which may ordinarily escape notice - and bringing these somehow back to their human and domestic origins.

I set about documenting this by photographing the surroundings
then projected those images into particular spaces inside the house, and photographed the result.  

By this means, what has passed from the inside to the outside finds itself returning to a kind of origin, and the space of origin becomes mingled with its external effects.

trees pollarded on the boundaries

snagged detritus on the perimeters

 Discarded fireplace, onto re-discovered bread oven 

A stump suspended, batlike

or like a bottle washer

 Burnt glass from a bonfire, fused with foliage

 a purse

When Llwyn Celyn is beautifully restored, I'd be interested in projecting some of these dusty, decrepit mementos back into the new interior as another way of thinking aout how systems collide and intermingle - bringing them into new relationship and offering a new perspective on them, their purpose and their value.

I'll use some of these ideas in a workshop - Seeing through Landscape - at Nottingham Lakeside Arts on 13th March.