Saturday 5th May

12.30pm and/or 2pm, Belvedere – details below

Tideline was a Heritage Lottery project in Belvedere, delivered by the London Borough of Bexley. I worked with local people and Trinity school to uncover memories and stories about the area. These were used as inspiration for a new series of poems, one of which has been installed as series of signs, running from Belvedere Station to the river wall. We have also produced a beautiful book about the whole project, featuring oral history accounts from local people and photographic portraits by Eva Sajovic. There’s more about the project at www.belvederestories.co.uk

The celebration has two parts – you are very welcome to join us for one or the other, or both!

12:30pm     Tideline Wayfarer Walk
Meet at the Norman Road entrance to Belvedere Station
Follow the Tideline signs with me to the river wall via the marshes. We will then walk to Belvedere Community Centre, making the entire route approximately 2.5 miles.

2 – 3.30pm    Tideline Celebration, Book Launch and Exhibition
Belvedere Community Centre, Mitchell Close, Belvedere, DA17 6AA
Join us to celebrate with tea and cake. Find out more about the project as a whole and see the project publication. Everyone who has contributed to Tideline will be able to collect a copy of this on the day.

We are able to assist with transport to and from the celebrations, so please get in touch if this would be helpful or if you have any other access requirements or questions.

Please RSVP to camilla.brueton@bexley.gov.uk  

The photoWANDSWORTH 2012 prize-giving event takes place from 5.30 to 7.30pm on Monday 23 April at Wandsworth Town Library, 11 Garratt Lane, London SW18 4AQ

Join us over a glass of wine to hear me read from my new short story, written in response to twelve selected entries to the competition. Prizes will be awarded for winning photographs in three categories: first, second and young person award.

The selected images with story excerpts will be displayed as a show-reel on library computers and across the road at Southside Shopping Centre, as projections. The projections will remain at Southside until the end of the Wandsworth Arts Festival, May 27. The full story will be available to download from www.wandsworth.gov.uk/photocomp with printouts for all those attending the event.

Please RSVP: jkenyon@wandsworth.gov.uk

Below is a short reflection on creating the story:

First of all I had to come up with a series of prompts for the competition. The aim was to inspire entrants to create images that would in turn inspire me to write a new short story. I chose 4 themes that I hoped would help me create a coherent plot and allow entrants a fairly free reign:
1. Arrival of a Stranger
2. A secret is revealed
3. Demanding an answer
4. Looking for a way out

I was struck, looking through the 12 selected images, how many of them were of people with their faces turned away from the camera, or partially obscured. Then there was someone running in the fog, frost on a playground, the blurred edges of a scene from Wandsworth Common, a hand reaching into a bag, lost objects by the river – all of which gave me an overriding feeling of loss and mystery, of things being just out of reach and not quite knowable. So I started to plan a story that would explore these emotions in its plot, and in the atmosphere of the story itself. Having made this decision, I then used the individual photographs in different ways – to suggest emotion, character, plot, and location. So the man sitting alone on a bench I imagined as the story’s narrator, waiting for a woman who never turned up. The hat and shoe by the side of the Thames became the narrator’s lost children. The runner in the fog became a dream, symbolic of loss. The car driving over Chelsea bridge at night gave me my final scene. I also tried to embed the very idea of photography and the theme of seeing or not seeing within the story, borrowing imagery and language from photography to further explore the themes of the story.

I would like to thank Wandsworth Council for the opportunity to be involved with PHOTOwandsworth 2012, and the competition entrants for giving me such rich material to work with.

We’re in the process of putting together a book about the whole project – more later!

Find out more at www.belevederestories.co.uk

The novel brings together my interest in place, belonging, home and family. In some ways it’s a love letter to London, a city I’ve lived in since 2004 and have not always had an easy relationship with.

Ten Things I’ve Learnt About Love will be published in February 2013.

Thursday 16th February

Please join myself and artist, Eva Sajovic to celebrate the end of Collecting Home, an artist residency at the Cuming Museum exploring objects, home and local stories, and the close of Home From Home, an exhibition of portraits and stories from Elephant and Castle.

5.00- 6.30pm
– Move between three conversation points throughout the museum space, and share your ideas about the residency themes: what object in your life would you most hate to lose? What is the value of artist projects in Elephant and Castle? What are the ethics and dilemmas of participatory arts projects? What does it mean to represent individuals and communities through photos, stories and objects?
– Place your ‘bid’ to take home one of the Home from Home exhibition pictures for free (photos will be allocated and be available to collect after 18th February).
– Explore the work created by Eva, Sarah, local residents, school children, and artists throughout the project.
6.30pm – A brief presentation by Eva and Sarah, sharing highlights from the project.
7.00pm – Close

This event will be of interest to writers and creatives working in the field of community arts and regeneration projects, and practising writers looking for further outlets for their work.

The event is free to all Canterbury Christ Church University staff and students. This event is open to the public, but unfortunately if you are not a member of Christ Church there is a £10 charge.

Venue: Folkestone, UCF
Time: 10:30 – 3.30

Contact: Jane Seaman
Telephone: 01303 760600
Url: www.ucf.ac.uk

I am really excited to be working with artist and photographer Eva Sajovic on Collecting Home, an extension of the work we did together on Home From Home, which culminated in a book published last year, and which is being exhibited at the Cuming Museum 22nd Nov – 18 Feb.

Collecting Home continues our exploration of stories and people local to Elephant and Castle: an ongoing conversation about the objects people would choose to represent themselves, their lives or the history of their area.

Visit the project blog to find out more, and if you’re interested in getting involved, please drop us an email: collectinghome@yahoo.co.uk

My short story, You Would Leave All This, will feature in a forthcoming issue of the New Manchester Review, a really nice online publication.

The piece has two main ‘layers’: text, written by Lavinia Greenlaw, and performed by 12 actors (who represent a mix of ages, accents and genders), and a soundscape designed by Tim Barker and Harry Escott. The headphones block out surrounding noise, so only the loudest of announcements invade the piece, and there are times that feel almost magical when the audience watches the bustle of the station with no accompanying noise – an experience which heightens our attention to the visual, and our response when sound resumes.

Greenlaw is explicitly exploring the ephemerality, proximity and fragmentary nature of our experiences in train stations. The accompanying leaflet states that Audio Obscura “is situated in tension with our compulsion to construct narratives”, and it is this aspect of the work that is both intriguing, and potentially frustrating. The audience is placed in the role of detective, and active participant. The characters give us snippets of thoughts and facts, half-glimpsed insights into stories, which insist on us filling in the blanks, or perhaps simply reveal our desire to find meaning and create narrative from what we come across.

A woman discovers a traumatic secret about her husband of thirty years. We know it is connected to a computer, we are given the image ‘like meat on skewers’, we have her reaction ‘you fucking bastard,’ and hear her fear that he, and perhaps she will go to prison. From this we are left to find our own response.

Other stories are even more fragmentary: a woman refers to a procedure that ‘can be messy’ and questions if she should have shared the information with ‘him’; a man says ‘I shouldn’t have told her about my brother’ – but we are given no other clues. The piece is all about what is not said, and how we find meaning (or don’t find meaning) in the spaces in between. Some may find that frustrating, but that frustration, that raising of questions and then refusing to fully answer them, is in fact the core of the piece and speaks to its site-specificity: a train station filled with people arriving, and departing, a place that offers us only momentary glimpses of people’s lives.

Perhaps a better way to assess the effect of Audio Obscura is to think instead about atmosphere and theme, rather than narrative arc or drive (Greenlaw does create a male character, who punctuates the piece with rising urgency, looking for his train platform, which he eventually finds, and then boards his train. Despite giving the piece some narrative drive, I actually found this the least satisfying strand, perhaps because it was the least mysterious). Through carefully chosen language (the piece throughout has a strong poetic quality and rhythm), and a soundscape that both supports the tension and melancholy of the words, and creates another rhythm – of silence, not quite heard conversations, train announcements, traffic noise – Audio Obscura creates an overwhelming mood, encompassing secrets, leaving, fear, regret, and what cannot be said. On a personal level I was left with more questions than answers, and a strong sense of disquiet.

Greenlaw switches between third, second and first person narrative voices, utilising the different effects of each – the ‘objectiveness’ and intrigue of ‘he is not saying what he wants to say’; the uncomfortableness of being addressed as ‘you’; and the voyeuristic feeling of having immediate, fleeting access into a stranger’s head in the first person sections.  I was less convinced by the lists of nouns, although they did lead to the final moment of the piece: ‘step, step, step, step’, which effectively drew me back into the space I was inhabiting and watching.

Audio Obscura is a piece that exists at the intersection between the text/sound, the audience and the space. St Pancras station was a fitting selection of location, with its stunning architecture, a layout which allows the audience to wander without feeling hassled, and to stop and take in a view, and its own atmosphere of peace and reflection. I couldn’t help thinking that the piece would have been significantly more problematic if located in King’s Cross Station during the building work for instance. The piece gives significance to the everyday, creating a performance (or perhaps just revealing it) from the daily bustle of a station. The isolation of the headphones, the almost complete blocking out of external sounds, and the shifting narrative voices result in a shifting relationship between the audience, their environment and the people around them, and lead us to question our own visibility/invisibility in the space.

A high quality, free experience that enhances the audience’s experience of a fantastic piece of London architecture and immerses them in an absorbing atmosphere, Audio Obscura challenges and perhaps exposes our desire for narrative and meaning. For me it didn’t go too far, or disintegrate into mere fragments without any meaning or connection, which is a risk with a piece like this. It did frustrate me, but I see this as a deliberately created effect which only enhances the piece.

clock image: zawtowers | station image: darapo