​towards a three-dimensional mapping of our separate journeys, their intersections and divergences...​

who we are

Di Clay: Artist http://www.diclay.co.uk/index.php

Much of my work since 2004 has been in live performance art. At the time of meeting with Kate, I was running an artist-led non-profit business with Jane Dudman, Matrix Art Projects (MAP) and, with Arts Council England funding, organising International Live Art Exchanges.

One of the themes I have explored has been based on the concept of personal relationship to outdoor places that are in some way meaningful to me. In ‘All the wool my mother never knitted’ I journeyed back to where I had lived through my life, knitting in each location. I have exhibited the resulting 25 metres long knitting in various places. The first, in Carlisle, included a drawn timeline of my life since birth to the present. Conversations with Kate had already revealed our shared interest in geographical locations through our lives, and so we were inspired to compare our timelines with locations and dates – the cross-over points where we could/might have seen each other unawares – Mapping Memory began and continues into the present.



Kate Swindlehurst: Writer 

My collaboration with Di dates from a chance meeting in Cumbria almost 20 years ago and is rooted in a shared sense of place. I have written novels set in Argentina and eastern Europe and, closer to home, a short story collection inspired by a residency at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. In 2020 my memoir The Tango Effect: Parkinson’s & the Healing Power of Dance was published by Unbound. MAPPING MEMORY grew from our fascination with the correspondences in our life paths and memories. The project has survived the challenges of ill health and geographical distance and continues into uncharted territory.

the project

 
Our first ‘real’ meeting was an accidental encounter on the pavement in Carlisle’s marketplace in 2005. We began to meet regularly in one of Carlisle’s cafes, Bar Solo opposite the station a favourite. During the first installation of ‘All the wool my mother never knitted ’ we compared our timelines and found numerous correspondences in our lives, those coincidences of time and place which seem so remarkable and delightful, and which give rise to the idea that our individual journeys through life are less separate than we suppose. We discovered that we might actually have brushed shoulders on a street somewhere years before we ‘met’ in person. 

In our desire to share our mutual delight in this ‘intersectionography’[1] our Mapping Memory project began as an attempt to design and create a concrete model of our overlapping histories, such that our distinct paths could be seen simultaneously. Comparing our timelines highlighted the correspondences and divergences. Our different disciplines – Di as a visual artist, Kate as a writer – seemed to create an opportunity for fruitful exploration. We looked to other map-makers for inspiration and support[2], considering in particular mapping as an act of imagination and the shaping of memory as construction and reconstruction. We read and discussed the work of other artists; in particular, the ‘walking diaries’ of Rebecca Solnit, Robert MacFarlane, Karl Ove Knausgård and Iain Sinclair and the work of Richard Long. Making the leap from abstract to concrete and realising our ideas including in a three-dimensional form has remained a work-in-progress! After many years of experiments with tracing paper and cardboard cut-outs, we have found some temporary solutions and have amassed also a good deal of text, voice recordings and some film, as well as photos and objects. Our work has been shown as part of a larger exhibition and we were working towards a solo show when the pandemic put our plans on hold so a virtual exhibition seemed the obvious solution.  If you enjoy the exhibition and would like to see more, the archive that follows contains all the material we have gathered so far.

Almost 20 years on, our paths have diverged geographically, separating us by 200 land miles and over 350 miles of sea. Still our project and our friendship have survived a dozen or more house moves as well as job changes and the loss of family members. Significant also have been changes in our personal circumstances and especially our health, leaving us both feeling more vulnerable.. As we approach ‘later life’ - is that the most appropriate term?! - our ability to live independently is challenged and compromised. At the same time there is a pressing sense of ‘the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone’[3]. It’s difficult to know how to face the future with confidence or courage, or even with equanimity. So our discovery of John Burnside’s poem ‘Winter Landscape with Skaters…’[4] has been especially precious: the sense that, like the skaters on the ice in Pieter Brueghel’s 1565 painting, Winter Landscaspe with Skaters and Bird Trap, we may manage a brief (and unsatisfactorily ‘slithering’) escape from our routine agonies but we are ultimately as vulnerable as the birds are to the dangers of their trap, and as oblivious. For Burnside what ‘matters’, though, is the notion of ‘grace’, of an ‘old belonging’: that for all our ultimate aloneness, there is someone keeping pace with us, walking alongside, ‘other to’ our ‘other’. In the darkest days, the companionship that we have discovered, the intersection of our consciousnesses and experiences, creates a kind of steadiness, some heart with which to look ahead.

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[1]  Our thanks to Nick Clay for the term
[2]  See Mapping It Out, ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist
[3]   Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
[4]    John Burnside: ‘Pieter Brueghel: Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap, 1565’