PROJECT PROPOSAL

Hartlepool is a coastal town in North East England and has been my home all of my life. Like many de-industrialised Northern towns- ‘England’s former manufacturing heartlands’ (Hartlepool Labour candidate Peter Mandelson, 1992)- the landscape reflects a forgotten edge-land, in limbo between the devolved and evolved, nature and man-made: presenting scenic juxtapositions and socio-economic disparity. As a town stripped of its former shipbuilding and steel-making identity, remnants of urban decay lacerate the landscape as scars of areas once thriving now abandoned and rife with endemic poverty and unemployment. Neglect of government funding, and vilified in national media, Hartlepool grapples with its identity existing in stasis, still to recover from its post-war demise. I like many young people in the area, am forced to move out in the hope of finding better opportunities.

Outgrowing a childhood home, though sad but common in modern British society, does not diminish its sentimental power and I know that it will always be more than a place to me and one which I will always return to: not for its biological but its biographical meaning. This ebbing gesture of back and forth I find can be affixed to one particular site for me: the sea. Integral within my family is this binding love of the seaside and I find wherever I am, I long to be back on the beach.

The title of my project takes inspiration from Simon Armitage’s poem ‘Mist’ from the Stanza Stones which I think beautifully encapsulates a translucent image of water, impalpable yet encompassing. The poem invites introspection to one’s own position within an obscure environment ending ‘You are lost/ adrift in hung water/ and blurred air/ but you are here’. I thought this a fitting line when trying to assign identity to a ghost town such as Hartlepool, whilst also placing myself inside of the landscape and looking to the sea for inspiration. All of these features (the town, the sea and me) instantiate feelings of being lost and trying to find itself. I think then, it is appropriate to navigate these feelings in poetic and visual forms similar to Alice Oswald’s Dart and Hamish Fulton’s Bird Song.

My Aims are to:

Explore the various landscapes of Hartlepool which are characterful and offer an interesting disjuncture.
Look at places which I routinely go through and which make up my own history. Attach the meaning and memory I have in a cognitive mapping.
Artistically respond to these sites in different ways to culminate a visual sensate of location and memory. Begin and return to the sea as a source of inspiration and aesthetic pleasure.
Arrive at a conclusion on how I identify Hartlepool and my relationship with the town as natural and continuous.This journey is analogous to the sea which I consider to be one of the town’s best features and which I have loved growing up by.