Bakestonedale Moor: wind, weather and a mobile artmaking kit’
(exposition and final exhibition of PhD project)

The final exposition took place in CASC, the University of Chester’s Contemporary Art Space Chester, in the Grosvenor Shopping Centre for a duration of three weeks, starting from 11th April 2025. The exposition aimed to reveal methodology and document the project’s development for the examiners of this research project and for wider academic audiences. It also aimed to invite the general public to engage with the artefacts, videos and accompanying materials as an example of a unique connection between artistic engagement and the outdoor world.

All artefacts, photographs, drawings and videos displayed in the exposition had been exhibited before in smaller display groups as part of the project’s ongoing development. In order to provide project documentation that correlated with the themes investigated and photographically documented in this thesis, I chose not to re-arrange the items for display in new spatial constellations though I was aware that this would have opened new avenues of meaning-making.

Due to the long rectangular shape of the gallery space I set up three large tables along the longitudinal axis of the room, a spatial arrangement that reflected audiences’ movements when entering the space from the shopping centre’s corridor. As visitors walked from table to table, the drawings, photographs and books displayed on the tables’ surfaces drew their attention, functioned as stations for them to pause and stand at, but also to direct their visual attention to wall hung drawings and photographs and the videos and three-dimensional displays. 

At the far end of the room, seating blocks provided the opportunity to watch a video that showed two instances of making a rock cover with paper in different wind conditions.

I also provided short texts, printed as labels and attached to the walls in the vicinity of the exhibits. These labels offered short narratives regarding my personal experience of making the artefacts and engaging with the outdoor world. They aimed to emphasise the subjective and embodied dimension of my artmaking. I believe that this person centred and subjective way of providing written information for audiences supported the generation of their own personal trajectories in connection to materials, the outdoor world and human bodies.