Studios on the High Street: Janie M McDonald

Installation In Keeping will be placed in the shop window and further developed in situ, inviting the public in to view sketchbooks and to discuss ideas and the work in progress in the manner of an open studio.

This installation is composed of thin, lightweight, fabric vessels, hung from the ceiling (or from suspended wires) which have a composite image of ‘things’ projected onto them.

Visitors are encouraged to bring along a photograph or doodle of a place in the town which is important to them, that they are emotionally attached to. I will print off the photograph, and record the story of their attachment to this ‘thing’ or ‘place’ and use these participatory elements to develop a new piece of work which would be seen evolving in the studio space and which could be displayed in Launceston at the end of the residency.

Being Welsh, I can empathise with the strong sense of protective pride Cornish people feel about their heritage. I can harness these feelings of pride in local distinctiveness, facilitate a response to Launceston as a place, and work alongside local people to facilitate a collaborative artwork that everyone can be proud of.

I am working on my participatory artwork about Launceston in the studio on Mon, Tues, Weds, Fri and Saturdays throughout July. It will be on display in the window for the final few days. I will also continue doing workshops for the three days of the Causley Festival.

About the Artist

I have been a practicing artist for over thirty years. My Practice is multi-disciplinary, I make and exhibit work and I make socially engaged art with people.

I am interested in the spaces that are hidden between common place things, and in ideas of things falling apart and being put back together in another form, in another time and place. I have always been interested in place, in notions of home and what ‘things’ we need to have with us in order to feel a sense of home. I have also experienced, and made work about, ‘hiraeth’: a heartfelt longing for a time and place that no longer exists.

I make work in series while exploring an idea or theme, often working on them for several years.

I am currently making work about our emotional connections to ‘things; exploring ideas around collections and displays of ‘things’ and asking questions about the nature of personal archives, particularly how an archive can only tell part of a story. My initial interest was in the thin lines between owning, collecting and hoarding, and in the emotional attachments to ‘things’ that feed each kind of behaviour.

In talking to other people about the things we keep and why, I’ve noticed that the memories attached to things are selective, fragmentary, embellished and that things develop a kind of patina of memory as time goes on. Things left behind – things with a history, can become venerated, become sacred objects, with the owner as custodian.

This body of work is partly participatory. I asked people to tell me about a ‘thing’ that they own and the story of their emotional connection to it. I have used these stories and photos of ‘things’ to form a methodology for developing the work. I have been making containers as bearers for our emotional attachments to things.

I am concerned with giving things which are invisible, a material presence, poesis. Making physical things materialise out of the ghostly realm of the feeling and memory that is attached to objects and transforming them into some kind of materiality. I’m interested in material semiotics, the idea that ‘practices in the social world are woven out of threads to form weaves that are simultaneously semiotic (because they are relational, and/or carry meanings) and material (because they are about the physical stuff caught up in and shaped in those relations)’ (Law, 2019) and that art work, for me, is a meeting of many narrative.

This project is funded by the UK Government through the UK Community Renewal Fund. Cornwall Council has been chosen by Government as a Lead Authority for the fund and is responsible for monitoring the progress of projects funded through the UK Community Renewal Fund in Cornwall.