Tom Godwin - Fine Art
I Will Cure You: Find Quest Walk
STONELEIGH ARMS
ART IS FOR EVERYONE
I Will Cure You: Find, Quest, Walk
Lead Artist: Lee Craig Mackenzie
Emerging Artist: Tom Goodwin
Community Partner: Emmaus Coventry & Warwickshire
Contributing Participants: Alan & Brendon
I Will Cure You began as an exploration of how people become grounded through place, but developed into a broader investigation of walking, searching and collecting. Working collaboratively with two members of Emmaus Coventry & Warwickshire, the project brought together community workshops, landscape walks and independent studio practice.
The intention was to explore how people relate to the places around them. Mapping was the initial starting point. Rather than treating maps as objective representations of geographical space, workshops used maps as surfaces onto which Alan and Brendon could project memories, routines, routes, conversations and personal histories. Drawing, writing and collage transformed maps into records of lived experience.
Booklet
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Erratics
My personal response to the themes we were exploring on the project was a series of five images of "Man-Made Erratics". These were inspired by our conversations, photowalks and research into Erratics, giant ice age boulders shifted around the globe during the ice age that became waypoints and place markers. These Man-Made Erratics became surreal waypoints in the fiction journey we created while also questioning the impact we leave on the natural landscapes we inhabit.
As the project developed, walking together created a shared experience of place and allowed conversations to emerge naturally. It encouraged Alan and Brendon to voice their interest in details that might otherwise be overlooked; this shifted the project away from simply representing landscape towards experiencing it and experiencing it through their perspective.
This approach transformed our own artistic practice. We began using a large variety of artistic materials - disposable cameras, analogue photography, cameraless photograms, botanical materials, film negatives, acetate, drawing, painting and collage - to capture these perspectives, and have fun whilst doing it. Plants and other materials gathered during walks became traces of our routes. Rather than simply photographing a landscape, we could bring part of that landscape into the studio and transform it through photographic processes. The resulting images occupy a space between documentation and interpretation.
