The Corby Glen Project has been a two year undertaking which has included a repeated walk recorded with photographs around the edge of the village. A series of oral recordings of memories of residents and former residents of the village, research into the pigments that are associated with the trade and geography of the village, so wood soot and other carbon blacks because of the importance of carpentry and the wood shed in the village and the roll wood importation was the funder of the building of the Willoughby Gallery. The pigments of the land, chalk and ochres, rust and mud and the pigments of the murals from the middle ages that are present in the Church murals. These pigments were used to build up a collection of abstract pieces that reference the sense of space at the outskirts of the village, and that hold within them the stories of the village itself. In September I install a three part solo exhibition, a room of photographs, a room of paintings and an interactive installation with sound and colour. The gallery is generally Open to the public, and there will be a public event on the 6th October 11-4, where I will be in attendance and the interactive gallery will be even more interactive than usual. It is also the Sunday of the Corby Glen Sheep Fair. There will also be a display of Children’s drawings in the Library using the same pigments creating saints out of the people they love.
The Project
My seating point for this project was that I was born in Lincolnshire, and while I had heard stories all my life from my mother, I had left at one year old and never been back. This project brought me back to the county of my birth and got me thinking about not only the usual subject of my work. the material traces of our history in the form of pigment, but also of memory and identity. The initial proposal occurred when I was making the lost girl series and these ideas were upper most in my mind. But here there was a reframe, what does that mean in relationship to a sense of place and belonging? How is memory related to that? And in particular how does any of that colour our view of the world. Corby Glen, like any English village is part of the world, with people from all over the world and people who have left to other parts of the globe. But when I came here at first I knew nothing I was a stranger.
Room 1: The photographs.
So here I was a stranger, a stranger to the county of my birth, and particularly a stranger to Corby Glen. My initial approach to the project was to circle the village, to walk around its edges, and to record what I could see in photographs, this walk became a repeated walk over the two years, and I took hundreds of photographs. When I made the recordings with the people of Corby Glen this influenced what I saw, what I took pictures of, but always this was my view, from the edges, looking out and looking in. From the hundreds of photographs taken I have selected 15 for the exhibition. The 15 which echoed with the way I see the village now, a little more familiar, but still an outsider. Each photograph is an edition of 10.
There is also a rolling video of a selection of the photographs taken during the first year of the project on screen.
Room 2: The Paintings
Visiting the village and reading about its geology, listening to its residents and reading the David Steele history, and using the internet to find out as much as I could about Charles Reed, gave me a way into the pigments to use. The way I work in general is to make abstract paintings, spaces to fall into to get a little lost in and to remember. Corby Glen has abundant landscapes that allow you to do this in their own right. I have borrowed visually, in a way I do not usually do, from the landscape here to make these paintings, a couple have elements of the Wash, the rest of Corby Glen. I have used pigments to make hand made oil paints for the canvases and hand made gouache for the works on paper in the print rack, pigments which have a special relationship with Corby Glen, and with the nature of being both a particular place, and a place connected with the world.
3. Interactive Installation
This room consists of five colour pods to stand in. Drawing walls with coloured paper and chalk based soft pastels which are an invitation to you to make your mark, and a series of audio recordings to listen to of the memories of people who do or have lived here. Through the exhibition you move from outsider to insider, from distant to intimate, and the questions the exhibition asks is what does it mean to feel you belong?
The Pigments and their relationship to Corby Glen
The pigments found in the murals of St John's Church: The medieval murals of St John's Church include red ochre, yellow ochre, carbon black, green earth ( and possibly verdigris) and ultramarine. These pigments have ,multiple ways of connecting to the history and geology of Corby Glen, and to human history in general.
Ochres: Red and yellow ochre along with carbon and manganese black are amongst the oldest pigments known to humanity. They were used from prehistory, by both
Homo sapiens and neanderthals, and they are used and have been used across the world. A universal pigment with a history as long as the history of mark making they appear here in the medieval period. The colouring agent is iron, and while Church mural painters would have carried pigments across the country, they may not have gone far to collect the ochre for here. There are iron deposits in the chalk ridge, iron smelting is recorded from Roman times. It is in the ironstone of the walls typical of Corby Glen. There are big iron deposits in the soil in East Linconshire, as is evident from one of the photos in the photography gallery (although this particular bit would have been underwater then). And in relation to modern Corby Glen, the mechanics, and the rusty farm machinery, the blood of the animals, all traces of iron oxide, all traces of the same colours. And in case you are wondering the difference in colour between yellow ochre and red is heat, and the level of oxidation of the iron.
Carbon black:- This would almost certainly have been locally made, it is the product of burning, burning wood, or bones, or any organic material. I have used bone black, vine black, in honour of the central nature of the pubs to the culture of Corby Glen and soot from the chimney of a wood fired stove in Corby Glen. So why Corby wood? The importance of the woodyard, the role of carpenters and the Walsingham family in particular, the woods around the village, Charles Reed's role in trading in wood. The bones are obviously a reference to animal farming, and also to the story recorded about the disposal of the bodies of deceased pets by the headmaster of the primary school and the way the older boys were involved!
Ultramarine:- In the Middle Ages this was the ultimate import, the most expensive pigment, Lapis Lazuli was imported along the silk route, across the Aegean and Mediterranean, into Venice and then throughout Europe. It was reserved for images of Mary in Churches, and has a number of grades of quality, a major cathedral likely to have the highest and a small parish church the lowest. It became a much cheaper product as the result of work of German and French chemists in the 18th century and can now be used more widely. It is the colour of the sky on a bluesky day. And it is a reminder of our interconnectedness by trade and the sharing of ideas and technology across Europe and across the globe. I have used it in the piece memorial with yellow ochre, my human pigment, as a reference to the origins of this gallery as a memorial to Timothy, Lord Wiloughby de Eresby who died in that same sea, a sea that currently plays a role in the life chances of people fleeing war and persecution.
Earth greens: Green has always been a tricky pigment. If you were asked to choose a colour for Corby Glen and you looked out of the window, most of the year the answer would be clear, but finding permanent greens was historically difficult. The source of Earth greens during the medieval period was Bohemia and the Italian peninsula, traded across Europe, these would also have been expensive, hence their limited use in the murals. The three small pieces, first green second green and third green are made using pigments known to have been used during the period of the murals, the first two are earth greens and the third is verdigris, made from exposing copper to wine lease and during that period an import from Spain. So these are present in the murals.
The other pigments present in the paintings but less dominant are indigo, which references sea trade during the era of the Slave trade, Chromium green a product of the industrial revolution that gave us our first good cheap permanent green, and was first used by Turner. Then there are Cadmium red and Cobalt blue, these are present in the batteries of your mobile phones and computers, the technology that allows Corby Glen its modern life. And at the gouache for the works on paper and the pastels for making your own marks, chalk, the stuff of the foundation of the land here.
The Project
My seating point for this project was that I was born in Lincolnshire, and while I had heard stories all my life from my mother, I had left at one year old and never been back. This project brought me back to the county of my birth and got me thinking about not only the usual subject of my work. the material traces of our history in the form of pigment, but also of memory and identity. The initial proposal occurred when I was making the lost girl series and these ideas were upper most in my mind. But here there was a reframe, what does that mean in relationship to a sense of place and belonging? How is memory related to that? And in particular how does any of that colour our view of the world. Corby Glen, like any English village is part of the world, with people from all over the world and people who have left to other parts of the globe. But when I came here at first I knew nothing I was a stranger.
Room 1: The photographs.
So here I was a stranger, a stranger to the county of my birth, and particularly a stranger to Corby Glen. My initial approach to the project was to circle the village, to walk around its edges, and to record what I could see in photographs, this walk became a repeated walk over the two years, and I took hundreds of photographs. When I made the recordings with the people of Corby Glen this influenced what I saw, what I took pictures of, but always this was my view, from the edges, looking out and looking in. From the hundreds of photographs taken I have selected 15 for the exhibition. The 15 which echoed with the way I see the village now, a little more familiar, but still an outsider. Each photograph is an edition of 10.
There is also a rolling video of a selection of the photographs taken during the first year of the project on screen.
Room 2: The Paintings
Visiting the village and reading about its geology, listening to its residents and reading the David Steele history, and using the internet to find out as much as I could about Charles Reed, gave me a way into the pigments to use. The way I work in general is to make abstract paintings, spaces to fall into to get a little lost in and to remember. Corby Glen has abundant landscapes that allow you to do this in their own right. I have borrowed visually, in a way I do not usually do, from the landscape here to make these paintings, a couple have elements of the Wash, the rest of Corby Glen. I have used pigments to make hand made oil paints for the canvases and hand made gouache for the works on paper in the print rack, pigments which have a special relationship with Corby Glen, and with the nature of being both a particular place, and a place connected with the world.
3. Interactive Installation
This room consists of five colour pods to stand in. Drawing walls with coloured paper and chalk based soft pastels which are an invitation to you to make your mark, and a series of audio recordings to listen to of the memories of people who do or have lived here. Through the exhibition you move from outsider to insider, from distant to intimate, and the questions the exhibition asks is what does it mean to feel you belong?
The Pigments and their relationship to Corby Glen
The pigments found in the murals of St John's Church: The medieval murals of St John's Church include red ochre, yellow ochre, carbon black, green earth ( and possibly verdigris) and ultramarine. These pigments have ,multiple ways of connecting to the history and geology of Corby Glen, and to human history in general.
Ochres: Red and yellow ochre along with carbon and manganese black are amongst the oldest pigments known to humanity. They were used from prehistory, by both
Homo sapiens and neanderthals, and they are used and have been used across the world. A universal pigment with a history as long as the history of mark making they appear here in the medieval period. The colouring agent is iron, and while Church mural painters would have carried pigments across the country, they may not have gone far to collect the ochre for here. There are iron deposits in the chalk ridge, iron smelting is recorded from Roman times. It is in the ironstone of the walls typical of Corby Glen. There are big iron deposits in the soil in East Linconshire, as is evident from one of the photos in the photography gallery (although this particular bit would have been underwater then). And in relation to modern Corby Glen, the mechanics, and the rusty farm machinery, the blood of the animals, all traces of iron oxide, all traces of the same colours. And in case you are wondering the difference in colour between yellow ochre and red is heat, and the level of oxidation of the iron.
Carbon black:- This would almost certainly have been locally made, it is the product of burning, burning wood, or bones, or any organic material. I have used bone black, vine black, in honour of the central nature of the pubs to the culture of Corby Glen and soot from the chimney of a wood fired stove in Corby Glen. So why Corby wood? The importance of the woodyard, the role of carpenters and the Walsingham family in particular, the woods around the village, Charles Reed's role in trading in wood. The bones are obviously a reference to animal farming, and also to the story recorded about the disposal of the bodies of deceased pets by the headmaster of the primary school and the way the older boys were involved!
Ultramarine:- In the Middle Ages this was the ultimate import, the most expensive pigment, Lapis Lazuli was imported along the silk route, across the Aegean and Mediterranean, into Venice and then throughout Europe. It was reserved for images of Mary in Churches, and has a number of grades of quality, a major cathedral likely to have the highest and a small parish church the lowest. It became a much cheaper product as the result of work of German and French chemists in the 18th century and can now be used more widely. It is the colour of the sky on a bluesky day. And it is a reminder of our interconnectedness by trade and the sharing of ideas and technology across Europe and across the globe. I have used it in the piece memorial with yellow ochre, my human pigment, as a reference to the origins of this gallery as a memorial to Timothy, Lord Wiloughby de Eresby who died in that same sea, a sea that currently plays a role in the life chances of people fleeing war and persecution.
Earth greens: Green has always been a tricky pigment. If you were asked to choose a colour for Corby Glen and you looked out of the window, most of the year the answer would be clear, but finding permanent greens was historically difficult. The source of Earth greens during the medieval period was Bohemia and the Italian peninsula, traded across Europe, these would also have been expensive, hence their limited use in the murals. The three small pieces, first green second green and third green are made using pigments known to have been used during the period of the murals, the first two are earth greens and the third is verdigris, made from exposing copper to wine lease and during that period an import from Spain. So these are present in the murals.
The other pigments present in the paintings but less dominant are indigo, which references sea trade during the era of the Slave trade, Chromium green a product of the industrial revolution that gave us our first good cheap permanent green, and was first used by Turner. Then there are Cadmium red and Cobalt blue, these are present in the batteries of your mobile phones and computers, the technology that allows Corby Glen its modern life. And at the gouache for the works on paper and the pastels for making your own marks, chalk, the stuff of the foundation of the land here.
Listen below to the audio recordings from the Corby Glen Project
1. The Corby Glen Project
2. The Corby Glen Project 2
3. You have to listen to Chippy Walsingham
1. The Corby Glen Project
2. The Corby Glen Project 2
3. You have to listen to Chippy Walsingham
Telephone02084445173
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sarahneedham@artfromlondonmarkets.com
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