Good work this week. I hope you have enjoyed your drifts and that in your groups you are beginning to explore the City more thoroughly – and differently.
We talked about Wilkie’s categorisations of site. Consider how your work will be specific to the site, rather than generic or sympathetic. How can you include specificity? We talked about being investigators, discoverers, researchers, consider the ways that you can do this for your ideas.
We talked about space. We talked about the difficulties of defining space, especially a space that we don’t know exists. When do you think a space is a place? What makes a space a place?
Our group plan to gather stories and information related to the women of the First World War, specifically the women of Lincoln. The working women of Lincoln at the time, who made a great contribution to engineering and development of one of the first tanks to be used in the war. This has been a huge influence on our group and has encouraged us to think about the other duties and roles of women at the time, for example Teachers, Mothers and Daughters, Nurses Etc. Again our project will be specific to Lincoln as our stories and evidence will be gathered from Lincoln and focused on the women of Lincoln.
In relation to when a space is a place or what makes a space a place, I would say that a space is a place when it has a purpose. A house that has never been lived in has not fulfilled its purpose, it is just a space, but as soon as someone moves in and starts to live there, it becomes a home, a place. It is the same with vast pieces of land that have no one uses, once someone gives that space life it becomes a place.
Good Laura. Your thoughts on space and place in relation to purpose are interesting. You could read Heathcote’s ‘Home’ and Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’.
Personally I feel a place is something specifically named and defined such as the lawn. A place for me is a building or a street defined in a larger outer space. This may suggest that I view space to be more abstract, different spaces for me create different feelings and emotions. Space I view as a larger scale consisting such as villages and fields. I find that space is viewed so very differently by each individual where as a specific place (building) such as The Lawn represents factual information such as reports statistics and stories within a confined building.
Good Ellie. Thinking about space and place in terms of confinement works well with your idea. Is this fixed or does it change? I think there is a sense of transience and perhaps you can explore this in relation to your site.
For my groups idea to be specific to the site, we are willing to choose a site like no other, which obtains key historic value to Lincoln itself, and a building which doesn’t only represent Lincoln’s History as a whole but also Lincoln’s past hospitals. The Lawn Specifically which held patients with severe mental illnesses. We are eager to find personal stories about the hospital which will create a sense of emotion within our performance, connecting our audience with the past.
Good Ellie. Do you think the Lawn is a space or a place? What makes it so?