A PLACE CALLED HOME
A documentary project exploring the landscape of both my childhood and adult environments. Conceived as an intervention into personal feelings of detachment, the work has developed into an autoethnographic exploration of deindustrialisation, precarity and mental illness.
Within both landscapes there exists a spectre. A past that haunts the land and those who dwell there. The deindustrialisation of the North in the latter half of the 20th century devastated communities both socially and economically, destroying the livelihoods of working class families and inflicting a precarious existence on the generations that followed.
The project is informed by the notion of 'social haunting' through the work of Professor Avery Gordon, of the University of California and Dr Geoff Bright at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Filtered through the narrative of my own experiences, this semi-autobiographical work melds the two locations, neither of which feels like home into a fictional landscape. One in which I can simultaneously navigate past and present, the known and the unfamiliar, and attempt to tether myself to an idea of belonging. However within this fictional space there exists a stronger narrative; one that is recognised as a reality in post-industrial communities throughout the UK.
