Dr Nigel Mills and I attended the third zoom session with our Bavarian partners. This project has developed into us helping them choose a suitable topic and then advising on how to create a single poster to get people in their locality asking questions about the Limes and what it means to them. They want to make local people more aware of their cultural heritage, so this project will help to shape their future thinking. Sites and photos are now being chosen so it is coming together and I look forward to our final session in mid-October when we see the finished work ready for display. This is a ‘pilot’ piece of work so they can seek funding and develop it further next year.
We also had our next project meeting as Nigel is to be away and I caught up with Clare a week later as she too had been away.
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Clare and I spent a very happy evening working with Beavers, Cubs and then Scouts and their leaders at different points during the evening. We ‘shook rattled and rolled’ recycled plastic bottles and drinks containers containing 50:50 shredded paper water mix from the Vindolanda Trust until the fibres broke down into a sticky paste. We danced to music and had fun! The paste was then sieved through cotton into a tray and a sponge used to compress the fibres and remove excess water. Paper was then stacked between pieces of reused kitchen roll and boards to remain flat and safe until I could hang them up to dry in my studio. Once they were dry I halved them and pressed them flat so they were ready for use the following week.
I was back for more a week later with the dry cards. The participants were surprised at how thick the card was and the final finish, all ready for writing. Barbara Birley led a short session on the Vindolanda tablets and handling digitally printed artefacts of finds from the site. Items such as tent pegs and a child’s wooden sword, wooden shoes from the bath house and even half a toilet seat! The printing method meant that you could really feel the lines of the writing on the replica writing tablet. I put together a series for suggestions of topics that today’s Frontier Voices might like to think about and everyone wrote or drew at least one postcard. The Frontier Voices tablets included shopping lists, party invitations, text messages, local news, how people were spending their time and even imagining themselves alive in Roman times. I now have to assemble a structure that suggests a piece of building structure so, the tablets can become ‘stones’ in our Wall structure. Watch out for some pictures! Today was the inspiration day at Vindolanda and Clare and I met Vindolanda’s Curator Barbara Birley along with members of the Allendale Cubs and Scouts from Hadrian District. We followed a site trail, heard some fantastic, stirring music from Cornu and Cornyx played on instruments copied from frescoes. These are the real Roman war instruments and they looked and sounded amazing! Vindolanda have recently found a trumpet mouthpiece at one of their digs this year.
We visited the site for our proposed artwork in the education room, in the valley near the Nymphaeum, which is currently sporting nearly 1900 beautifully made pieces of bunting celebrating 1900 years of Hadrian’s Wall. I introduced the project to the young people and discussed what we would be making at their next meeting in their local village hall in the following weeks. The Vindolanda tablets really inspired us in the museum - seeing snippets of everyday life captured, shopping lists, letters home, camp stores, and a birthday party invitation written by a women - the first examples in Britain ever - amazing! Thinking about modern issues of climate change, recycling and repurposing we are going to make paper postcards from Vindolanda’s shredded paper and then write postcards relevant to today, inspired by the tablets. The cards will then be used to create a sculpture for display. Look out for more images to come! The Tullie House community project began with introductions from me and Catherine Moss-Luffrum and then a visit to the Frontier Gallery at Tullie House with David Gopsill. We had made a slit book sketchbook to make notes and, using mobile phones, we captured anything that interested us. We made notes about how we felt about frontiers and Hadrian’s Wall as a border. These are to be debated further in our next session in two weeks when we start to create the artwork for the Wall we are making for inclusion in the Frontier Gallery. I had organised a site visit to Birdoswald so I could share some of the poetry from the Birdoswald workshops. Also, the Tullie House participants could see the fort and the fabulous landscape at the Wall. Everyone expressed this using words, which they chose carefully: Peaceful, historic, strategic, prepared, drilling, organised, isolates, ordered, drilling, green We also visited Birdoswald because the finds from the fort are accessioned at Tullie House and English Heritage’s Learning officer Helen Klemm shared artefacts from their handling collection, which everyone enjoyed. I was particularly fascinated by Genius Colcullatus - a single hooded figure that may have been linked to Celtic deities. Apparently they normally appear in threes and Housteads have three, but they haven’t been found at all the Wall sites. We also saw three figures in similar (but not the same) clothing in the Frontier Gallery at Tullie House. There is something very tactile about this little stone sculpture and it clearly meant something important to the fort dwellers in the past. I discovered that he had a nickname: ‘Bert Oswald’! The Great North Museum officially opened the Frontier Voices Spotlight Exhibition. We had a small but select gathering from Great North Museum and Tyne & Wear Museums and Archives staff who had been involved in the project, plus Dr Frances Macintosh from English Heritage and Dr David Walsh from Newcastle University. The communications officer, Jonathan Loach took lots of photos and I hope that the Newcastle press will print something about the project in the next few weeks.
Today we had also hoped to run a Frontier Voices art and English Heritage workshop at the GNM where many of the original artefacts found along Hadrian’s Wall have been accessioned and displayed plus the Frontier Voices Spotlight exhibition and the installation at the GNM - so lots to see and much cross-fertilisation. English Heritage’s site at Carrawbrugh has a Mithraeum and we thought that this might strike a chord with people from Persia, Iran and Syria. Refugees from Newcastle were originally going to participate but called off at the last minute. A second group from Gateshead were asked to come along but they didn’t make it either at such short notice. Life as a refugee is so uncertain when people are trying to sort out their lives as they are being moved from place to place, so we all understood how difficult it is for them to commit and turn-up in these circumstances. We have set up another workshop for next week and hope that some participants will make this one as it will be third time lucky! Here we are planning to take a bus out into the countryside to see the Wall landscape and visit the Mithraeum, followed by an art workshop at the Sill and a look at the landscape near the Wall. Over a period of three weeks or so I have typed up the poems, queried names and wording with some of the writers and decided that these workshop writings need a wider audience. I played with the words from the final workshop and used the App ‘WordPack’. The image was the best one that I felt gave the most accurate feel for the site and the words Birdoswald visitors had chosen.
Clare filmed me making a slit book with the group, which will also be put on the Frontier Voices website. I will include the final version of the poetry in the Frontier Voices legacy section of my website but English Heritage have agreed to host the poetry and artwork from the Frontier Voices project on their website pages and keep it beyond the project, which is fantastic news and a really good way to share the project more widely. I hadn’t expected to spend quite so long on the literary output and I still have the banners to complete for the café area. I have now narrowed it down to 6 banners - one with standards and 5 with poems from the workshops, and drawings of my interpretations of finds from the site selected by the group on the second day. When the banner designs are completed in the next few weeks I will add them. to edit. It was a weekend of sun and showers. Fortunately our small but enthusiastic group was well-dressed for the weather as we developed Banners for Banna at Birdoswald Roman Fort. Birdoswald defences are the best-preserved of any of the forts along the Wall. The landscape is fantastic here and it is one of the only parts of the Wall where you can see fort, milecastles and turrets in a relatively short length of wall. The Wall here had originally been turf but later was rebuilt in stone and the archaeological evidence shows that it was occupied after the Romans left and housed a population of local people and there have been people using this site ever since.
Over the weekend we had the historic expertise of English Heritage through their Hadrian’s Wall curator Dr Frances McIntosh and Education Officer for Northern England ,Helen Klemm. These 4 workshops were for adult volunteers who worked on the Wall in some capacity so we had volunteers involved in social engagement, guided walks leaders and young people working with young people on the Wall. We had a volunteer from the Northumberland National Park’s Sill - David Young - who was originally an engineer who shared interesting facts about the landscape and geology long before the Wall was built and then construction techniques along the Wall. He also measured the cafe annex (which formally was the site of an infantry centurian’s quarters) with me, information necessary for siting the new banners. We explored the fort and landscape from our different perspectives. Conversation flowed as we moved from Roman to modern times and Trump’s “wall”. Barrier or connector? How did the indigenous people feel when the Wall arrived? We speculated on access or population control or tax collecting? How did a farmer cope who had land on both sides? English Heritage arranged a selection of artefacts for us to look, hold and discuss and, in turn, they were shared with visitors who dropped in - especially on the Sunday. These gave ideas for patterns and drawings for the banners. One of the volunteers, Jackie, taught Yoga and she shared a relaxing mindfulness exercise inside Harrow’s Scar Milecastle. We found good luck phalluses carved on the Wall and learned a lot about the geology of the landscape which I certainly will be using with the other groups. I led a site exploration based on our senses and we collected single words to describe the sense of place, which we then expanded: River Irthing steep edged with soughing trees Rounded fells punctuated by marching fences Towards the people shouting Scrambling over Fort, Hall and Horse Round grassy mound with Square walls, stones stacked Green trees edging over the green leafy sea below. Karen MacDougall We developed these, playing word games, which led onto different poetic forms. We we looked at acrostics and mesostics and found out about links to John Cage and music and Merce Cunningham in a session presented by Clare Forsythe the project’s creative assistant. I shared WH Auden’s poem ‘Roman Wall Blues’ and led sessions on writing haikus and golden shovel poems. I love haikus as they paint a picture with words and the beauty is in elegance of 17 syllables and just how much you can say. Here is one I wrote for the Roman Cavalry project in 2016 Cavalry shade, Glide, helmets and plumes turning To face both ways Golden shovel poems are a relatively new art form devised by Terence Hayes as a homage to Gwendolyn Brooks who was the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, in 1950. I felt this ideal poetry form reflected the diversity of those past and present Frontier Voices from other lands and also pays homage to the fact that the Romans were really good at borrowing and subsuming other people’s ideas, such as Celtic deities becoming Roman ones evidenced along the Wall. The Romans also loved spectacle and ‘bling’! This is relevant as you ‘shovel’ a line of poetry that speaks to you and this becomes the last word of each line. I wrote Hadrian’s Wall Blues as an example for the group using the line ‘Over the heather the wet wind blows’ which is from WH Auden’s poem ‘Roman Wall Blues’ inspired by Hadrian’s Wall. Hadrian’s Wall Blues Too tall to see over, separating me from the family beyond. Heather smoke snakes upwards, the same sky. Arching over our wet lands split by a wind- break. Then the trumpet blows……… We then spent part of the final workshop engaging with the public, encouraging them to share with us how they saw or understood the landscape around Birdoswald. I thought there would be much more consensus but perhaps this shows the wide range of responses made by visitors to the site who were allowed to choose one word to describe the Wall landscape here. Here is a word art I made using WordPack, which we are using for the front cover of our Birdoswald anthology. The Frontier Voices Spotlight exhibition showcasing the Great North Museum’s installation and the projects at Segedunum and Arbeia were finally approved, printed and erected with a ‘soft’ opening planned for September, when many people will have returned from holidays. This was good for catching summer visitors to the museum with our project and suggesting nearby sites for visitors to see the other projects near Newcastle.
The project team caught up on the European projects and final preparations are underway for the workshops for English Heritage sites in September. Click This was busy with lots of admin, looking at feedback from the first three projects, running Zoom sessions with the Bavarian and Black Forest groups and then back to Arbeia to install all the pots in the museum - ‘Face-off!’ Exhibition. The pots will be staying here until the museum closes for the winter at the beginning of October when they will move on to be displayed somewhere else until the project exhibition at the Sill in December.
Zoom calls were also held with curator Barbara Birley of the Roman Army Museum and Vindolanda as we identified groups for workshops to start in September. Mandy Roberts of the Sill became a useful contact as she has worked with refugees before at the Sill and we made a plan to work with a group of ‘Jets’ later in August working with the Sill and English Heritage - combining history and landscape to create art for the final exhibition and for display at Chesters Fort. to edit. Early Zoom call with Dr Frances McIntosh of English Heritage, discussing the next art projects for Birdoswald, Corbridge Roman Town and Carrawbrugh (with its Mithratic temple) and Coventina’s Well and putting provisional dates in dairies. We had a lot of discussion around appropriate youth groups and about reaching out to refugees who might like the link to their homeland through the Mithratic Temple.
Then off to Hadrian’s Primary School in South Shields to deliver pots ready for the dress rehearsal for their scene for Much Ado About Nothing at the Northern Stage, Newcastle. Everyone was delighted to see their pots back in school finished, ready for the exhibition and for them to be used in the play. The performance was the next day and the project and ACE were credited in the programme too! here to edit. |
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