THE END... FOR NOW!

It's the end of the residency and I'm meeting with Jo Eden and Lucy Jefferies from Quiet Down There Theatre tomorrow to talk about what ways could be possible to follow up the residency.

So I'm looking back. There's still so much I didn't get to fully explore, which is a positive, although it feels frustrating right now. Here's what I thought I'd do when I first heard I'd got the residency back in February 2020. I've kept the repeats in, most of these will have been written lying awake at night:

  • Draw map and photocopy and ask people I meet to fill in bits where they know and don’t know
  • Get Maidstone and Medway towns a-z
  • Do sex education in Sheppey
  • Paint bodies like the watery wet bodies / dissolved forms Rodin painted in watercolours using the sea water (fill up bottles)
  • Sounds of Sheppey- make recordings
  • Get a Sheppey ordnance survey map
  • Borrow a bike, panniers, and make a rain proof map to wear round neck
  • Make flags
  • Draw a map every day
  • Wandering lectures
  • Build up ways of understanding the world or develop tools to understand Sheppey- be understood
  • Invent an imaginary colleague or co-traveller - Tracey etc, based on personalities you meet in Sheppey like Victoria Wood or Meera Syal one person per week - Victoria’s been with me this week we went to... I loved it, she wasn’t so sure... she’s fussy...
  • Make a hankerchief in the shape of Sheppey and “catch the sneezes” (write down notes) inside it
  • Take sewing stuff - hem hanky as go along?
  • Take coloured pencils, pen n ink etc
  • Go to the graveyard and write to people there
  • Wet week, dry week, wind week, heat week
  • Go swimming in the mornings and read / write about swimming (pack swimsuit n small towel?! N plastic bag)
  • Get blog address and instagram account printed on cards so that I can give it out to people and ask for money for cards
  • Write about dreams I have
  • Go to the highest, lowest, central, most eastern and western points
  • Have days when I amble, creep, saunter, revolve, mince, glide, reverse, crawl, limp, skip, sprint, ramble, roll, scoot, hop, dawdle, trundle, wind, nudge, scoot, meander, wander, flow
  • About the same size as London – maybe draw a map of London onto a map of Sheppey and go to where I live in London in Sheppey?!
  • Set rituals
  • Invite other people to have breakfast with you or go to their's for breakfast. Have a big breakfast at the end where we eat all the ingredients
  • Write poetically
  • Buy a local newspaper
  • Write into a local newspaper
  • Get a job
  • Go to school, hang out with retirees. Come up with 3 questions I ask most people
  • Map it, know it - rename it every street n corner n patch of grass use the 3words app? Need to work out which square is which.
  • Write a postcard each day to people left behind? Read somewhere and nowhere book and place making book
  • Do a journalism course? Like the Radio 4 programme The Patch? What does it take to know a place plus what if a place doesn’t want to be known?
  • Pack pen n ink n watercolour n colour pencils and do today Sheppey is,... so that it transforms every day and ask people how would you describe Sheppey? As an animal? Or in 3 words? One month before write about what be like and one month after write about what was like
  • Charity shop get one outfit
  • Ask people what they have for breakfast then have next day n take photo - buy ingredients on the way home
  • Borrow library card
  • Go to museum
  • Make videos
  • Go fossilling
  • Meet Jim Allchin - Sheppey bloke - is everyone like him - Steph
  • Go to the library second day - maybe can’t get books out
  • Observe and write lists. Take things to swap and exchange. Host dinners - this is my space. Write and read - take books and run and stretch and date?
  • Write days differently
  • Write songs
  • Uploading as I go
  • So I met this guy let’s call him Jim...He was talking about ... let’s call them …
  • Racial bystander stuff in Sheppey
  • Ask favourite song for breakfast
  • What breakfast and what song? Join in at home. Tomorrow it’s Tom’s breakfast listen to ...What song could go with that? Soundtracking breakfast.
  • Say I’m a spy and I’m doing research?
  • Listen to Sheppey FM
  • Go visit Anne and ask them to visit me.
  • Decide psychotherapist or mentor.
  • Go to library between assignments.
  • Chat up organisations to get job.
  • Go to police station and ask what to do if bike goes etc
  • Mapping draw along streets
  • Go to creative journaling course?
  • Live as people here live?

It's funny looking back at all the kind of “extra” ideas I had, when in reality I used all my brain power to organise what I was going to do, who I was going to meet and how I was going to get there. The residency had to change a lot because of the Covid pandemic. The version that could've existed somewhere between the ideas in this list was long gone by the time I arrived a year later and I think I'm still mourning this carefree version. I took on a lot of the responsibility including the budget, my schedule and where to stay as well as getting in touch with people to speak to via Facebook before I arrived. I learned a LOT about all these things and so although I'm sad I didn't get to do the residency in the way we'd all wanted it to happen I'm glad for what's been achieved.


 

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