In collaboration with Artist and Filmmaker Rosalind Fowler
Supported by Arts Council England, Awards for All and The Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment

“He looked at his own Soul
with a Telescope. What seemed
all irregular, he saw and
shewed to be beautiful
Constellations: and he added
to the Consciousness hidden
worlds within worlds” – Coleridge, notebooks

Permissable notations of was a project that took place on Wenlock Barn Estate with a gathering of people from across the world. Through a series of visits home – taking place in people’s houses and within social space on the estate we collected pots of cultural inheritance. These gestures were later re-enacted in public space around a roaming backdrop, using a series of hand-made sculptural props. Through a series of processes enacted by others, shared and passed on a performance was built collectively. 

This performance captured on 16mm film became a liminal space, where stories collide to take on new forms of kinship. A collective acknowledgement of intangible moments, fragments and histories that people carry with them.The resulting 16mm film “I feel like doing this” was hand-processed using ecological formula.

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“Evoking our subconscious to arrive to a home that is ephemeral and infinite in its temporality.”

“An endless walk. A notation of the sole. This wandering tale of potentials and encounters that imbue an intangible essence. Something with edges and ambivalence – hidden, cyclical and binding, where the Estate is a collection pot of cultural inheritance”

 

The work considers notions of the permissible – what is permissible and what allows the permission to be reformed by someone else. How to encounter and navigate edges, of one holding space for someone else. Who gets the permission to speak on someone else’s behalf.
The work emerges from Fourthland’s collaborations with people on Wenlock Barn Estate over 9 summers as part of a wider project Land and People.

Dr Ben Cranfield worked as a researcher in Residence during this process and a series of events that took place at PEER to show the work to local audiences.

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Watch interview about process here: