The first one

This project stemmed from an article I read in the guardian about a year ago stating that in 50 years parts of the Norfolk coast will be completely underwater. Thinking about this now I am reminded of when I was 18 and my best friends parents uprooted from Great Yarmouth to inland Devon, because they predicted the value of their house would fast depreciate due to the rising sea levels.

In 50 years I will be in my 70’s (if I make it that far anyway) so there is a very real possibility that in my life time the land where I grew up will have disappeared. I realise this is not something unique and that natural disaster and war have devastated landscapes all over the world. The wreckage of a landscape by the sea is not something new either. What is interesting about the rising sea is our ability to predict it and inability to totally prevent it. The whole world needs to stop making Co2 on an enormous scale to prevent climate change. The sea will rise and we will watch it happen.


It is not just co2 made from our homes and cars, like they tell us on the government adverts, but the phenomenal amount made in industry to maintain society as we know it. As always it all comes back to money, why for example aren’t the hybrid cars sold at an affordable price? Why are there not more laws against how often people travel? I ask these questions without having an answer and I admit to not doing enough to help the environment myself, but if things are really serious then surely the government needs to go to bigger extremes than adverts that tell us off for leaving the TV on standby.


Anyway I digress, what I want to outline is where my thinking started. And it started with the loss of home, and things, out of our control, that change over time. Inevitability.


When discussing this project before I have been asked about the privilege of my upbringing. The original incarnation of this project presupposed the loss of my homeland. Because it quite clearly did not speak from real experience I think the content came across as less worthy, and the landscapes and memories I shared, privileged. The land I explore in the piece is beautiful and rural, a privileged place to have been brought up. What I hoped to explore in the piece was not simply a presupposed mourning of my home but to draw a comparison between the possible loss of this landscape and the always inevitable loss of ones home and past through the unreliability of memory and through growing old. It looks at the memories that last, what they look like and how they define who we are. I believe that the memories I selected to present in the piece were very privileged ( but here I would argue that all happy memories are) I selected only memories that remained distinctive and vivid to me and all related to place in some way.


Where the piece failed was that the retelling of the memories (and landscape acquainted to them) became more focal to the work than the failure to revisit or recreate them truthfully. It is interesting what the mind selects to remember and how unreliable these vivid images in our minds are. I wanted to show the impossibility of recreating memory, or to truly revisit a place as we remember it, as both these elements are always altered with time. I wanted to explore that if the images we hold onto in our minds are not real, physical places, is art a therapeutic medium in which recreate them, in art can we go back to those moments? I argue not, as most art and certainly theatre is ephemeral. If memories, connect us to a place, a landscape and from that landscape we attain a sense of home, a part of what makes us who we are in the present, the only place that recognition of self can survive is in our minds. We age, people around us change or depart, the land we once called home looks different to how we recorded it in our heads, but memory can be sustained, can be more poetic, we can create a better version of our pasts.


Revisiting the places I fondly link to a sense of home and self, there is a sense of nostalgia but also a sadness, a feeling of absence and loss. Alongside memories, one is constantly reminded of what has changed. One is reminded of the people that no longer occupy those spaces, of moments and memories swallowed up in history. Where do memories end up if not recorded? This recording can never be accurate, no words, art or digital media can perfectly preserve the past. But I believe the closest we get to preserving memories lies in our relationship to landscape. A place I can touch that is from my past, that reminds me to remember and recall.