Unfolding Narrative

Work in progress artwork displayed on the
‘Re-Imagining Hilbre’ exhibition.

During the exhibition ‘Re-Imagining Hilbre’ (17.06.25 - 01.07.25) a large scale artwork was displayed on one of the walls of the exhibition rooms. The artwork named ‘Unfolding Narrative’ (100 x 65cm) consists of a ‘map’ of Hilbre constructed from impressions of the landscape created by attendees to the workshops of ‘Re-Imagining Hilbre’ (April 2025). This artwork also has a photograph of the people that attended the Being Human Festival 2024 event, also part of this research project. The photo was taken some distance away from Little Eye (the smallest island of the archipelago), it features the people walking on the island, resembling dots on the landscape/on a map.

The boundaries of this landscape are defined by dotted lines and some folds, denoting ‘fold here’ prompts. These folds and dotted lines don’t feature definite boundaries but rather fluctuating, blurred ones. This artwork therefore, challenges the notion of territorial boundaries, since from an interconnectedness viewpoint, what matters is not where the divisions are but where the points of connection are made. The different impressions of the landscape (total of 5), alongside the photograph of the people walking on the island (center left) indicate visual unity, where different textures come together to represent an integrated, abstract version of the landscape of Hilbre. The fact that is a rather abstract artwork enables to detach the viewer from standarised representations of the archipelago, allowing to highlight the notions of mapping and boundaries.

An artwork in progress, an unfolding narrative

After deciding that the exhibition was going to be both a statement (Hilbre as a SSHI - Site of Special Human Interconnectedness) and a process (ever evolving, unfolding as the practice of deep mapping), I decided to make one of the artworks a ‘work in progress on show’. After installing the artwork shown above, and observing it in-situ I felt the need to add more colour, to reflect the idea of sections within a map rather than just relying on the dotted lines and folds. I did this once installed, as well as using the action of the wind on the paper to denote how nature (the wind) interacts with the artwork.

The artwork being modified by the action of the wind.