In Gratitude

In Gratitude was created during a collaborative residency at Visual Arts in Rural Communities (VARC) in May 2025, with filmmaker Steve White.

In 2009, I undertook a transformative year-long artist residency at VARC in rural Northumberland. In 2024, past artists were invited to return to celebrate twenty-five years of this vital program. Due to funding constraints, VARC is now closing, making this celebration both tribute and farewell.

In Gratitude explores the broader impact of the VARC experience on past residents. The landscape affects each person differently, and I wanted the work to reflect this diversity of experience. I developed twelve questions for past VARC artists, asking them to record responses designed to evoke sensory memories and emotional connections. Location-recorded sounds—birdsong, gates opening, cattle grids—are woven throughout. When layered with collected voice recordings, they become an ode to place, an audio poem.

Visual components convey sense of place through time-lapse footage of sunrises, sunsets, and the road serving as main artery into this landscape. Using the Merlin bird app’s spectrograms, we created representations of nature alongside participants’ voices displayed as sound waves—visuals interpretable as trees, standing stones, or monumental landscape structures. The imagery is deliberately hypnotic, allowing spoken dialogue to remain the primary focus.