Re: generating

So this is my first post to the residency blog, and is admittedly a little overdue - I've only today got internet access in the studio, and have otherwise been working remotely, on and offline, but never seeming to be able to do both at the same time... It's been going well, if flying by already. Since meeting the others involved in the residency, and having a few visits to Taunton, my ideas for the work that I will be producing are definitely taking shape. I've particularly noticed the scale of regeneration and development taking place in the town at the moment. A good thing overall, I'm sure, but I still always have questions about the reach and resilience of much economic and commercial development (as I've seen in many towns and cities in which I've lived and worked over the years). Shopping centres, café bars and new build homes (often of the luxury/boxy apartment type) are all very well, but I wonder if they are the best and most integrated way of enriching the lives of individuals and communities, and whether they are (environmentally and socially) sustainable? Will architects' and developers' dreams of the future end up being nightmares of the past (like much urban planning of the 1960s and 1980s)? And led as they are, by commercial, municipal and social impulses, what might they be overlooking?

It is some of these questions that my project for the Context residency seeks to address. What of the spiritual health of Taunton? What of peoples' hopes and fears beyond the material provisions being constructed for them? What of art? Of dissent? Of the living past and of the imagining of different possible futures?

My intention is to bring some of these questions into discussion. Not to necessarily provide answers, but to hear peoples' thoughts about them, their wishes and their regrets. As an artist in residence, I hope to use my powers to activate some of these, to dance out the good and the bad, to engage people with processes of regeneration and to hopefully make them laugh a little too. What shape will this take? I'm planning to talk to all sorts of people in Taunton over the next week or two, and use some of the material I get from them to make a participatory performance intrevention in the town centre, which'll be documented for the exhibition. I'm also hoping to make a separate performance for video camera, at another site (or two) in the town centre. Both should be quite fun and'll be public pretty soon, so watch this space...!