ARTSPACE / STILL WATERS

Photos: Jim's Ealingy grotesques, during a closed session at the cottage and our family workshops in Askam the other week.  It's been a good few days for Still Waters, what's emerging is a sort of aphoristic rumination on the way a place can tell its own story, with Jim and his cousin Kev at the centre of it, telling theirs.   The rest of us work at a remove, responding to what we find, what we are told and shown.     Askam's history is in the hands of people that know it and live it. We are interested in how stories within it get told, through anecdote, folk processes, and in the role of formal and personal archives.    Story, like land, is fluid and shifting. It shifts with every visit and every telling. Jim and Kev's versions of this unruly ragged slice of family history dip into official versions and family lore, and  each carries  their own fingermarks , along with the discrepancies and shifts in tone that result from any process of reproduction and re-telling.

We moved into Askam Community Centre for a couple of days, with a bag of paper, fabric and other recyclables from the Scrap Store. The idea was  to make maps of parts of the village with local children and their families, to introduce ourselves and the Still Waters project and find a few people who might like to help out with the next bit. We worked from photographs, Alex's sketchmap and the children's own knowledge of Askam.  Jim's animation and Lindsay's photographs ran on a loop, and it was good to hear our visitors point out the same paths and tracks that we've been exploring, and hearing their stories overlap ours. The Community Centre is a beautiful and well-equipped former school building, run by volunteers and used by youth groups and others. We'll  be back with our exhibition, which is likely to consist of a screening and Lindsay's photographs.  The work from this weekend will be in there too.   We asked a few  Askamites to record their walks around