The Frontier Zone

Amongst the exhibits of the Wisbech and Fenland Museum, Lois Williams read a series of poems she wrote during the three weeks.

She also produced a risograph poster stack of her poems which were installed in St Peter and St Paul Wisbech and available to take away.

In The Wisbech Masonic Lodge Paul Johnson screened a film of Nina Simone singing 'Four Women'.  Simone's shifting symbolic stories weaved into the symbolic atmosphere of the Masonic Lodge creating a visual and aural collage.

In the camping supplies section of local store Evisons, Anna Chrystal Stephens presented an installation concerning survivalism and basic shelter, including a short performance about an imagined future society which has reconnected with nature.

During the 3 weeks the artists used The Wisbech Social Club & Institute as a temporary studio and were able to reveal their artistic process and approach to the residency with an invited audience.

On Saturday 27th September The Frontier Zone culminated in a town-wide event to celebrate the first Wisbech Arts Colony Residency.

Each artist revealed some of the hidden spaces throughout the town and offered creative encounters in unexpected places.

Thanks to everyone who made this fantastic opportunity possible!

  This poem responds to my learning about parishioners who hid fragments of medieval stained glass during the iconoclasm that gripped East Anglia and the Fens during the 16th and 17th Centuries.

I was moved by the idea that an image could be powerful enough to be destroyed, and then powerful in another way to the rescuer of its fragments.  It made me think differently about risk and salvage as actions connecting humans and objects.  Some of the rescued glass later worked its way into restored windows during the Victorian era, and sometimes in ways that created mysterious anatomies and landscapes—a face made of other faces, for example.

          Keeping the Glass

    Imagine the sound—ricochet of shattered glass

clatter of shards, of saints atomised

  Picture the iconoclast’s hand—the exact moment

the window splits the brick’s flightpath,

  the brick a little warm from being held          

then cooling in the hurl

  Perhaps the wrecking was done at night        

the glass dark, its many eyes unmet

  each image, symbol smashed and catalogued,

an archive of disposals

  Imagine the windows gone, air rushing in

in a great levelling of atmospheres

  And afterwards, after the spectacle,

going there under the cover of an errand

  to look for faces in the grit, to gather

fragments of depicted miracles

                and pocket them away to britches, chimneys,

jars of horsegrease, blanket hems, the larder’s

  lump of lard, anywhere unlikely—

Think of the hidden medieval glass,

  colourful and rare as an insect

in an unmapped landscape

  Imagine its resonance, a small chipped secret

clanging in the vacant chancel of a faith

  Imagine being that sure our uncertainties matter—

that you pass the glass along over centuries,

  keeping it for a safe time, not knowing

Plan The Event, Masonic Lodge, Evisons, Nina Simone, posters & flyers.

Visit Walsingham and Thomas Clarkson Academy.

Elgood's Brewery for Beer Festival and meeting with Ann Elgood.

Film making with Rob Hill.

In 2414 it is difficult to imagine 'The Separation' era; just a few hundred years ago. Humans had attempted to extract themselves from the rest of nature with intricate and deeply embedded myths like ‘unlimited production’ and ‘right to domination’. Food was often sourced in a complicated process involving many transactions, trafficking of ingredients and products and synthesising and packaging of food items.