20ft to an Inch

Client: Sustrans

with Sustrans

[2008-9]

An art project to survey and map the River Severn from the City Bridge to the new footbridge to raise awareness of a new cycle network and riverside walk.

Initially to support Liminal's Tranquility is a State of Mind project and the installation of the Organ of Corti, the project aimed to investigate to the idea of 'tranquillity' or the 'bucolic' in relation to the changing character of the riverside.

Research into the canalised riverbank and the 19th Century Diglis weir led to a re imagining of the sketching trips of Severn river engineer and amateur painter Edward Leader Williams and his young son Benjamin Williams Leader (Benjamin grew up to be Worcester's best known landscape painter). This tension or blurring between 19th century engineer and artist and the imagining of conversations between adult and child became central to the investigation.

The question then became about perspective; or how to record experiences for just over a mile of bending river, examining both the fundamental part of landscape painting of being in the landscape and the linear walk of the river bank.

Historical research interwoven with the conversations between myself and many others in the present became a map of the river. A scale taken from Edward Leader Williams drawing helped organise the texts.