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Veronica is a visual artist, curator and project manager, based in West Cornwall. Currently she is undertaking a commissioned yearlong residency with The National Trust in West Penwith. She established BOSarts during the residency.
The main line of enquiry in Veronica's work is related to issues to do with time and place, with identity, culture and heritage. How do we relate to the past? What does it say about who we are in the present? Is there a need to ossify the past, to preserve every fragment of past lives in order to give us a sense of who we are as a society today?
Veronica's current research is a practice-led enquiry into the commodification of people and place. This research is examining through a series of practice-based projects the contested ground of heritage and place. It is looking at whether it is possible to use the processes of art practice to create a counter-narrative of place.
Production of difference is a particular issue in a rural area where culture is objectified as tourist product and homes built for use by people living and working the land, become rural idylls for those seeking second home retreats. The presented face is either of picture postcard image or official designation (UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, National Parks etc) - many people living in these settings feel like they are living in a museum piece.
The work explores questions around how identity, culture and heritage are preserved and (re)presented, and how contemporary culture is framed by and also constructs the past in an attempt to make sense of an endemic sense of rootlessness in a fast changing world…
The work looks at ways in which a different narrative can be reflected and presented using visual arts processes by focussing on the everyday, on story. It plays with the transient, appropriating form (an estate agency, a visitor centre, a board game...) and re-presenting it out of its usual context ion a gallery setting, where it can be interrogated. This reworking of culture is characterized by an involvement with the everyday, and an approach that seeks to make the invisible visible. Embedding practice in the local, in context or place becomes a socio-political act that forefronts issues to do with contemporary living. And in so doing moves beyond the local and the parochial.
 
Crowned Glory, Veronica Vickery with fabrication & technical assistance, Tim Timms
Crowned Glory Heritage Interpretation Panel, Veronica Vickery
Rebecca is interested in the interface of the everyday and the ancient heritage of this land and in psychogeography as a way into a discussion about being here. Her experiential enquiry will involve the consideration of space and place, identity, displacement, memory and imagination.
Re-examining notions of the 'flâneur' within a rural context and ideas of 'détournnement' in which artefacts are liberated from their past contexts and diverted into contexts of one’s own making has enabled me to realise the importance of the double life of site as a physical spacel and importantly also as a space for the imagination to act upon and so create new modes of being and belonging.
Challenging existing approaches to mapping Rebecca intends to construct a survey in which modes of hidden narrative and spatial localisation are key to interpreting the existence of pivotal points or places. This process of surveying, of searching for sites of significance as portals into being and belonging may take multiple forms such as recorded interviews, drawings, performative walking lectures.
Ian Whitford is an artist, independent curator, graphic designer and web designer. He is based in Penzance.
Ian co - founded 'Artdept' in 2002. 'Artdept' have exhibited at group shows including the alias platform, Newlyn gallery, 2003, at 'Live Art Falmouth' in 2007, and at 'Something Like Spit - In Residence', The Exchange, 2008 and independently exhibited 'Artopsy' at Dartington gallery, 2008. Artdept curated 'Ignition' an alias symposium on digital/live art, The Acorn, 2004 and the alias seminar 'Invigorate' at The Exchange in 2007.
Whitford is interested in artist led culture, collaboration, mythology and the experimental use of digital technology. His work is nourished by uncomfortable realities. His process often results in multimedia works involving live art, video, and installation.
Stills from 'The Captains Cottage Triptych: Dwelling and Loss' (video 2008)
Andy Whall moved to St Ives in 1996 from Cardiff. He currently lives in Marazion and describes himself as an artist and curator and director of Art Surgery.
Whall’s creative practice embodies many of the defining characteristics of contemporary art. His work is self consciously discursive and utilises video, text, drawing and sculpture. His work consistently examines the relation of the self to the spaces he sites his work in, whether it be cities or the elemental landscapes of Penwith In Cornwall.
His artworks indicate a sense of the work as something ongoing, something which is always in one way or another in progress.
Whilst he may make visible and tangible references to landscape, the space (the work) is treated as metaphysical construction - an intellectual plain or gap - seen as analogous to the space between ideology and language and where these enter a social framework.
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