Cumbria live Art exhibition
‘Slupsk’
2004

A performance in Tulley House Gallery, Carlisle for an audience mainly composed of local people and Polish artists.

I have never been to Słupsk. But I read the papers. I have my snatches of geography and history, my dreams and prejudices. AND I’ve got all the photographs. So of course I know what it’s like.

What an amazing place...

The performance took the form of a talk and Power Point talk-and-image presentation, ostensibly about the city of Słupsk in Poland. It was in fact a humorous inquiry into the ways in which my/our general ignorance of other countries opens up space for a strange mix of bigotry and romantic fantasy. How can we do other than locate new experiences in terms of previous ones and interpret the ‘foreign’ in relationship to home? All the images of ‘Słupsk’ were taken in within a few minutes walk of the gallery in Carlisle.