The Home Correspondence Pics

Off Adventuring...

I've just put the finishing touches on the map of the world we are taking to Cambridge Folk Festival for The Home Correspondence. We leave tomorrow ('we' being the delightful Helen Preddy and the equally smashing James Owen) in a van full of the entire contents of my bedroom which is usefully providing most of the set for the project. Very excited to be premiering a new piece of work in such a lovely, supportive environment. The piece will hopefully draw together some of the strands of my musings on Home over he past year and a half and will hopefully be an opportunity to collect lots of stories of home from the audience at the festival. I am also very excited about wearing a jumpsuit all weekend.

Here are some pics of the signage I've been making in the garden of my new (and relatively permanent) Home...

Tree of Smee

Something I made for someone named Smee.

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More Neverhome Pictures

Thimble Gifts

Lovely piece by Lyn Gardner about the things left behind as reminders of a performance (she mentions Neverhome, where I gave each audience member a thimble as they left): http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2011/may/02/theatre-shows-that-haunt-us

I love to give people things, gentle echoes of ephemeral moments. Maybe when they touch their gift, they’ll recall something they felt or thought because of a piece of work. I like to think this extends the experience for as long as they keep the object. A particularly pertinent object can change the tone of a piece of work once you have stepped out the door, can be a bitter-sweet epilogue or a whispered question of oneself. Unfortunately, as with the thimbles in Neverhome, cost sometimes gets in the way of giving something to everyone. I put some of my own money into buying 250 thimbles for the One-on-One fest as I felt it was important. Multiply the cost of any small object by 250 and it suddenly becomes a costly element of a production. But for the joy and surprise tiny, tangible pieces of a fleeting moment can bring when bestowed, it is worth the expense. It may only be a thimble but it is also a lot more.

The Home Frequency

We are creating a new piece for Cambridge Folk Festival. I am the lead creator and Allegra is producing it. It is called The Home Frequency. Sort of an amalgamation of my ponderings about home over the past few months as well as some new bits in a new travelling/instillation format. Helen Preddy, who came with us to Secret Garden Party last year, is coming and someone new -we don’t know who that will be yet but we do know they are lovely and have a vehicle. On the topic of this mysterious new person… is it you?

We need a new member of the Ignore the Forecast’s extended family to be part of the Home Frequency project. You need to be free between Wednesday 27^th July and Monday 1^st August, you need to have a vehicle (preferably a large car or van) and you need to be wonderful. Does this sound like you??? There is a small fee to cover expenses and of course a ticket to the festival. The Piece itself will involve talking to festival goers about home, so you should like people. And you should like getting stuck in, maybe getting wet and muddy, camping, making do and mending and, er, folk music. If this sounds like you (why haven’t we met already???) then contact me at ekirstyh@gmail.com.

Home: Found

The theme of home in my work is hard to disguise and at times it did feel all too relevant that I had 218 intimate encounters with strangers (most of the time), making a temporary home with each of them whilst still being homeless myself. But now I have found somewhere to live and over a year of nomadism is coming to an end. I think the hardest thing about the last year has been not having a base in which to work from, nowhere to spread out sketches, make things and stay up late researching and reading. Nowhere to nest in. I am a nester. There have been brilliant parts; Old Chapel Farm, late nights talking to friends before sleeping on their sofas or in their beds. New places, new parts of London, living by the river, Christmas in Cornwall and learning to play spoons (which has since become more popular than I could have ever anticipated), freedom, falling asleep in parks (during the day – even though I have been technically homeless I am lucky that I have always had a roof over my head at night thanks to supportive and tolerant friends and family) and a summer of back-to-back festivals. But now I realise I can have all these adventures but with a home to come back to, and maybe that fact in itself will lead me to being even more adventurous. It reminds me of the verse we wrote on the hillside on the farm a year ago… “How happy are the birds, they come and go as they please; to the mountains, to the seas and home again with out rebuke.” Here’s to that.