After Ours is a multi-media installation of sound, video, bodies and synthetic skin. Film footage intervenes in two spots in the West Yorkshire area: the Westwood Mill in Linthwaite and Bridestones Moor in Todmorden. Westwood Mill is believed to be the oldest surviving woollen mill in the Colne Valley, the original buildings built as a scribbling mill in 1798. The Bridestones Moor is a half mile stretch of millstone grit rocks which, due to weather erosion, have been shaped into distinctive figures over millions of years. The immersive installation in the Create Lab of the Barbara Hepworth Building at the University of Huddersfield provokes us with questions about place and temporality, including our material bodily relationship to place.
What does it mean to be both within and in extension of place, and yet foreign, where the presence of oddity itself seems right, albeit absurd? Must our bodies always end at our skin? How might we dissolve the edges of our presence and build something in relation? If not us, then what else will?
This installation was made in collaboration with Sam Gillies and Maria Sappho. It was installed as part of the Cultures of Place festival which took place in Huddersfield from June to July 2022. For further details on the festival, see here. For a publication documenting the festival see here.
