The Long and Winding Road

Concurrent to the MA I am undertaking an ongoing drive art project The Long and Winding Road. I installed the car and the items by the River Trent as part of Hinterland - a collection of transitory artists projects. A temporary site to explore the dialogue between town, country and suburbia, Hinterland examines how the actual and imaginary landscape can converge within an artwork or research.

Taken from www.hinterlandprojects.com

The Long and Winding Road began on the 17 May 2004 when Michael Pinchbeck embarked on a journey in a graffiti covered car from Nottingham to Liverpool. The car was packed with 365 mementoes wrapped up in brown paper and string. Each item was given a registration number – like a car (e.g. R350 ACH – R – 1998.) The project will last until 17 May 2008 when the car will reach its final resting place in the River Mersey.

The mementoes in the car are items that belonged to the artist's brother who died in an accident in 1998. Michael travelled to Liverpool where his brother had been a student, to pack a car with his things. The Long and Winding Road is a memorial by the artist to his brother. It is Michael's intention to exhibit the project in galleries and garages between Nottingham and Liverpool.

The objects will spill from the boot. Log books, photo albums and maps of the journey so far will litter the dashboard. Audience members will be invited, three at a time, to join the artist in the car for a personal car history. The artist will offer passengers a travel sweet before introducing a film of The Long and Winding Road and sharing the reason for the journey. Passengers will be invited to join the project steering committee.

I have been refecting on how The Long and Winding Road connects with the themes of absence and presence I am exploring within Acts of Communion. There is a sense of absence as loss. Absence as sadness. Absence as grief. The objects have become devoid of recognisable shape or function in a bid to objectify emotion. Absent of meaning. The car appears abandoned with no explanation of why or how it came to be there, in that colour with those contents. Absent of narrative. The film humanises the journey with the presence of a driver but there is no sense of his being present in the car. Only the detritus of the project so far - of places the car has been, the driver has seen. The car is an ark. An arc. An archive. A carchive. A cathartic icon. A secular relic. A vehicle for the baggage of loss. A memorial to someone's absence. A celebration of someone's presence. A eulogy for recovery. A souvenir of self-discovery. There is the sensation of presence when visitors take a seat in the car. Sucking a travel sweet amidst the mildew of two years of storage, their physical presence animates the objects wrapped up in brown paper and string. Their leafing through maps and diaries makes the journey tangible. Their listening to the songs and lists of items makes the details audible. Their flicking through photo albums makes the journey visible. Their view of the river from the car parked at 27 Degrees North West pointing in the direction of Liverpool places them firmly on The Long and Winding Road. Only when the presence converges with the absence does the project begin to make sense.