The Bosigran Visitor Centre
featured an exhibition in the summer of 2008 by Veronica Vickery, National Trust artist-in-residence...
'Much of Veronica’s work is concerned with how we interact with place and the cultural landscape. She wonders about issues to do with heritage and how we relate to it today in the world in which we live. Memory, story and a sense of belonging, probably stemming from a deep desire on a personal level to feel rooted, whilst at the same time recognizing the complexities of issues to do with time and place, with nostalgia and site, are at the root of the installations and events presented here at Bosigran.
‘ There is something magical about this place, a chicken has chanced in to the Visitor Centre to mop up cake crumbs… and so we go from art to life. Boundaries seem superfluous. And art like life is multi-layered and has many facets, questions and dichotomies. Conversation, dialogue, people and the social become the space of my work…
Many local people say they feel like they are living in a museum. And yet people also express a wish that things remain unchanged… the landscape at Bosigran has a history of being worked that stretches back to the bronze age several thousand years ago. It is one of the oldest farmed and mined landscapes anywhere in the world. And yet today traditional industries have either gone or are under threat. Today’s commercial product is yesterday’s heritage.
Are there dangers in creating a heritage product, in atrophying the past, consolidating it and setting it in cement for ever…? The tendency to romanticise, to buy a bit of the dream, the rural idyll, how does this fit with a community in dire housing need? And how does the heritage product buy into this? And there again if it weren’t for our heritage and cultural product, how else would many people around here earn a living, including artists and heritage/environmental workers? And so we become complicit in something that many of us perhaps query or feel uneasy about. Dilemmas and questions that seem to have no answers…
And so I play around with heritage, with the museum…attempting to gently raise questions, very much aware that there are no satisfactory answers. It is strange that as this project has unfolded it has become clear that it is in the relationships that have been built, an old man’s dream being dreamt, the conversations that have been had, that the real work has happened.’
So the work presented here at Bosigran takes many forms from setting up a Heath Gathering, creating opportunities for dialogue amongst artists to sculptural installation and a Visitor Centre. It is the product of six months as artist-in-residence with The National Trust in West Penwith, of spending time walking the landscape, being part of the National Trust team and talking with people.'