Speaking to Maps, March - December 2024
Speaking to Maps presents new artwork created by students from Priory School and Portsmouth Grammar School working with artists Eva Jonas and Maya Brasington. Together the artists and students explored the complex and entangled history of Caribbean prisoners of war that were held at Portchester Castle during the late 18th century.
The exhibition is presented across three wooden structures that holds the students’ work on layered fabric, allowing you to peer through webs of process and making in light, shadow, rubbings and traces that echo the uncovering and rediscovery of remnants of the past, the exhibition also presents mapping undertaken by students creating a collaborative map that emphasises the sensorial method of ‘feeling out’ and encountering a space steeped in colonial history.
Using fragments of findings and loosely basing their placement on the geography of the site itself, the students’ work reflects upon ‘traditional’, western notions of cartography, instead presenting ideas of history as ever evolving, acknowledging gaps that remain unseen, untold, and lost.
A teaching resource accompanies the exhibition - Gathering and Unravelling: Recording Untold Histories.
Students took part in creative place-based exercises to gather digital, physical, and sensory responses to Portchester Castle. They were encouraged to think through places beyond the visual recognising what their own lived experience and histories bring to it. Inspired by artist Raven Chacon, we encouraged the students to replace wordings often associated with photography such as ‘shoot’ and ‘capture’ with ‘gathering’ or ‘recording’ to highlight photography’s extractive history.
Students from Priory School were invited to ruminate on ways we record a place beyond visual means, creating sound drawings, rubbings and recording light and shadow cast in and around the walls.
Students from PGS were invited to center non-human things from the site in their projects, using them as vessels to express histories and perspectives. Seawater from the sea surrounding the castle was used to create chemograms, objects collected on the shoreline and castle interior were layered to create physical encounters.
Scans made by Arwen and Alice from PGS.