Exploring The John Weld Collection
In this blog, Artist and Filmmaker Ian Nesbitt and Artist Ruth Levene discuss their research into the John Weld Collection as the basis for a new commission. The Harris and In Certain Places is working in partnership on this commission.
We’ve just begun research into a new commission for The Harris, looking into the John Weld archive, the results of which will be displayed when the museum re-opens in 2025.
In 2017, we worked on a project called ‘The Precarious Landscape’. Commissioned by In Certain Places, the project invited a number of artists to make work that cumulatively explored expansive and collective ways of examining and understanding Preston’s changing landscape. Our contribution manifested as a 5-day walk, a bus tour and a community exhibition in a new housing development.
Exhibition: The Precarious Landscape
During our research for this project, we learnt about The John Weld Collection in The Harris Archives through a meeting with Linda Sever (Course Leader in Documentary Film Production at UCLan and author of ‘Lancashire’s Sacred Landscapes’) and couldn’t resist taking a look. What we found was deeply intriguing.
John Weld (1813 – 1888) was a Victorian landowner, antiquarian, naturalist, and amateur painter who lived at Leagram Hall near Chipping. During his lifetime, he made detailed records of many aspects of his local area and beyond. In the Harris archive, we found drawings and paintings of agricultural buildings and church architecture, botanical drawings of birds, mammals and sea creatures seen on his travels around the UK and Europe, but, most interestingly to us, a thick ledger with ‘Flora and Fauna of Leagram and neighbourhood’ written on the cover in faded ink.
On opening the tome, very carefully of course, it begins with the title: ‘A list of birds observed or taken in the neighbourhood of Leagram within four or five miles from the hall’. What follows is an incredibly detailed set of observations relating to bird sightings and shootings of 112 different species over a period of over fifty years from 1836 until his death in 1888.
We used this list as the basis for an artwork; audio recordings played the songs of the birds listed by Weld, and were displayed in the garden of the house. This appeared alongside contributions from residents of Preston and its surrounding villages and was staged in a vacant plot on the Story Homes Waterside development in Cottam. Titled ‘Plot 188: Notes From a Precarious Landscape’, it was our culminating exhibition, and explored the relationships between people and place, city and surrounding landscape, through the lens of the people who live and work in Preston and included prints, poems, maps, sound recordings, and photographs. The exhibition also housed watercolour paintings by Weld. More details can be found on Ruth’s website: https://ruthlevene.co.uk/works/the-precarious-landscape/
Fast forward six years, and we’re back in the archive again. This time we’ve invited contemporary ornithologists, conservationists and historians amongst others to look at the Leagram volume, in the hope that we can shed some contemporary light on the information that it holds. To help us do so, we have Ann, a wonderful volunteer from the Harris, transcribing Weld’s often difficult to read script for us. We’ve also had offers from Leagram locals to guide us around the locality, within the 5-mile radius area Weld refers to, so that we can better understand the lay of the land. As artists, we’ve always used walking and being present in the land as a primary research method, so this is very exciting.
It’s very early days, but ideas and questions are beginning to emerge. What were the social/scientific/folkloric contexts for John Weld’s work during his lifetime? One question we keep coming back to if we add what we know of the contemporary picture to Weld’s notes from 150 years ago, what can this tell us about how things might look 150 years in the future?
Watch this space!
Harris Your Place
Harris Your Place is a £16 million project set to restore and reimagine the Harris for 21st-century audiences as a cultural learning space. The aim of this project is to protect the building and the architecture for future generations whilst enhancing accessibility options and positioning the Harris as a community hub for Preston and Lancashire.
The capital project is more than simply preserving this much-loved building; Harris wants to ensure that it remains a vibrant heart of the community. A place where people want to spend their time.
