Unpublished Tour built on artist Irene Rogan’s earlier Arts Council England-funded projects, The Making of a Cultural Landscape (GFTA 2018) and Between Silence and Light (GFTA 2019) as well as the strong community links she has developed in south Copeland, and in particular in the town of Millom and its surroundings, where the former industrial landscape is undergoing a restorative process as it is reclaimed by the natural environment.
Irene Rogan at the Duddon Estuary, October 2021 (Image by John Scanlan).
Over a period of three months, from land and water, ten artists explored the hidden and inaccessible edges along the Duddon Estuary as sites for a shared creative journey. The results of their work can be seen at the Unpublished Tour website.
Unpublished Tour artists return from a journey around the Duddon, August 2021 (Image by John Scanlan).
My involvement in Unpublished Tour has several elements to it. In the first place, the programme of events that have been developed by Irene Rogan will form part of the focus of new research and writing on the places around the Duddon Estuary. Secondly, and more specifically, the programme has provided the opportunity to look at arts and cultural policy and practice in the region and to accompany several of the artists involved in the programme as they developed their works. This fieldwork will form the basis of future academic publications.
I have also helped to promote the project as part of my role with UCLan’s In Certain Places and broader efforts to foster partnership working that can develop the cultural ecology of the region. I was also commissioned by Irene Rogan to create the Unpublished Tour website (see screenshots above), which functions both as an archival document of the programme itself and as a means of shedding more light on on the artistic and cultural life of the the places it is concerned with, and - indeed - the places themselves.
Unpublished Tour materials.
With Irene Rogan, I also co-produced the Unpublished Tour launch event, which took place on November 27th at Millom Palladium, Cumbria, and designed project materials, including David Cooper’s zine, The Duddon Estuary: The Myriad Lines of its Relations, which was produced to coincide with the November 27th launch event.