The Place Where I Live

At the end of 2019, inspired by some rather wonderful 15th Century atlases housed within York Minster Archives and taking inspiration from our beautiful city, we started a Community Art project entitled “The Place Where I Live”. We asked our tutors to complete projects in class based upon this theme, and planned one ‘small’ group piece, where we asked local people to design a small section of our map of York.

Sadly, COVID hit after just one workshop, and lockdown forced us to pause our plans. As it became clear that we would be in this situation for a while, we tentatively moved forward by meeting in very small groups, over Zoom, and slowly chipping away at the city and surrounding areas.

Much of this piece has been created in lockdown. Participants were sent an A5 piece of watercolour paper, with roads and rivers lightly traced onto it. We asked everyone to maintain these features, and shared some resources to give people ideas, but encouraged everyone to be as inventive as possible in terms of the imagery and symbols they used.

The rest as they say… was up to them!