At the end of June 2018 I left Courtenay Street, it seemed like a good time to bring my Artist in Residence in My Own Street project to a close. As part of this closing I set up an exhibition in my house and invited my neighbours (and others) to come and see the work that I had made.
You can find out about how the project came about here
The main part of the project was an exploration of the street itself and its residents – I met with people and then made collages about those meetings.
Out of these meetings came other ideas – one to go to the pub once a month for Duchy Nites – we did this! I would take work I’d made and sometimes we’d discuss it and sometimes we’d just talk about other things. Out of these discussions came the historic exploration of the street. I picked on 1911 as the last year with freely accessible online census data and a point where many of the houses in the street had already been built.
This became the Shadow Street project. This video gives an idea of the 9 metre long drawing of all the houses in the street with all the residents standing in front of them.
Artist in Residence in My Own Street from Deborah Mason on Vimeo.
You can read more about the Shadow Street here:
In doing this research I found out all sorts of other things and as part of Inktober in 2018 I made a series of drawings that form a Pick & Choose History of Courtenay Street, Kennington and Lambeth you can read about that here and see the pictures here.
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