the lying stones

My family (the 'Vehro's) were Travellers who lived outside borders and did not recognize land ownership. Within living memory Travellers, Roma and Gypsies encamped and held Fairs on Ilkley Moor. IMy work is situated within the 'Heritage' landscape of Ilkley Moor and specifically the prehistoric cup and ring marked rock the ‘Badger Stone’. I am investigating how identity can be navigated in response to the containment or colonization of space by mapping. Each marked stone is a Statutory Scheduled Monument and has an invisible and liminal two-metre boundary . It is therefore illegal to leave ‘litter’ or in any way touch or deface the rock. My work is a resistant response to what I term 'heritage control' as the methods employed by the heritage industry for land management and access to ancient monuments. My photograph depicts the remnants of a performance whereby fragile paper printed with text and symbols becomes 'stone'. Mine is a mapping practice that navigates an in-between hybrid space between the ‘official’ heritage maps and my own ‘conceptual' maps containing inhabitant knowledge. I am engendering a new moment in a social network of human relationships and migration symbolized by the movement between the human figure and the 'stone' . I am reclaiming ancient ritual place as live art and the moor as my home.