Lynette Willoughby – Artist ….

David Honeybone and my installation in St Edmund’s church as part of Roundhay Artists Open Studios this bank holiday Monday and Tuesday – a completely collaborative site specific piece of work – a lot of work but great fun and very well received.

Come with us on a journey ‘From My house to Your House’: a familiar journey, a frequent journey, and an essential journey to enable us to meet, talk and work together. But this time stop, look and ask, ‘What have I not noticed before, what surprises me, what seems strange, what do I think of when I look afresh at such a routine part of my daily life?’

Start at my house, and look up above the leaves and see the telegraph poles we take for granted. Keep looking up and there is a world full of chimneys. The woods are full of light and pattern and possibilities but history is never far away – Dean’s Quarry and Gipton spa, the thrill of posting proper letters – and who remembers the Astoria, and whom you danced with there? The world of today presses in with its invitation to consume, the ever present infrastructure and detritus of urban life pushing back the natural world. Restoratives to body and soul: elegant art-deco fish and chips and much loved books and a library that has been an anchor in our lives. Nearing your house, look down: stone and incongruous tarmac tell a hidden story; then the end of the journey which is just the beginning of another. From My House to Your House is an experiment. It draws on the ideas of psycho-geography, investigating our responses to the rich urban environment between our two homes and using the journey as a metaphor for our friendship and artistic collaboration. Travelling between our two homes, we rarely stopped to think about the ordinary /everyday detail of the route. Walking it instead of driving, and sketching, photographing and collecting objects along the way, enabled us to respond to the familiar in ways unrestricted by the necessity of simply getting from one place to another. Our different responses to different sections of the journey led us to start developing a number of distinct pieces. Realising that this side altar at St Edmund’s had 15 separate panels gave us the idea of dividing the route into 15 sections and making a piece for each. The process of making them is at the heart of the project: we worked simultaneously, side by side, in the studio on developing and executing every panel. What you see is entirely the result of a shared process.