For this residency project, Laura was interested in developing and recording sites of transmission and exchange. The core impetus was to document plague stone sites as a visual metaphor and framework to make new expanded cinema works. 

 

According to the Eighteenth-century historian William Hutton: ‘In plague-stricken seventeenth-century England, the need to quarantine sufferers of the disease produced a number of unusual social conventions. Among these was the establishment of so-called plague stones, which served as meeting places for, and boundaries between, the healthy and the sick within an affected community. In addition to serving as a site for exchanging messages, the stones also functioned as a point of commerce where goods were left for the ill, who in turn paid for them by placing coins in a hollow carved into the top of the stone and filled with disinfecting vinegar.’ 

 

Part of the residency was also to work collaboratively with artist Luke Godden, whose own lecture performances are inspired by politics of land management, archaeology and queer histories. For Luke, plague stones and their associated histories are an ongoing research project which focuses on investigations of ancient monuments, artifacts and other evidence which bear links to pandemics, epidemics and other outbreaks of disease. Research by Luke has been largely encouraged by his grandmother, writer and historian Maggie B Dickinson. Most of the findings have been focused on locations in the northwest of England; Lancashire, Cumbria, and the Yorkshire Dales. From medieval stone crosses, ancient packhorse routes and Viking tombstones - hunting plague stones opens a portal to histories that show us how life before convenience shaped landscapes and communities. Issues around faith, grief and transformation emerge in reflections.