LOCAL SENSES
EMBODIED PSYCHO-CARTOGRAPHY
LOCAL SENSES' MEMBERS CONJURING SENSORY REFLECTIONS IN DEPTFORD'S RAILWAY ARCHES
LOCAL SENSES collective are Leonie Abrahamson, Nathan Bather, Geoff Clark, Benjamin Jenner, Rikki Jodelko, Natanya Mark, Lizzie Nichols, Colin Palgrave, and Lesley Palgrave.
The LOCAL SENSES collective was formed in 2017 from a series of self-initiated creative workshops for people undergoing changes to their vision. Since then the group has acquired new members, meeting regularly to nurture a sense of community through peer-learning, shared experience, and collective discovery. Please click on the tabs at the top of the page to explore our work.
Image details: Still capture from the film "Mapping in Lewisham", by Nathan Bather. Access the whole of this film via the "Mapping in Lewisham" page.
Since 2019, the collective's focus has been on generating sensory reflections of the local environment, walking, talking and thinking through the streets, parks, churchyards, play areas, railway arches and creeks that populate that space. Through this process, the collective productively use their individual relationship with vision as a prompt to question the various ways in which a sense of the local might be established. Wondering at the relation between psychic and social space, between what is seen, smelt, tasted, heard or felt with the body, the group question how these sensations might be channelled to effect journeys in the mind.
In order to share this work beyond the group, the collective conduct sensory walks where they re-present their interaction with the terrain through the reading of poems, the playing of songs, the telling of tales, and the handling of alternative cartographies.