Aletheia: Widecombe-in-the-Moor Residency

Summary

Final outcome of a 10-day residency at Southcombe Barn, Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Dartmoor, awarded by Arts University Plymouth and curator Vashti Casinelli, RCA. Living in the Old Piggery and walking the moor each morning, Liza Jane Stumbke developed an embedded, site-responsive body of work culminating in a 9-foot square cyanotype-and-glass piece divided into the nine map squares surrounding the studio.

A Palimpsest of Dartmoor

This project excavates layered memory from place. Daily walks gathered traces—light, weather, path, and parish—translated into a grid that mirrors the OS map squares around Southcombe Barn. Cyanotype's sun-developed chemistry binds time to surface; glass carries that impression as something both fragile and enduring. The nine panels read as a single field while holding distinct localities, forming a palimpsest of the residency's observations, conversations, and histories.

A sketchbook produced on site documents tests, exposure notes, rubbings, and composition studies. Experimental works made during the residency informed scale, tonal range, and the final division of the whole into a 3×3 map of the studio's nine of the overall 365 grid squares that make up Dartmoor.