Sandbag Haiku

A piece about people's responses to floods. A video almost at floor level in a darkened cellar hovers over sandbags stencilled with a poem. As the film fades to darkness, the words on the sandbags become more prominent. ‘Sandbag Haiku’ was inspired by the 10th anniversary of the Lewes Floods in 2010 and involved gathering phrases: local people were invited to write a word or phrase summing up their feelings about the flood onto a card then posted anonymously into a box. These were then typed on to postcards and rearranged to form a series of haiku-like poems. During an AA2A residency at Kingston University I experimented with photographing and filming some of those phrases bleeding out into water. Part way through this period, the title gained a poignant irony after the terrible post-earthquake floods in Japan. The scale was so large and the suffering so great that I could not presume to do more than make an oblique reference to it through appropriating a TV journalist's phrase which, combined with the phrases I had already gathered locally, inspired the 'haiku' that forms part of the installation: On a journey To a place No longer there A bright moon shone