In a widening field Journeys in Body and Imagination Miranda Tufnell and Chris Crickmay write that:

‘The stories of our lives include many places -places lived in, visited, remembered, heard of, and dreamed about. Some’ of these hold a special significance -the place we were born, the place we’ regard as home, places we love to go, places we avoid. Every place is many places -for you and for me each place will be different’

Thinking back I consider my high school experience. I was the new girl at school five times, in the five years of my senior education from 11 – 16. In each new place and school I began with a slightly different version of myself, reflecting and learning from each past experience to take forward into the next. I got better at it. On the first day of each new school year, I would stand at the front of a class of strangers and the teacher would introduce me as the new girl. This is Ria, she has moved from….lets all welcome her. I would look up at the thirty faces staring back at me and feel nervous and embarrassed and hope for a friendly smile or gesture, someone to sit next to, someone to have lunch with, a group who would invite me into their already established clic. It still kind of feels that way for me, when beginning in a new place, standing in the presence of strangers and being the new girl.

I would make good friends, and then I would leave again. I would try to stay in touch, but the momentum would fade as I kept moving and there became more and more people to keep in touch with which became difficult to keep up. When I finished school, I just kept moving. I didn’t really know where to go or where to begin so on impulse one day I jumped on a train, I had no money and no ticket but decided that I would just see where it took me and leave where ever I might end up to chance. I started in Rugby and I waited to be asked for my ticket, but no one came. I got off at Manchester, my city of birth, and although I had not lived there for a long time, it made sense to me to begin at the beginning and be in a place where I knew I could stay with family if the shit hit the fan. But on my way into the City I met strangers whom I told my story to and they invited me to Reading, so I went there for a while and met someone who invited me to Leeds, so I went there for a while. I carried on doing this until one day I became stranded in Tamworth late at night. It had been three months and my Mum was quite worried about me, so I went home.

Looking back at my naivety and the risks I took as a young woman travelling around the country, taking on the invitations of strangers, although I like to think that strangers are just friends I haven’t met yet, I can say I am much more cautious today. But there was a kind of knowing and a kind of trust and mutual agreement I could sense in people and a lure to the places they took me. I felt as though I was entrusting guardians guiding safe passages through my nomadic existence. I was on a quest, searching for a place to stay and to call my home. But at the time I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for.

Some twelve years later I initiated the Train project, a two week drift across the UK rail network by train, never leaving the stations and only stopping to change platform and direction. I slept, ate, washed, and performed on the trains and at stations for two solid weeks. I had come to realise that home had become a series of beginnings, where placelessness, in motion was my stability. Like birds flying off for the winter, their home is in between places, they have left but not yet arrived and for a while travelling is home.

My grandparents whom had migrated from Jamaica in the 60s both worked for British rail up to their retirement. There beginnings here were then invested in the connectivity of others through transportation, and it suddenly occurred to me that the trainline not only connected me to them, geographically, but to their labour and lives and our history. I was in search of more than just a place to stay, I was also looking for a way to make sense of my identity, my heritage, and my other homes.

AWingAPreyASong is a multi-platform project experimenting across artforms. But since ‘Art’ is not a career choice how is it that we become creatives?It begins with a journey of neccessity, a migration of the imagination..
I was born a cockney sparrow into London’s gutters. But from my pushchair I saw a vast colourful country inside the capitol’s free galleries and museums. This was my introduction to the world of the artist’s imagination and i accepted its truths without question as only the mind of a child can. I explored paintings as if I was looking through glazed frames into real places where the mind was free to soar and the possibilities of life seemed limitless. Unconsciously I knew ‘here’ I had arrived in a land of my own. To this day I have the sense of coming home when I pass through the gates of lofty exhibition spaces. A feeling I struggle to have anywhere else, except inside the pages of a book, in the theatre, or whilst playing music or dancing. It is this sense of creative belonging that I try to share with young people as I encourage them to recognise their own call of the wild, knowing that through writing and drama they too will surely discover new lands of the imaginagion to name home.

“In 2005 I was an artist in residence at Bristol’s Empire & Commonwealth Museum where i was granted access to a rare archive of super-8 footage taken 1st October 1960 on Nigeria’s actual 1st day of independence! Editing the footage and combining with a new poem and a soundtrack composed by Nathan Ng i made a ‘moving exhibit’  in which i reflected on the sad outbreak of the Biafra War only 7yrs later. This war set the precedent for all the later conflicts which involved western oil interests and ethnic cleansing and yet inspite of the deaths of over 1 million people, today it is barely remembered or acknowledged internationally…

‘Lest we forget’ the people who came before us who fought to preserve their place on this increasingly crowded and hungry earth, and the many forced migrations that survival has required of those that struggle to find for themselves a place to call home…”
http://www.electricpavilion.org/content/roots/empire_represented/independence_day/independence_day_small.html

The man I live with is full with the love of birds
Although he no longer considers me one.
I have advised him to read Jean Rhys
The Wide Sargasso Sea

And re-acquaint himself with Mr Rochester
Who almost lost himself in the love
Of a Caribbean woman. We are a breed apart
And sometimes people can’t take too much of us

Like curry. It’s something seeing a young bird
Trilling in the wild, quite another to bring it inside
Give it a home in the front room. It’s another thing
To turn your room into a hide, watch the blue tits

And magpies vie for the titbits outside
And pin them down with your binoculars
And the desire to be able to fly. The thing
About flying is: you need wings

And to grow them you need to become
Another creature entirely. That’s when the whole
Business gets crazy.

At least we have Mr Walcott who has compared us
To swifts, we sleep on the wing
Exist on this astral plane: it’s called being a migrant.

Maggie Harris www.maggieharris.co.uk

That bird singing outside that window
early bird, late bird
bird dreaming of fandango
late night soirees on some veranda

he is remembering St Lucia, the Antilles
a fisherwoman’s ballad of the sea
light is streaming through her net
net full of singing sardines
and a hot mouth conch thinking

he’s the business but who
later that day becomes lambi
for 60 EC dollars down by the waterfront
where the cruise ships slip easy into blue

Maggie Harris www.maggieharris.co.uk