Isabella Streffen

In August 2009, Isabella was appointed as lead artist for Hadrian’s Wall World Heritage Site working in collaboration with Inspire Northumberland and Hadrian’s Wall Heritage Ltd to respond to Britain’s largest and greatest heritage structure.
Having travelled the Wall, which extends 150 miles from South Shields on the East coast to Ravenglass on the West coast of Cumbria, and discovering the diverse and rich heritage that surrounds Hadrian’s Wall and the concept of the Roman Frontier, she has developed a proposal for a number of works. Her responses to the heritage, landscape and physical presence of the Wall and architecture along the Wall are the base for this creative brief.

The developed proposals incorporated concepts of military strategics; language; international frontiers; sites of boundary invisible and visible; and reconstruction, and have resulted in installations, film and multi-spectral imaging, a limited edition print, and a performance piece, documentation of which is currently being collected into a limited edition artist’s book. The book will be available in 2012.

“Kipling’s poignant poem recounting the plea of a Roman centurion begging not to be sent back to Rome after forty years of service ‘from Vectis to the Wall’ has haunted me for over twenty years. It’s a reminder of people making homes far away from their natal lands, of daily experience in a landscape that is both exquisite and unforgiving, and of military power.”

The images below where taken during the research and development phase of the residency between autumn/winter 2009, and are a fraction of the hundreds of images I collected during my time on the Wall.

Five Hundred Spectral Horsemen (2009)

a bright vision of glorious autumn

TEWTS – tactical exercises without troops

searching for the Truth that is out there