'Oxon Pilgrimage'

Memory sites or les lieux de mémoire as Pierre Nora discussed in his 'Between Memory and History' article (1989:07), featured in the special edition (No.26) of the Representations Journal on memory and counter-memory, is where "memory crystallises and secretes itself at a particular historical moment". Nora observes that with the diminishing of societies such as peasant cultures through the 'movement of democratization and mass culture on a global scale', collective memories have fractured. Thus the depletion of family reserves of memory the phenomenon of lieux de mémoire now becomes the 'embodiment of memory in certain sites where a sense of historical continuity persists' because real environments of memory (people) have passed and no longer exist.  

A memory site of value for me on a personal level is a particular area in south Oxfordshire. Within the rural hamlets of Russell's Water, Maidensgrove and Pishill, lay memories of ancestors. The Norman church on the hilltop at Pishill houses two plaques bearing the names of my great uncles Aaron and William Gorton who lost their lives fighting in the first World War. My deceased mother recounted family stories of the uncles she never met of which I can no longer recall. However, their stories (whether true or false) fill my thoughts on entering the lieu de mémoire. These sons of farm labourers took on real characters for me to communicate with on an artistic level.

My new work Oxon Pilgrimage, 2018 records the journey I took this spring to walk in the footsteps of my ancestors and visited sites which have a connection to my family's stories. Accompanying me were two specific artworks, puppets and crows, and together we ventured to these familial lands, marking the occasion through photographs and written records. The pond at Russell's Water has a significance for me. You may remember a scene from the iconic 1968 film Chitty, Chitty, Bang, Bang (dir: Ken Hughes) in which the character Truly Scrumptious swerves her car (CUB 1) narrowly missing truanting school children Jeremy and Jemima Potts and runs into the duck pond. I drove to this very site and placed one of my puppets and a crow in the exact position of the film still shown. The significance of this act was that I had encountered embodied memories through this specific site.  

Film Still: Truly Scrumptious
driving into the duck pond
at Russell's Water. 

Leiu de mémoire (Chitty) 2018
Sara Jayne Harris

Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang

My mother was born and raised in Russell's Water, playing at the duck pond as a child. My father worked as a scenic joiner (chippy) on this film and constructed Chitty Chitty Bang Bang's seating boat structures (there were six versions of this car for filming). Chitty was filmed around the the locality of Russell's Water, Maidensgrove, and Nettlebed. The film was loosely based on Ian Fleming's 1964 children's fantasy novel Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang: The Magical Car. My maternal ancestor worked at the Fleming Family residence, Joyce Grove in Nettlebed.