Caroline Morris

Mercian Enactment Society

Saturday 23 September

Tom Long enactment No 2.

Mercian Enactment Society

The Mercian Enactment Society is sending one of their most experienced members to Penzance for ‘Tract’. The purpose of the M.E.S. is the performance or enactment in public and private of histories of many sorts. The society is interested in the locality and its stories: to use a term coined by the charity ‘Common Ground’, Local Distinctiveness. Simultaneously, the society is trying to question the role of re-enactments in the Heritage industry and our mediated experience of the past.
In Penzance, we will carefully choose a piece of local folklore or legend and create an enactment. It will involve the active participation of the audience in the heritage of their local environment through an act of ‘pilgrimage’, commemoration and ‘enactment’. We hope to bring virtually forgotten narratives to public attention whilst simultaneously nurturing local memory.

Caroline Morris graduated from University of Plymouth with a BA in Visual Arts and Dartington College of Arts with an MA in Visual Performance (Time-based Arts Practices). Since completing her MA, she has taken the Magpie Seven Museum of Curiosities and the Peddler of Talismans & Relics to a diverse range of venues across the UK (galleries, woodland, museums & railway platforms amongst others). Through a research based art practice, she explores her interest in museum and heritage practices, collections, narratives and cultural memory. Through the Mercian Enactment Society, she and her collaborator Lorna Trupec are investigating re-enactments, site specificity and vernacular narratives and customs.