Blending found texts with fictional flights-of-fancy, THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT welds the fragmentary and appropriative techniques of Walter Benjamin and Richard Prince to the luridly carnivalesque world of pop culture and local folklore. Inspired by sporadic rambles around the old North Riding of Yorkshire, and random trawls through physical and internet archives, THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT builds into an epic (and never-ending) multi-dimensional derivé.
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT also serves as a repository of fragments, ready to be re-purposed and re-contextualised to form infinite incoherent narratives. Some of these – ranging from fiction and poetry to subject-specific explorations – are available here as BOOKS AND PDFS.
For more, see FRYUP PUBLISHING.
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT is updated daily on Instagram @northridingproject. Also follow @fryuppublishing.
There are children of all ages for whom maps possess an irresistible attraction, and you would think, perhaps, that such children become great travellers, intrepid explorers, Marco Polos to a man. It does not follow. Map-worshippers are often introspective fellows whose journeyings take them only through lands of the imagination. The Himalayas and the Kuen Lung, the Tian Shan and the Mountains of the Moon, tower together into the skies above a single planetary landscape where the pampas and the llanos, the deserts and the dark rain forests sweep into a blue distance in which the peaks of the Andes may be superimposed upon the Urals and the Caucasus. Why should such children ever step across their own doorsills? Yet it may come to them in the way of war, business or pleasure to watch new constellations rise in the night sky and to see the domes and minarets of eastern cities, the skyscrapers of the west. And what then? I can only tell you what my experience has been. First, dreams grow dim and the landscapes of imagination blur and vanish. Then, too, it becomes impossible to hold steady in the mind’s eye the lately seen realities. Lastly, the landscapes of one’s own particular patch of country grow clearer and dearer to one’s sophisticated and rather tired eyes. Although in my time I have travelled somewhat, I have few strong memories of the foreign places I have known, but, on the other hand, many vivid impressions of my own district. That district is the North Riding of Yorkshire.
Oswald Harland, Yorkshire North Riding (London: Robert Hale, 1951)
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 