Artist Statement.
My work explores questions of belonging and memory, old pathways and roads ahead, as they are experienced through a history of loss, dispersal and a re-weaving of frayed threads. A rope-bridge of the heart to find a way ‘home’ whatever that can mean. The act of making is influenced by the material cultures and ephemera of both the places I’m ‘from’ historically: in Co. Durham and Yorkshire, and the place I’ve lived for so long: Beitou, Taiwan. The work is more a probing into the dark – a questioning and unearthing of memory and identity, rather than an attempt at an answer. Early childhood traumatic parental bereavement marked a moment at which an uprooting began for me. The overlapping territory of multi-generational loss and migration is an ongoing source of understanding for me, as I discover both familial, community, national and international parallel experiences. In Taiwan, histories of colonial occupation, assimilation, and scattering of family history, lineage and identity have close personal relevance. In a sense, I tentatively explore the areas of communication between these issues of identity and belonging. What does it mean to belong? Where do we belong? How do we belong? How do we weave and make belonging, and make sense of broken threads and scatterings?
Contextual statement.
Weaving Belonging is a project about belonging, at sites in Taiwan and the U.K. in collaboration with family and friends and students. Early stage explorations of the project focussed on the Prisoner of War story of allied soldiers forced to work in mining camps in Taiwan, under the Japanese, and the parallel story of ‘comfort women’ who were enslaved in an equal darkness by the Japanese during WW2. I worked together with Michal Hurst MBE, director of the Taiwan POW Camps Memorial Society on early project ideas, which culminated in a public wreath offering at a memorial event in Taipei, and then a poetry reading at a second memorial event in Taipei. I also made a personal visit to a former PoW camp in central Taiwan, and left flower offerings and other gestures in memory of those who never made it home. Other outcomes of this first stage of the project were 10 weaving workshops at Weige High School in Beitou, Taipei, and production of hundreds of woven wreaths by the students, and three woven ‘stupas’ produced by my own weaving. These experieces were meaningful but illuminated for me that much of what I sought to unearth was also of a very personal nature.
Buddhist praxis underlies much of my thinking about both these wider histories and my own personal history. I became interested in using the native cabbage palms I was cultivating to stabilise damaged hillside trails that link multiple Buddhist shrines near my home, and this became a further, and ongoing outcome of the project. Buddhist symbolism also exists as a sub-surface layer, or rather a parallel reading, of the sculptures and offerings, and also ties together Buddhist communities that have deep personal links to place in Northern Britain, and links to Co. Durham mining through material site links at Conishead Priory, Ulverston – formerly the rest and respite home for County Durham miners, and now a Buddhist community I have personal links with going back almost 30 years.
Communion with, and offerings to, unseen beings, whether understood literally or as an abstraction, have remained a key element of this project throughout. Somehow, a wish to gather that which was scattered and dispersed, is something I came back to repeatedly. Knot-tying string began as a way to both count recitation of mantras on behalf of scattered beings, and as a way to represent those beings, and also became a key aspect of the ongoing project outcomes.
Returning, mid-project, to the UK, I visited key sites connected with my own family history in Co. Durham, Teesdale, the Pennines and Cumbria; Edmundbyers, Consett, Shotley Bridge, Wolsingham, Chopwell, Lanchester, Hill Top, Egglestone, Whitley Bay, Ulverston. Flowers were collected or offered in all these places as both offering and act of memory, and were gradually woven together by close family and also Buddhist community into a basket that gradually became a floral garland tying together all these individual places of continuous migration. During research, an unexpected discovery was the story of mass migration from Cornish mining communities to the same Co. Durham mines my great-grandfather and grandfather worked in, and a beckoning to explore these links in future work.
Returning again to Taiwan, 37 Taiwanese bamboo farmers hats had bamboo, pandanus leaf, cabbage palm leaves and woven string circles stitched onto them, and these were made as offerings, both for people in the community to use, and sometimes at deep locations in the volcanic Datun mountain range as offerings to unseen beings, gestures of shelter and friendship in both cases. Where the hats were left out for people to take, sometimes they had QR codes pasted inside them linking to related websites (www.junju.tw and www.robertocollinson.com).
A final outcome was a rooftop offering made overlooking the Beitou Shamaness pool, of multiple structures inspired by the multiplicity of ideas at play in this multi-layered project; a ‘spirit bus stop’, two ‘spirit baskets’ that represent a memory of ancestors but also evoke mining structures used both in Taiwan and the U.K., and libations left out for the unseen friends and guests who were invited to ‘return home’, in a gesture of friendship that binds and weaves further meaning to the idea of belonging to place.
Reflecting on the project, it feels like it has been one of journey and movement through landscape, and attempts at interacting in those landscapes with unseen beings in harmonious ways, whether memorial gesture, animist projection, ancestral invocation, auto-biographical yearning, or something else altogether.
Weaving cabbage palm (Cordyline fruticosa) into wreath circles. The leaf base that connects to the stem has to be split to enable weaving.
I did 10 workshops with students at Weige High School in Beitou, Taipei, weaving string-knot circles.
The workshops were a huge challenge but also a lot of fun.
Stupa (2025). Bamboo, pandan leaf, Cordyline leaf, bamboo leaf, cotton thread, aluminium wire. 40cm x 30cm.
Many of the knot circles I wove were then woven into three 40x30cm Buddhist stupas, which contain calligraphic Ranjana-script mantras written by a Mongolian Buddhist monk, Changkya Hutuktu, who previously lived here in Beitou many years ago. Stupas, within Buddhism, represent enlightenment, and are seen as having a non-human agency that can heal an environment and the beings who live in it, sending out positive energy in all directions. Another hat was also left at the memorial stupa to Changkya Hutuktu, on the hillside nearby, as an offering.
My mum weaving plants into the flower basket used to make flower offerings in the UK, At my sister’s house in Whitley Bay.
My mum, sister, daughter and myself travelled to Edmundbyers to visit Home Farm, where we had first come into the world, and where my dad’s family were tenant farmers. After my parents had my sister and me, we lived in the small house just next to Home Farm, while my Nana and uncles were still living inside Home Farm. Here my sister and daughter are weaving a daisy chain that would later be added to the flower basket.
While I was back at my mums I went through some old books that belonged to my dad. He died when I was 11 and all our lives were upturned.
Flower offerings at Home Farm, Edmundbyers, to those who watch over us.
My grandad James Bayles “J.B.” Collinson died in 1984, when I was just 4, and I never knew him. He was a local bus driver before he started Collinson Bros. of Chopwell, a haulage company, with his brother. My Uncle Roy was showing me this photo at his house in Medomsley Road, Consett. I had a long, recorded, conversation with Roy about family, that helped guide my own understanding of how I belong.
We continued collecting flowers and plants as we travelled. I made a small offering outside Wodencroft, Chopwell, named after the farm where my great-grandad Alfred Collinson had previously lived. The name is still on the house, which is just down the road from Frederick street, where Great-Grandad Alfred had also lived. Alfred walked almost 40 miles from Hill Top, Egglestone, to Chopwell looking for work, which he found as a miner in Chopwell.
We travelled high up to retrace the journey Alfred had made, and continued collecting flowers and making flower offerings in honour of the memory of the sacrifices made in years gone by.
Hill Top, Egglestone. Flower Offerings. Alfred began his journey from here to Chopwell by foot. It’s high up, and a challenging landscape to exist in. Hill Top is just 6 or so miles from Low Birk Hatt, the farm of another relative; Hannah Hauxwell.
Returning to Taiwan, I continued making offerings to unseen spirits of the landscape. Offerings and prayers sometimes left as gestures in memory of the hundreds of men from British towns and villages who were forced to work in hellish POW mine camps during WW2.
Sometimes the hats were just left out as offerings for any passer by who might need some shade from the burning sun or rain. Sulfur Valley, Beitou. Volcanic geothermal hotspring source, and former Sulphur mine site, mined by British company Tait and Co. during the early period of Japanese occupation.
Longfenggu Geothermal zone. Hotspring source and former Tait and Co. Sulphur mine. Hats were also left by sulphuric vents.
Hat offering to the deities and spirits of Longfenggu. Sulphur vent covered in sulphur crystals and pervaded by sulphuric gases.
Hat left under screw-pine Pandanus at Shalun beach, Tamsui, Taiwan, for any passersby to use.
Hat at Shalun beach.
Hat offering left near Datun Falls, Datun Mountain range.
Qianbanling bus stop, Zhishan Rd. Hat left for anyone waiting for a bus.
Hat and music offering left on Phoenix Mountain trail from my home to Changkya stupa. The beautiful song of the Newcastle folk duo Watersmeet was played into the forest here, with their kind permission to share here, and at many of the other sites shown as another form of offering woven into the project, linking back to the north-east of the UK. An offering linking across huge distances. https://watersmeetmusic.bandcamp.com/track/carried-away
Hat offering at Mongolian monk Changkya Hutuktu stupa, Phoenix Mountain trail.
Hat left at Ten Gu An Historical Park in Beitou – the location of the very first Japanese Onsen in Beitou, Taiwan during Japanese rule. This hat stayed here over a week and survived a typhoon, before finally being taken (and still used) by an old grandma who lives on my street. I now see her using the hat every morning for her walk.
Hat left in bamboo clump directly below my apartment and the Atami Hotel, Xin Beitou. This hat amused many tourists until finally someone took it.
Hat left at the Shamaness pool – main hotspring source and reputed mystical and spiritual shrine of the Ketagalan Pitauuw (Shamaness) from which the sinicised name “Beitou” is derived from the Indigenous Katagalan word Pitauuw.
These three gentlemen immediately picked up the hat, only a couple of minutes after I had left it there, and then approached me and asked me to take a photo of them wearing it. The response to the hats was immediate, natural at this site.
Visitors playing with the hat.
Spirit basket offering. Apartment rooftop overlooking Shamaness pool. This site, not only my home, became the central nexus of both making the Taiwan offerings, but also of sharing the project publicly with Aaron and his sons as active participants in the project. This final offering is made to unseen guests. The audience here is non-human.
Rare red cabbage palm from central Nantou mountains.
Spirit bus stop. This bus blind is from an old 1950s or 60s bus that drove the Chopwell route. There’s every chance that my grandad J.B. drove this bus. Here it is incorporated into a “bus stop” for the spirits who might linger here after WW2 and want to find a way home, and also as an offering to the Buddhas, a wish and intention in my heart.
Taiwanese soft drink “CC Lemon” offered at the spirit “bus stop”for unseen guests, absent friends.
Drinks for unseen guests, absent friends, along with hats for shade, and two spirit baskets. Photograph taken by Izzy Collinson 25th August 2025.
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