Llanarmon felt like a place of stone and water, with its river and stream, nestled in Welsh rain dappled hills, its stone buildings and walls seemingly sprung from the rock that surrounds it. Stone seemed to summarise Llanarmon to us, and the decision to take stones as the starting point reflected a concern to express the essence of a place, its geographic and geological roots.

Whether intentionally or not we found that the sites in Scotland where we chose to place the stones also had this relationship to water – rivers, sea, lochs and waterfalls. The similarities between the two situations also exposed differences – the small scale of Llanarmon compared to the wider reaches of the locations in the Highlands, the exposure and remoteness of some sites compared to the localised remit of the village where we were to return with our Scottish finds.

We envisaged the project as an ‘exchange programme’; a simple taking and returning of similar objects and through the agency of travel transforming them. What we discovered was that we were forming two works from one –our activities in Scotland and their documentation forming a significant counter point to the experience that we hoped to generate during the Inside Out exhibition. Again, connections and differences abound – between the experience of a real place and one that can only be imagined, between seeing things in the ‘here and now’ and looking at what was ‘there and then’, between small scale, pedestrian travel and that which involves greater time and distances.

We were also interested to play with the notions of abandonment and discovery, between something removed and all but lost, but recalled through a tenuous reference, in photographs and maps to a place that you may or may not be able to find again and the potential to explore and find new things in a familiar setting. It was our intention to make a work for Llanarmon that involved an investigation of the place, a kind of treasure hunt where visitors would be encouraged to go looking in some depth around the village to discover the stones, and in so doing maybe discover other things of interest too.