Close Encounters
A collaborative pilot project commissioned by Aberdeen City Council through Historic Env. Scotland’s Heritage and Place Programme.
The project aimed to celebrate, record, and reveal the historic and contemporary stories that make up the Castlegate’s unique sense of place in the east end of Aberdeen city centre by capturing some of the social history of the area at a time when the city is on the cusp of change.
I teamed up with Aberdeen’s Smart Art Agency and photographer Steve Smith to write the proposal for the project in response to an Aberdeen City Council brief. During the research phase I ran a series of community-based workshops exploring local heritage and community relationships with place. Working in parallel with Smith’s portrait photography, I then conducted a series of audio-recorded interviews to capture a sample of individual experiences relating to the Castlegate and its heritage.
The final output for the pilot was an interactive online platform and digital map that enabled an exploration of the Castlegate through the images and stories gathered during the research phase.
The website and digital map is no longer live.
A contributing chapter in the cross-border collaborative deep mapping project Four Rivers: Deep Maps, edited by Dr. Jo Jones of Curtin University with Neil Curtis of the University of Aberdeen and published by UWAP in September 2022.
My chapter takes a narrative journey along the River Don from source to sea, exploring how the river’s ancient sacred status has shaped the region’s geography and identity through Neolithic, Pictish and early medieval histories.
“Ian Grosz takes the reader on a journey, often on foot, to the half-hidden spiritual locales of the Don. Replete with historical and archaeological resonance, his journey through road, trail, stream and field is an elemental dance of often elusive elements. Places of transformation and spirituality are never far away from the divine river. The ancient goddess endures in a looping and recursive movement that exists differently from linear formulations of time and space.”
Neil Curtis and Jo Jones, Introduction to ‘The Don: A Sacred River’ in Four Rivers, Deep Maps, pp. 21-22.
Details of the UK Book Launch can be found here.
A short film commissioned by Live Life Aberdeenshire for the 2020 Across the Grain Festival, which called for a poetic response to the Aberdeenshire Landscape.
The film is based around a dramatic, poetic response to the Hill of Barra and its stone circles. I wrote and narrated a V.O for the film, working with poet and sound artist Haworth Hodgkinson and filmmaker Martina Cammatta to produce a dream-like sequence that takes the viewer into the Aberdeenshire landscape. The film aims to evoke a tangible sense of the time held by the land.
The soundtrack by Hodgkinson takes a sample of the old Bourtie Kirk bell as its basis and incorporates ambient sounds gathered from the environment.
An independent, creative social documentary in collaboration with photographer Steve Smith.
The project was initially funded through an Aberdeen Council Creative Funding grant and then by Robert Gordon’s University to take the work to exhibition for the Aberdeen Look Again Visual Arts Festival 2019.
The exhibition told the stories of traders through images, text and audio-recorded interviews conducted during the research phase.
An international anthology of writing on Time and Change through the Aberdeen-Curtin University Alliance, edited by Wayne Price and published by PWP Curtin in 2019.
My chapter ‘Orkney: Where Past is Present’ is a reflective travelogue exploring the landscape of Orkney through the richness of its Neolithic heritage.
Groundings 