the word hoard

was a group of women artists who worked together in The Word Hoard from 2002 – 2009. Their work combined text, image, film and sound, through a variety of projects. The images on this page are from their final project, an installation created in 2009 entitled straying from the path, which was developed over 2 years through a variety of workshops and collaborations.

What happens when you forget your mother’s warning, wander off into the homes of bears or tuck into gingerbread cottages, lose yourself in the woods? Who or what is waiting for you in the forests, in the hills, across the river, in the castle? Are they a wolf or a witch, a beast or a bird? Will they help you or enchant you or trick you or will you trick them? Will you wear a disguise, will you discover magic, will you solve the riddles or past the tests, will you be saved or will you be devoured?

What happens when you stray from the path and stray into the story? This is where the path has taken us, into an abandoned park to dress up and drink tea, to find red shoes, to discover one of us is a witch and one of us is a princess and one of us isn’t what she seems.

We map the landscape of our childhood fairytales and enter the stories, this time as the she-wolf or this time as the wicked step-mother or this time as the ugly sister, we unravel the stories and begin again and again. Once upon a time twice upon a time three times upon a time…

Working in text, film, sound, photography and 2d and 3d making, this Close to the Bone project took fairytale as its inspiration, to encourage wandering and dreaming and transgression.

Those who strayed with us included:
Annie Beech
Stephanie Beever
Glynis Charlton
Dianne Darby
Kim Gregory
Kath Jones
Laura Mosley
Al Orange
Sarah Murphy
Clare Porter
Eleanor Rees
Liz Tolan
Sue Wood
Calderdale Young Carers Group
Calderdale Young Readers Group
Students from Newsome High School, Huddersfield