‘Thin’ is an artwork made during a two-week residency in November 2024 as part of ‘Full Circle’ at VARC (Visual Art in Rural Communities). It was exhibited at VARC in September 2025. This mini residency followed a year-long residency in 2009 supported by the same organisation.

The residencies were aimed at artists unused to living and working in rural settings. Involving local communities was not mandatory but supported and encouraged. In 2009 Coutts made a series of films involving re-enactment. ‘Passing Place’ (2009), set at a remote crossroads in Northumberland near to VARC, involved scenes from six feature films, where significant moments occur at crossroads. Each was re-enacted by local people who live or work nearby and know the location well. Notes were made relating to these filming sessions where participants knew the landscape well, but not the part they were now playing within it. These notes have more recently been developed into a book titled ‘Understudies’. They were written in an effort to engage with an unfamiliar place and in acknowledgment of knowledge gaps. Over the initial residency year this writing sought to question the value of an ‘incomer’s’ knowledge, looked at how it might be possible to write of a place you have no ties to. It also explored where knowledge lies. To do so fictional communities were formed who were getting to know the idea of place and humans anew.

The artwork ‘Thin’ is a text work based on these original notes made for ‘Understudies’. It comprises a printed text broken down into individual short stanzas exhibited in a sequence deliberately broken up by other works in the exhibition. It asks audiences to be mobile and to find the continuing text if desired. ‘Thin’ contributed to the exhibition’s accompanying publication ‘Full Circle’ which includes all artists’ work in the exhibition.

• https://varc.org.uk/archive/full-circle/