Stay Where You Are was a year-long project in which four award-winning artists and writers, known for their wide-ranging travels across the surface of the planet or through the realm of the imagination, paused to reflect on the appeal of the local. Foregoing the far horizon for the close-at-hand, artist-composer Jem Finer, poet Lavinia Greenlaw, essayist Jay Griffiths and filmmaker Ben Rivers each developed works that focus on their home environment, that highlight places (or people) that are near (and dear) to them, or that revisit themes whose atmosphere or subject represents a still point in an ever-turning world.

Launched in the midst of winter, when the urge to hole up and stay put is strong, and when we often feel a need to pare back from the excesses of the end of the year, the project started from small beginnings, but grew, in extent and ambition, throughout the course of 2014, with public presentations at seasonal points of the calendar and at different venues around the UK. As it did so, it nevertheless stayed true to the guiding premise of the project’s title: namely, to take stock of, and take pleasure in, our immediate surroundings. A reminder that the world around us tends to reveal more of itself when we slow things to a quieter pace, this heightened awareness of the here-and-now not only prompts us to look more closely at what we sometimes take for granted but might also encourage us to make the most of what we have.