ABSTRACT
The location of the LYC Museum and Art Gallery at the village of Banks in rural north Cumbria is close by the Northumberland and Scottish borders, site of a longstanding intermingling of social and cultural relations, skills and resources. This chapter views the practices, networks and notion of place with which the artist and curator Li Yuan-chia was associated throughout the 1970s in terms of an expanded geographical and conceptual process of ‘cross-bordering’. Through its activities and interconnections, the LYC appears as a hybrid borderland site, a meeting place of different cultures of time and place, mingling ideals of community through national and international conceptual, environmental and land art practices and local skills and craft traditions. Viewing the LYC in this context is to depart from any sense of its rural location as remote or marginal. Here, as with some later examples, a more positive rurality is proposed. All of this speaks precisely to the lived experience of those inhabiting this ‘soft border’ or borderland region.
