Creative Community: What I Did On My Summer Holiday by Casey Orr

This summer I travelled from my home in Armley to my home in America, to Delaware, where I'm from. But instead of doing what I usually do, a day of travelling by car and plane over the Pennines and then the North Atlantic Ocean, I rode my bicycle from my house down the old path at the end of Tower Lane, which is the path that was taken by the workers of Gotts Mill, and then the 127 miles along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal, to Liverpool where I boarded a container ship. 9 days and 3000 miles later I arrived in the small port town of Chester, Pennsylvania, my birthplace.

This idea of home, searching for home, wondering where home is, is complicated. Often wrapped up in childhood, nostalgia, and dreams, home becomes something longed for, even for those who have never left theirs. Through this journey I wanted to get a real understanding of the distance from one home to the other and to try to understand the hugeness of the North Atlantic Ocean. Air travel is commonplace, and communication has become so sophisticated that real distance takes on a different meaning, so as to become practically invisible; I swap baby pictures and anecdotes with my friends and family in America as if we're all sitting at the kitchen table.

I'm a photographer and my pictures about this journey are called By Water. By Water is about how water connects us, how it linked us historically through wool, cotton, tobacco, and slavery and how it links us now through the often invisible movements of goods. The photographs are also about time. Killing time, wasting time, and, in some cases, doing time. I've lived in leeds for 14 years and my work as a photographer is often responding to the fact that I no longer live in America. I'm always trying to make sense of how I got here and why I stay.

Oh, and by the way, I flew back.