A RENOWNED Berlin-based artist - Alexandra Laykauf - who works with the fascination of film, photographs and paintings of landscapes - is currently in Essex working on a forthcoming exhibition to take place at the Focal Point Gallery.

You are invited to be part of a studio audience who will watch the live production of her film, Inventing the Landscape, which will feature as part of that exhibition.

The recording will involve a "programme of talks, performance and literature reflecting on the hidden and imagined landscapes of Essex".

It comes as part of Focal Point Gallery's huge Radical Essex project (see radicalessex.uk) and takes place at the Old Public Reading Room in Southend Central Museum, on Saturday January 13, from 2pm until 4pm.

This live filming pulls together some of the research Leykauf has been carrying out for the Artist Research Centre Fellowship in Essex.

Since July 2017, she has been visiting libraries, museums and archives of Essex as part of her investigation into the Essex landscape and the ways in which writers and artists, academics and archaeologists such as JA Baker, Seamus Heaney and Ken Worpole have sought to make sense of our shared history.

She says: "The ancient geography of Essex is one that holds within it the social and political history of our nation as a centre of trade and migration, a home of industry and innovation, radicalism and reaction. A watchful, sometimes war-like island shaped by the sea and the life of the people living at its edge.

"All this can be seen within the physical geography of the county of Essex, from the docks in the estuary to the ancient barrows and crops marks which appear fleetingly over the summer and can only be seen from the air as layers of history reaching back to the Bronze age."

The final edit of the film will feature in the artist's forthcoming big exhibition at the Focal Point Gallery and Forum Southend, titled Caprona, opening on January 20, presented in collaboration with the Artist Research Centre, Southend Museums and Libraries and Essex University.

Also involved in the filming on January 13, will be actors from the E15 Acting School, who will perform selected passages from texts chosen by Leykauf, from Journey to the Centre of the Earth to Seamus Heaney. There will also be a panel discussion between Leykauf and artists Sophie Sleigh Johnson and Melissa Gordon, who will "consider readings of landscape as an embodiment of history and a mediating image of culture".

It is free to be part of the studio audience, but booking is required via eventbrite.co.uk/e/arc-live-studio-recording-inventing-the-landscape-tickets

Southend Central Museum is in Victoria Avenue, Southend.