In the next few months we are offering a number of short courses which may be of interest. All our courses are run on the Dartington estate, a medieval rural estate in southwest England encircled by the River Dart. We use the estate as our studio, our laboratory and our meditation place.
All our short courses are a time for reflection, for renewal, for contemplation, and quite often for hard work. Meals are communal as part of the Schumacher College community, and as part of honouring being part of the community we are all asked to help with clean up after meals. Meals are made with organic ingredients grown in the College’s own gardens, and while simple are exceptional in their quality and variety. All food is vegetarian, and other dietary requirements can be catered for. Read more at https://art-earth.org.uk/our-events/short-courses/.
In general, courses last five days and begin after lunch on Day 1 (14.30) and finish by 16.00 on Day 5.
April
In April we are offering our first weekend course which runs from 17.00 on Friday April 6 to around 16.00 on Sunday April 8. The course is facilitated by artist/cultural geographer Christos Galanis, and explores creative and non-rational approaches to nourishing and caring for the land, the planet and ourselves using performative and other creative languages.
We gather at the river with our Bone Songs is an opening-up, an invitation for finding deliberation, skill, courage and authenticity within ourselves. Christos has provided three essential framing questions that form the starting point for the weekend which go to heart of the ways in which we as a society approach our relationship to the natural world and our lives.
Q. What if we allow ourselves to compost the narrative that humanity – ourselves included – are simply resource-extracting machines; a kind of cancer spreading over the planet that needs to be increasingly policed and managed?
Q. Without losing our noble and worthy impulses to analyse, manage, and fix ‘the way things are,’ can we also make space to develop and hone the beautiful creative gifts of humanity we inherit from our ancestors – our moving bodies; our voices; our hands that fashion worlds; even language itself? Our Bone Songs.
Q. Can we allow ourselves to imagine that these inherent gifts are sorely longed for and needed by the land? And might we therefore have a responsibility to craft, refine, and skilfully share these parts of ourselves in order to nourish life itself?
The course is booking now. Residential fees are £275 and non-residential £195 (including lunch and evening meal). Accommodation is in student-style single rooms with shared bathrooms. Read all the details and book at https://art-earth.org.uk/bonesongs/ There are limited places so early booking is always advised.
May
From Monday 7 to Friday 11 renowned environmental artist Chris Drury comes together with collaborator and partner writer Kay Syrad to explore ideas of context and form in Context and Form, Art and Writing. They bring together a lifetime of visual art, land art, and writing and have worked together on a number of art-text and book art projects. Chris and Kay invite you to investigate how form develops in relation to an ecological context that is local, global and seasonal. The programme days assume a regular pattern of immersion in the landscape: walking, collecting, making; reflecting and working inside, with short lectures, shared conversation and discussion, individual tuition, and private time exploring visual and/or written forms that are personal and universal. The guest artist during the week is David Buckland, founding director of Cape Farewell.
Details of the course can be found at https://art-earth.org.uk/context-and-form-art-and-writing/. In addition to the course offer, Chris has generously offered a public lecture on the evening of Wednesday June 9 which can be booked separately for £5. Limited places remain. Book at https://art-earth.org.uk/wp-admin/post.php?post=7741&action=edit
The course is booking now. Residential fees are £795 and non-residential £675 (including lunch and evening meal). Accommodation is in student-style single rooms with shared bathrooms. Hotel accommodation is available at an additional cost. See https://art-earth.org.uk/context-and-form-art-and-writing/ for all details.
Later in the month we welcome poet Alyson Hallett and dance artist Deborah Black to offer their first course together. Embodying the Line is a unique opportunity to bring two different disciplines together and allows us to ask:
What happens when we embody words and speak embodiment?
Embodying the Line invites us to discover the physicality of language and the language of being embodied. Using a range of different exercises we will develop an open awareness of what’s inside and outside of us – emotions, thoughts, words, sensations, space, time, location. This will encourage us to move through language and write the moving body and experience the connections between them.
During the course we’ll delve into what we call this radical presence as a way of deepening and expanding our awareness. We’ll open ourselves up to our myriad connections with trees, rivers, buildings, birds, sky, stones. We’ll fire and inspire the imagination with exciting writing exercises and spark new rhythms of movement with ideas that introduce us to new perspectives.
At the heart of the course is a sense of play and open enquiry. There will be time to nourish individual as well as collaborative work, time for speaking and being quiet, time for documentation and creating community. As language rises up within us, we will bring awareness to words as well as to the movements of our bodies.
The course is booking now. Residential fees are £780 and non-residential £645 (including lunch and evening meal). Accommodation is in student-style single rooms with shared bathrooms. Hotel accommodation is available at an additional cost. See https://art-earth.org.uk/embodying-the-line/ for all details.
About art.earth short courses
art.earth residential short courses are designed as intensive periods of work, reflection, quietude, and creative energy. They are not just designed for artists, although creative expression forms an important part of the activity and learning.
We take an inclusive and transformative approach to learning: this is not a hierarchical structure but one of genuine knowledge sharing and with the assumption that everyone in the room has much to learn and much to offer.
We work in the wonderful Ship Studio in Dartington Hall’s medieval courtyard. This space becomes yours for the duration of the course and how it is laid out and how it feels is very much a product of the course and those engaged in it.
Dartington is in itself an extraordinary venue. In addition to its medieval courtyard and other buildings, it is situated in a 900-acre rural estate wrapped by the River Dart in one of the UK’s most beautiful area – the South Hams of Devon. The estate is a varied ecological site, with the river and riverside, open field and woodland including some ancient woodland, managed and farmed area, formal Grade II* listed formal gardens boasting an astonishing array of native and non-native species. For almost a century the modern Dartington has been a place of societal change, of creative exploration, and of social experiment. For more information visit dartington.org.
We use this wonderful ecological environment in our courses, spending as much time outdoors as in for much of the year.
…I just want to say thank you for organising the short course for In Other Tongues. Alyson and Mat were excellent; well organised, inspirational, caring and encouraging. The evening with Alice Oswald will stay with me as a very special event. The Ship studio was a lovely venue too; and it was a privilege to be able to work in it and the surrounding gardens/grounds. I learnt a great deal, and it is still percolating.
Overall I thought the course was fabulous, not least [because of] the tighter focus on writing (with support from drawing/illustrating) which produced a very intense programme of practical work which was about delivering creative work.
Find out more about the venue
