Memory and observation

Friday May 3 to Thursday June 13, 2019, Dartington Space Gallery

An exhibition of work by Clare Heaton, Katy Oxborrow and Laura Denning: a series of moments, pauses, memories and observations drawn in very different ways and in different media. 

Clare creates felted vessels and wrappings about which she says: ‘The vessels are matted together with the moment, sentiment, memory, conversations, meetings and reveries.  The felted wrappings envelope flowers and nature, catching a memory and a moment in time…. There is a magic in the making, an alchemy, an unpredictability.  With the wrappings I endeavour to catch the soul of living matter, its quiddity, impression, gesture.  They become a collection of spirits, totems and small things that are other-worldly, strange, magical and enchanted.’

Katy works with various drawing media and with collage. Several of the works in this exhibition are directly drawn from trees at Dartington. ‘[Tree] bark’ she tells us ‘is like a curtain, concealing the unknown.’ This work prefigures the next exhibition in the gallery and across the estate which focuses entirely on trees and woodland and how we live with them.

Katy tells us that ‘the process of producing the works…evolves organically and is all consuming and immersive. I use the medium of painting in all its variety, combined with collage, found text, layering and mark making, to create a personal response to the natural world around me.’

Laura’s work is less figurative and more conceptual, but still rooted in the natural world. ‘Rhyne & Huish’ she tells us ‘is a long term project which seeks to uncover secrets within the Somerset landscape that can help us to be better prepared for living in a wetter world. This transdisciplinary project uses sound, moving image, photography, drawing, collaboration, experimental geography and performative ethnography as research tools.’

led by Dougald Hine, co-founder of The Dark Mountain Projectand A School Called Home,

An evening talk on Thursday June 6, 19.30 at Dartington Hall, Devon

A follow-on seminar on Friday June 7, 09.15 to 16.00 also at Dartington
(limited to 20 participants)

The past year has seen a shift in the conversation around climate change, a new urgency and a new sense of what is at stake – from the IPCC 1.5° report and the UN Secretary General’s ‘sounding the alarm’ speech, to the impact of Jem Bendell’s Deep Adaptation paper, the emergence of Extinction Rebellion and the international school strikes movement.

In mainstream political and media debate (and in the framing of international negotiations), climate change is still treated as something manageable and solvable: an obstacle that we might find our way past and continue on some pre-existing trajectory of development, progress and/or growth. Yet this story is under strain from multiple directions. What happens when it reaches a breaking point?

If ‘sustainability’ tends to end up meaning ‘sustaining our current way of living’ – where ‘our’ has never referred to more than a fraction of the global population – then what if the challenge now is to negotiate the surrender of that way of living? What can we learn from understandings of ‘surrender’ in military strategy and peace negotiations, but also in spiritual traditions and addiction treatment programmes?

Full details at https://artdotearth.org/negotiating-the-surrender-with-dougald-hine/

First Fridays happen (surprise!) on the first Friday of every month, except January. First Fridays is a gathering place for artists or anyone interested in the arts, an opportunity to share food and talk. Each month, after lunch, there is an informal presentation of work in progress by one or two artists who may be local or from far away.

You can check out details on our events listing on Facebook.

with Kari Furre and Nancy Sinclair

Join us at Dartington Hall for this residential week as we continue our explorations of relationship with landscape and liquidscape –– part of art.earth’s compelling new programme of short courses. Swimming: labour of imagination is facilitated by artist / swimmer Kari Furre and artist / swimmer Nancy Sinclair.

Five intensive days all about being in the water and exploring how creative work and creativity can be empowered, supported and inspired by the physical experience of water, and swimming in particular.

You will spend time in the water:  in the River Dart and in various nearby seas, such as Start Bay and Lannacombe Bay.  This will include swimming in the gloaming, swimming as meditation, swimming technique and tips, partying by the sea and throughout exploring your creative responses to water and to being in it.

If you have an interest in swimming and in creative practice (whether or not you are a regular practitioner in either area), then this course is for you.

Full details at https://artdotearth.org/swimming-2019/

This three-day symposium draws together a wide variety of voices to explore a wondrous heritage of woodland and forest. In celebration of 100 years of forestry in the UK it looks back at the last 100 years and looks forward to the next. We draw on the wisdom of foresters, environmental managers, policy-makers, scientists and other experts; we hear the voices of artists, writers, philosophers and others who wander and wonder in our varied British forests; and we learn from others around the world about their own cultural connections to trees, and the wood that produces some of the world’s most beautiful objects.

This event is producer in partnership with the Royal Forestry Society

Full details are here

Prof Fiona Stafford: Why trees matter

Wednesday June 19 16.00-17.00  BOOK TICKETS

Professor Fiona Stafford, Fellow and Tutor at Oxford’s Somerville College open proceedings on Wednesday afternoon with her reflections on why trees matter. Author of The Long, Long Life of Trees(Yale 2016), writer and presenter of the BBC Radio 3 series The Meaning of Trees, Prof. Stafford will remind us of the cultural importance of trees within literature and society from the 18thC on.

Prof Stafford will talk about the cultural significance of trees and how we have celebrated them in words, through cultural practice, and in our lives. Read more…

Professor Stafford studies Romantic poetry. Her research interests include Ossian, Austen, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, the Shelleys, Byron, Heaney, Carson, literature of the Romantic period, the literature of place, nature writing (old and new), Scottish poetry after 1700, dialogues between English, Irish and Scottish literature, literature and the visual arts, and contemporary poetry.

Tickets are limited. Seats available in the balcony only (except to those with limited mobility). BOOK TICKETS

This event is part of the Evolving the Forest international conference, June 19-21.

A conversation between Sir Harry Studholme (Chair of the Forestry Commission), Beccy Speight (CEO of Woodland Trust) and architect and broadcaster Piers Taylor(Invisible Studio Architects) about the future of forestry in the UK, why we love trees, and how we must learn to live differently with them.

Three of the most important voices in the UK in any discussion about how we live with trees, how we use them and how we love them. Sir Harry Studholme has been at the forefront of environmental thinking and policy-making for 2o years and in 2010 conducted the Independent Forestry Panel report on the future of the UK’s state-owned forests (with the Bishop of Liverpool) after the government announced plans to sell off the British state forests; Beccy Speight @WTBeccy spent many years with National Trust before joining the Woodland Trust as CEO in 2014. She, too, has been involved as a policy-maker in helping to shape how we view and respect our woodland and public spaces within nature. Piers Taylor@invisiblstudio is founder and CEO of Invisible Studio, a radical design firm that encapsulates Taylor’s illustrious and wide-ranging career as an architect and academic. Invisible Studio ‘aims to be a different organisation…; we operate through collaboration, experimentation, research and education. Probably best known as the writer and presenter of BBC2’s The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, Taylor and Invisible Studio was also the subject of a recent (Jan 2019) feature in The Guardian.

Tickets are limited. Seats available in the balcony only (except to those with limited mobility).  BOOK TICKETS

This event is part of the Evolving the Forest international conference, June 19-21.

Prof Kathy Willis CBE: The framing of the UK’s forests: past, present and future

The NDG James Memorial Lecture 2019 from the Royal Forestry Society

Thursday June 20, 14:15 to 15:30  BOOK TICKETS

Policies to manage, conserve and enhance forests have seen a dramatic shift in their framing over the past decade.  Terms such as “natural capital” and “nature’s contribution to people” are now commonly used. The focus of this framing is upon determining those aspects of forests that underpin important societal benefits. These range, for example, from identifying their role for carbon sequestration and equitable climates, to those that prevent soil erosion and reduce flood risk potential. There is also an emerging interest in the value of forests for underpinning important physical and mental well-being benefits.

Tickets are limited. Seats available in the balcony only (except to those with limited mobility).

This event is part of the Evolving the Forest international conference, June 19-21.  BOOK TICKETS

with Camilla Nelson and Alex Metcalf

Branching Out explores sound, movement, mark- and language-making exercises with trees to open new dimensions in your creative practice. We will expand your awareness of what human and tree bodies are and do – in and of themselves and in relation to each other – in order to develop new ideas and forms of creative expression with trees. After introducing you to a range of tree-listening, language, mark-making, sound, installation and performance techniques we will invite you to combine two or three methods to trial solo/collaborative works and ideas for sharing and discussion. The aim of these three days is to support you to deepen and broaden your understanding of how trees work and your relationship with them through a creative being-with-trees.

The first evening will be largely introductory, getting to know each other and giving a sense of context. Saturday and Sunday will be intensive workshop days with time to share and reflect in the evenings. Monday offers time to draw on new techniques, experiment and play in a supported environment with the opportunity for one-to-one sessions and a final sharing and feedback before we part ways. Our aim is to offer a range of new approaches and to create a supportive community that will be of continuing benefit to you beyond the three days of this course.

Exercises will encourage participants to think with and through their bodies (and other supportive technologies) to explore the relationship between physical form and gesture, mark-making and writing, sound and speech – between humans and trees. We will use prompts inspired by Tim Knowles and Andy Goldsworthy, the embodied work of Open Spaces and TWIG dances of Malaika Sarco-Thomas, alongside imaginative work with root systems and tree communication networks. All experiments are grounded in Alex Metcalf’s extended Tree Listening research and Camilla Nelson’s in depth study of human language and its relationship with the gesture, sound and mark-making capacity of trees. Join us for a rich three days of working creatively with trees!

Full details at https://artdotearth.org/branching-out/