![Workshop": Mair Hughes [Green willow weaving] ‘Floating river tributes' with mixed media such as willow, flax string & resin.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55639535e4b004a8dfcc2259/1631885839638-HUZ5YO958HUC0JIXSISR/6a64e764-4736-4fb6-a52c-670bde58fe4c.JPG)
Curator, Material Flow Exhibition
Museum in the Park, Stroud
September 2019
Plant Communitas (summer 2023)
Communitas [kɔmˈmuːnɪt̪äːs̠] is a Latin noun which refers to an unstructured community in which persons are equal, it also signifies the very spirit of community.
Linum
Ilka White, From my selves, 2023
Annemiek de Beer, Linum Elegy, 2023
Plant Communitas: Linum
Flax/Linen Crossings
2 - 30 September
R-Space Gallery, Lisburn
Northern Ireland Linen Biennale 2023
This exhibition highlights the aliveness and presence of the plant kingdom, attuning specifically to flax and linen for the Linen Biennale 2023. Human-plant material entanglements refer to different relations that follow from working and living with flax in its full cycle. The exhibition focuses on the ‘generosity’ of Linum usitatissimum (common flax) and the importance of inherited knowledges, local practices and intuitive relations with plants more broadly. It features artists from diverse practices, places and different times. The idea that plants (and specifically flax) provide often overlooked yet crucial communal resources is tied to the future imaginaries of place.
Artists’ work (from left) Bridget Kennedy, Tim Parry-Williams, Patricia Brien
Amanda Coppes-Martin, Impasse, 2023
Plant Communitas (5 August-30 September)
Sidney Nolan Trust, Presteigne
As part of an expansive plant turn in the cultural sphere, Plant Communitas works with artists who respond to the plant kingdom in diverse ways; as kin, as cosmic beings, as entities of radical otherness, as part of an entanglement of material relations.
Vegetal beings are considered part of an animistic world in various indigenous cultures; a world inhabited with different persons, human and nonhuman. In this case there is an important value placed on kinship relations between persons, creatures, and extending seamlessly to plants. This spectrum of tradition also includes the traditional, pre-Christian, agrarian Europe where plants and trees were also spiritual entities, this thinking has been re articulated in contemporary paganisms.
This exhibition at the Sidney Nolan Trust acknowledges and incorporates the work of Sir Sidney Nolan from his Paradise Gardens series as an important inspiration and anchor in the curatorial direction. As a touring exhibition it has different iterations and responses to the specific nuances of place and context.
Siren Elise Wilhelmsen, Nomen est Omen, 2022
Ingrid Pumayalla 2023
Madeleine Kelly, One is the loneliest number, 2022 (1 of 10 framed)
floccus exhibition
floccus | ˈflɒkəs | Latin, a 'tuft of wool', the raw material.
The floccus exhibition was part of Wool Week Stroud 2022. It emphasised the qualities of wool focusing on sustainable textile production based on ecological care, design thinking, innovative handcraft and technical practices. It featured a diversity of work from local and international talented graduating students and recently graduated practitioners at Bachelor and postgraduate levels.
Artists: Brenda Miller, Liangzi Xiao, Olivia Dunn, Emily Taylor, Emma Gannon, Polly Armond & Katinka Halland.
Dates: 27 September – 8 October 2022 / 2 Bedford Street, Stroud
Images in the exhibition series: Nettie Atkisson
Olivia Dunn
Image: Nettie Atkisson
Katinka Halland
Image: Nettie Atkisson
Brenda Miller
Image: Nettie Atkisson
Liangzi Xiao
Image: Nettie Atkisson
ARTISTS
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller lives in Gloucestershire, graduated in Creative Textiles at Bath Spa University (1996), received her MFA in Art Practice (2009) from Goldsmiths College and currently studying for a PhD at the University of Wolverhampton. She has shown moving image, textiles and installation in the UK, Europe and USA. Miller is interested in the historical representation of art through textiles, its links to craft and domesticity and its relationship to current practice. She collaborates with both professional and amateur women.
Polly Armond
Polly Armond is a textile artists and designer, studying at Manchester School of art. Specialised in weave, she is fascinated by the colour, shape, and composition of woven cloth. At present, she has learnt to use tabletop and computer-controlled Dobby looms, to experiment with different techniques and textures. She aims to preserve the ancient practise of weaving and has interned at Whitchurch Silk Mill and volunteers for the Stroudwater Textiles Trust.
Katinka Halland
Katinka Halland is a graduate from the Art Academy – Department of Contemporary Art in Bergen (2022) with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Art, where she is currently studying for the Master of Fine Arts. Halland also holds a Diploma in Fine Art from the School of Art in Bergen (2019). Her work touches upon issues related to time, decay, and the body. The work investigates these topics trough an intuitive process often resulting in three-dimensional works. Halland’s work has been presented among others at: IRGI gallery, Lithuania and The Textile Industry Museum, Salhus.
Lexy Liangzi Xiao
Born and raised in Beijing, Lexy (also known as XIAO Liangzi) is an artist and researcher, currently based in Bergen and London. She acquired a first-class Bachelor of Fine Art Photography at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, and is studying for a MA Fine Art at KMD, UiB. She mostly works with experimental analogue photographic processes, moving images, and textile. Her practice is about experiment-based repeated working process, investigating the ways to interpret pairs of paradoxical ideas around repetition, such as degradation and superposition, interruption and continuity, permanence and impermanence. She is interested in repetitive gestures, durational performance, materiality, exploring how time, perception, and repetition can produce a form of visibility and aesthetic experience. She tends to raise metaphysical questions by reviewing the produced material results, to build a connected, consistent and poetic theory system through her practice.
Olivia Dunn
Olivia Dunn is a Bath-based, constructed textile designer, specialising in machine knitting and natural dyeing. Often working across disciplines, their practice revolves around sustainability and locality, with ethical material sourcing at the forefront. Dunn graduated in 2021 from Bath Spa University with a BA (hons) Textile Design for Fashion and Interiors (1st). They are a freelance textile designer and EMERGE Studio resident in Bath.
Emma Gannon
Take a Dip in Panoramic Paradise by Emma Gannon is a knitwear collection inspired from a five-week trip through Australia. The vivid colours and distinct imagery inspired a bright, unique knitwear collection using a variety of yarns and materials. Sourcing deadstock yarns was vital for this project and including biodegradable and traceable natural yarns - such as lambswool, linen, mohair and cashmere.
Emily Taylor
Emily Taylor is a Knit Designer with a unique style who continuously pushes the boundaries within the Textile Industry. Taylor’s love for Knitwear began at College and continued to develop at University. It was at University where she had the opportunity to gain new intriguing techniques and took the initiative at an early stage due to the Covid pandemic to purchase a knit machine. It was at this time that she started to experiment with yarns and designs and teaching herself gave her the confidence to develop further a unique style in order to produce innovative knitwear samples.
Severn worlding
Exhibition 1st-10th July 2022
SVA, Stroud
Curator: Patricia Brien
Artists - Carolyn Black - Patricia Brien - Tara Downs - Su Fahy - Mair Hughes
Poetry: JLM Morton (with Oonagh Davies & Joff Elphick)
Carolyn Black, Bev ‘D’, Lydney Harbour 2021
Film still
Sound: Andrew Heath
Su Fahy, Outmoded Rituals (left)
Carolyn Black, When you call I shall come (film)
Image: Nettie Atkisson
Mair Hughes, Ffont Pumlumon 2022
Image: Nettie Atkisson
With light streaking through the Severn silt painted windows
Patricia Brien, Nuclear discs detail from ‘Spent, nuclear crone, Magnoxia (2022)
Image: Nettie Atkisson
Patricia Brien, ‘Spent, nuclear crone, Magnoxia
Background: Offering, Mother, CVDA
Image: Nettie Atkisson
JLM Morton with The Phonograph Collective
Severn worlding
The Stroudwaters meet the River Severn downstream from Gloucester and as they merge with the larger body of water, narratives of local ecologies commingle in passages of universal substance. This exhibition considers the imaginaries of the tributary River Frome (and its constructed canal systems) from multiple valley sources and their deep time convergence with the River Severn. It equally considers rivers as liminal spaces, sites of comings and goings; partings and mergings; banks that may be perceived as divided but equally joined by a fluid entanglement of ecosystems and cultural ecologies.
This collection of creative responses draws on the sense and experience of place as well as verdant local and archetypal mythologies, pre to post-industrial undercurrents and the silence of nuclear imaginaries. In this particular storytelling, the focus is on the realm of water, mineral, deity, and the entanglements of human-world relations emerging with them; clasping at ritualised practices even as they disappear and tracing material flow in the future tense. The ‘worlding’ (after Donna Haraway) of the River Severn refers to engagingwith this active river natureculture ecosystem and the immediate encounters, embodiments, experiences, and fragments which intersect with processes and interrelated phenomena on a planetary scale.
Severn Worlding seeks to contribute to contemporary environmental and social discourse from its own spatial aperture and attunements, to imagine the Afon Hafren/River Severn and its multiple selves, visible and invisible. The works in this exhibition articulate a sense of reciprocus in becoming with the flux of the River Severn and its environs. This exhibition is a fluid and continuing speculation on the lifeworlds, materiality, rhythm, ritual and myth-making and the creative potential of attending to the multiple temporalities of place.
Artists
Carolyn Black
Carolyn Black studied BA Fine Art at University of West of England; post-grad diploma in printmaking at University of West of England and an MA Fine Art at University of Wales Institute Cardiff. Selected groups exhibitions include Black Swan Open, Frome 2022; Severn Worlding, SVA Stroud – July 2022; Wells Contemporary Arts 2021; RWA Open 2020; Earth Photo 2020 & 2022, Royal Geographical Society touring; b-side Festival 2021; Harvest Film Festival, Dorset 2019; Tide Turns Performance Lecture, Liquidscapes Conference, Dartington Hall 2018.
Patricia Brien
Patricia Brien is a curator, researcher, and artist. She is currently researching for her practice-based PhD in Environmental Humanities / Art at Bath Spa University. Her work focuses on interpreting selected objects from the Museum in the Park, Stroud connected with the heritage of Stroud scarlet cloth industry through multispecies, counter-colonial and ecofeminist curatorial approaches. She is currently working as an associate lecturer in Historical & Contextual Studies at Bath Spa University.
Tara Downs
Tara Downs designs and builds intriguing installations with Bart Sabel, under the name of Miniature Museum. Finding ways to tell site/theme-specific stories through objects and sound, combining the curious and the beautiful, they draw on skills in design, engineering, (street) theatre, museology, automata and poetic license. Since the invention of off-shoot project Radio Droogdok, she has been delving more into the field of sound – exploring the radiophonic arts, sound-scaping, experimenting playfully with theatre, producing audio installations for interacting with in public spaces, and for heritage interpretation. Her practice is informed by MAs in Social Anthropology and Museum Studies.
Su Fahy
Su Fahy is an artist working in lens – based media, principally photography, drawing, and sculpture, Fahy’s research utilises the aura of the documentary photographic image in order to interrogate and contextualise our readings of natural or architectural environments. Working principally to commission, Fahy engages with theorists, photographers and archive materials with a view to producing images for collaborative publication or exhibition. Recent projects have included Drawing on Dorset (2019 – 2021), Fugitive Testimonies (2009-2019) an artist led archive, with Oh Yeah Decca!an artist bookwork exhibited in Readers Art: Concealed, Confined and Collected, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, USA.
Mair Hughes
Mair Hughes works in sculpture and installation and is based at Stroud Valley Artspace. Her practice centres on research projects, collaborations and residencies. She completed her MA in Fine Art at Glasgow School of Art and has work held in the Royal Scottish Academy collection.
JLM Morton
JLM Morton’s work has featured in various publications, including The Rialto, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Magma, Ink Sweat & Tears, Fenland Poetry Journal, Raceme, The Sunday Telegraphand on BBC Upload, as well as in sound installations and exhibitions including ‘if trees were lone women, what would they sound like?’ at Sanctuary Lab, Galloway Forest (November 2021) and Immersions: Into the River Cam, Cambridge (June, 2022). She is poet in residence at Corinium Museum, Cirencester, and is currently finishing her first collection.
PLANT COMMUNITAS
2-24 APRIL 2022
MUSEUM IN THE PARK, STROUD
Artists:
Emma Bennett, Diana Scherer, Madeleine Kelly, Sigrid Holmwood, Louise Amelia Phelps, Gloria Petyarre, Fiona Owen, Annemiek de Beer, Sir Sidney Nolan, Ingrid Pumayalla & Cristina Flores Pescorán, poet JLM Morton, Siren Wilhelmsen, Emma Thistlewaite, Tim Parry-Williams, Mandy Coppes-Martin, Jack Everett
Madeleine Kelly (2022) One is the loneliest number (detail of series of ten)
Starch print, 31 x 27 cm, framed
One of ten framed images
Courtesy of Milani gallery, Brisbane, Australia
Communitas [kɔmˈmuːnɪt̪äːs̠] is a Latin noun which refers to an unstructured community in which persons are equal, it also signifies the very spirit of community.
Plant Communitas considers the agency of plants in the context of plant-human entanglements.
Backgrounded as inanimate, non-subjects, this exhibition features vegetal beings philosophically as ‘active’ entities. That they are backgrounded may not be surprising given the philosophical underpinnings of Western thought. Looking back to Aristotle’s tripartite division of nature, he ranked the unmoving kingdom of plants as the lowest order, the animal kingdom next and humans at the top. The philosophical hierarchy which informs Western dualistic thinking, where different often becomes the dominated and subjugated Other, frames plants as passive entities.
Numerous indigenous cultures on the other hand, consider vegetal beings as part of an animistic world, a world inhabited with different human and nonhuman actors and multiple interrelations. In this case there is an important value placed on kinship relations between human and nonhuman creatures, extending seamlessly to plants. New animism and multispecies thinking refers to those traditional and present knowledges which decentre the human, placing ‘us’ firmly in interdependencies with Others. This spectrum also includes ancient and neo-Pagan subcultures which consider plant-beings to be sentient entities and kin.
Plant Communitas seeks to reconsider the difference of plants as actors in a multispecies world, where humans are balanced in delicate ecosystems. In the Plantationocene era (one of Donna Haraway’s reconsideration and reappelation of the Anthropocene) the nature-culture hybrid of the plantation economy model sees the vegetal beings at the forefront of extraction economies and colonial capitalist endeavour. At the same time ‘exotic’ species are transported around the world as living trophies, or in collections and archives, and are in many different bioregions the much-maligned ‘invasive species’; the ‘weeds’ that need to be eradicated. Weeds, however, viewed as ‘plants out of place’ invokes the importance of a broader plant ethic of care.
Diana Scherer (2019) Interwoven #18
Plants as Persons by Matthew Hall and Plant-Thinking by Michael Marder have been influential texts in the conceptualisation and development of the exhibition. This exhibition looks to examples of plant-human relations to unfold narratives that may evoke new perspectives to the ‘backgrounded’ plant kingdom. Increasingly, Western societies are focusing on the capacity of plants to nourish, nurture, heal and medicate (often falling into colonial-capitalist tropes as knowledge is taken for profits) in equal measure to their positive impact on human wellbeing.
This exhibition was scheduled to run at Museum in the Park in April 2021 however, like many other events, it was postponed due to the Covid pandemic. This in itself highlighted the importance of gardens and green spaces experienced by many during the pandemic, but equally showed how much more inclusive ‘greening’ needs to take place in common spaces. The wilding programmes which are gaining momentum for planetary and ecosystem health have a sentiment recalling the Romanticism of the 18th Century and are matched by the explosion of plant-based lifestyles and a sense of plant fever. But the rediscovery of plants only reveals the timeless, ancient creative inspiration for artists and the arts. The magical wisdom of plants and electro-chemical signalling and communication of plants through their root systems have reignited popular interest and research into plant intelligence and the relations between plants and other creatures which are invisible to the human eye.
The exhibition features a community of artists from diverse practices, places and different times. All works involve human-plant intermingling with real and imagined vegetal beings. There is new artwork made especially for the Plant Communitas exhibition and there are selected pieces that were already in existence; some for decades, others even longer; there are samplers too, a promise of further work to come. The artists are based locally, nationally and internationally. The exhibition is accompanied by a schedule of events including artists in conversation, eco-political discussions as well as family friendly workshops and encounters. An ongoing festival of living plants hold the museum including the flourishing Walled Garden designed and maintained by devoted volunteers to the back of the gallery – a garden of delight – and in the Museum’s foreground there’s the established Stratford Park with its tall, impressive and beautiful trees once saved by a group of passionate locals from the chainsaw.
Love your weeds and hug the trees too.
Curator, Patricia Brien
Plant Communitas events
SATURDAY 2 APRIL
10:00 - 13:00 LIVE JLM Morton – Plant Communitas Writing Workshop
This writing workshop will take the Plant Communitas exhibition as inspiration, recentering plants in our imagination as active agents and sentient beings in relationship with the human and nonhuman. We’ll reimagine plants through our writing, using the work of local and international artists in the exhibition as a jumping off point to explore the central themes of plant as totem of colonial (plantation) economies, as luxury good, medicine, romantic utopia, exotic archive, invasive species, right plant in the wrong place. This fun, experimental and interactive workshop will be suitable for all levels and forms, from beginners to more advanced writers of poetry and prose.
13:30 - 15:30 LIVE Artists’ presentations and discussion Tim Parry-Williams & Siren Wilhelmsen
Tim Parry-Williams is a craft practitioner with a specialisation in weaving. He is Professor in Fine Art in the Faculty of Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen, Norway.
Siren Elise Wilhelmsen is a Norwegian designer and researcher. She is currently developing a practice-led PhD engaged in questions concerning natural resources, local production and plant-human relations in the Faculty of Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen.
WEDNESDAY 6 APRIL
17:00 ONLINE talk: Madder – traditions & medicines, dyeing. Artists Sigrid Holmwood & Louise Amelia Phelps in conversation
Dr Sigrid Holmwood’s work focuses on the relationship between art and the figure of the peasant in the construction of modernity & artistic practices that have come out from peasant communities. Researching plant dyes and making pigments out of plants is central to her practice. She follows the histories of these plants, unearthing their relationships with folklore, colonialism, and modernity. She is based in Sweden.
Louise Amelia Phelps’ work draws on the poetics of sign, symbol, plants and place. It is grounded in the interface between inner and outer perceptions of the world and respect for the landscape first. She has a Fine Art BA and an MA Art Psychotherapy and her expanded artistic and materials practice are informed by the processes of nature: Plants are partners in creating colour. She is based in Stroud.
FRIDAY 8 APRIL
17:00 Online presentation & poetry presentation Dr John Charles Ryan - 'A Bestiary of Wild Flowers'.
A response to the Paradise Gardens (1968-1970) painting series by the honoured Australian artist, Sir Sidney Nolan.
John Charles Ryan is Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, and Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the Nulungu Institute, Notre Dame University, Australia. His scholarly research includes critical plant studies. His recent books include Introduction to the Environmental Humanities and The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence. Ryan’s poetic practice focuses on vegetal life and human-plant relationships and is widely published.
https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/booking/select/RdiEJKhzXNnT
SATURDAY 9 APRIL
14:00 - 16:30 Walk with Walking the Land. Walking into the Kingdom of Plants: Plants and Pilgrimage
A circular participatory walk of around 7km from the grounds of Stratford Park to explore the flora of the Painswick Valley, and from an artist’s perspective consider our relationships with plants and the affect they have on us.
We will be walking over rough, uneven ground, up and down hills. This walk is not suitable for wheelchair users. Participants will be limited to 10, (no dogs please). Donation fees go to Stroud Valleys Project
SUNDAY 10 APRIL
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LIVE ‘Meet the Buzz Club’ with Peter Lead
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14:00 LIVE Conversation: intuitive herbalist Nathaniel Hughes & artist Fiona Owen
Fiona Owen has been an artist and plants-woman for more than 40 years. She recently completed a 7-year herbal apprenticeship at the School of Intuitive Herbalism specialising in Plant Folk-Lore, Magical Herbalism and plant-spirit-medicine.
Nathaniel Hughes has been following a plant path for 25 years, systematically exploring how we can open our experiences and perception of plants in ever deepening ways. He has written two books about this exploration and is founder of the School of Intuitive Herbalism.
15:30 ONLINE: Tsjeard Hofstra from the Dutch organisation Meer Bomen Nu (‘more trees now’) + artist / activist Jack Everett discussing different ways to support trees
Jack Everett is a sculptor, designer, and writer who has exhibited widely. His career spans more than four decades. He was an early proponent and practitioner of eco-design principles working on projects in the UK and internationally. His practice is diverse and regularly blends art, eco-activism, spirituality and elements of performance & ritual pageantry.
Meer Bomen Nu, speaker Tsjeard Hofstra: The Dutch campaign Meer Bomen Nu (“more trees now”) collects saplings and shrubs in nature areas and parks – where they are overabundant or unwanted – for planting elsewhere. Winter 2021 saw 250,000 plants transplanted into gardens and fields with the assistance of 2000 volunteers. Hear about the Meer Bomen Nu method, by ecologist Franke van der Laan during this online presentation and discussion.
12 APRIL - Periscope (Emily Jo and Alison Cockcroft)
13 APRIL - Periscope (Emily Jo and Alison Cockcroft)
14 APRIL - Periscope (Emily Jo and Alison Cockcroft)
THURSDAY 21 APRIL
14:00 ONLINE Botanical artist / forager Emma Thistlewaite in conversation with textile artist Mandy Coppes-Martin
Emma Thistlethwaite is a florist & botanical artist. Thistlewaite’s approach to floral design references the year’s circularity & the natural curation of flowers in wild environments; mindful foraging for botanicals also being a part of her practice as a way of harnessing the untamed to create unique and ephemeral compositions.
Mandy Coppes-Martin completed her MA Fine Art at the University of Johannesburg, where she concentrated on the development of local and invasive plant fibres for the production of specialist papers. Her current work locates a mark of time – past, present, future – in a particular moment of decomposition and inescapable ephemerality.
FRIDAY 22 APRIL
14:00 Online Conversation with artists Ingrid Pumayalla / Cristina Flora Pescorán on their artistic research of the Amazonian huayruro seed
Pumayalla and Pescorán’s work is linked through the use of thread. Their practice(s) seek to repair and transform illness, loss, and pain through the weaving traditions of the Peruvian ancients. Their research focuses on the relationships between nature and the body in creating sustainable new threads of thought and a collective engagement of resistance to capitalism. The common thread for this project has been the huayruro seed, native to the Amazon whose cultural symbolism is related to the act of protection.
SATURDAY 23 APRIL
LIVE 2pm – 4pm Henk Kort. Talk & short workshop. Weeds and how they revitalise us
By comparing the chemical makeup of weeds and vegetables attendees can gain insight into how different weeds can nourish and support the microbiome. This session explores the power of plants as creators of matter.
SUNDAY 24 APRIL
14:00 LIVE Closing Event. Individual Performances: London-based artist Ingrid Pumayalla + Performance practitioner Brenda Waite
Exhibition - Invoking Absence
3-26th September 2021
Hallidays Mill, Chalford, Stroud
Workshop": Mair Hughes [Green willow weaving] ‘Floating river tributes' with mixed media such as willow, flax string & resin.
Workshops: Victoria Works Studios Saturdays 18th & 25th September
In conjunction with Invoking Absence exhibition (Hallidays Mill Gallery) and SITE Open Studios, artists Anna Simson and Mair Hughes will host Workshops on Saturdays 18th & 25th September at Victoria Works Studios, London Road, Chalford, Stroud, GL6 8HN
2pm-3.30pm
Mair Hughes [Green willow weaving] ‘Floating river tributes' with mixed media such as willow, flax string & resin.
Anna Simson ‘Votive & Figurine Offerings’ with local Chalford clay.
Drop-in. No bookings necessary. Children welcome if accompanied by an adult.
Suggested donation: £5
Closing ceremony - Sunday 26 September
3 - 5 pm - Kate Dineen
Who is your local deity, spirit of place, naturespirit of the river ways, earth, sacred/everyday sites where you live? How can you connect with these entities in developing a closer understanding of the interrelations existing beyond the colonial-capitalist systems & human-centrism of current relations with the more-than-human world. Shifting the hyper individualisation of the western psyche & opening to different living entities & beings is a way to reconnect with the naturesacred.
Closing ceremony of Invoking Absence & votive casting, floating river offerings with Kate Dineen. Guided practice: ‘connecting with the spirits of place’ £6 www.katedineen.com
Patricia Brien
The Guardians (genii cucullati) 2021
Ink, acrylic, pencil on canvas.
Ancient custodians of these lands (and found elsewhere in Europe). New guardians/custodians for troubling times.
Chantal Powell, Dragon's Womb, 2019, Cast tin, 34 x 25 x 4cm
Anna Simson, Dormant (2020) unfired stoneware
Chantal Powell, Prometheus (2020) cast tin
Morag Colquhoun, Parangolés (river swimming), photographs, 2021
‘As the cold water triggers unforeseen receptors in my body, I can feel the workings of the endocannabinoid system.’
Invoking Absence
water, mineral and deity
Curator: Patricia Brien
‘Nothing is created or destroyed; it just moves and changes’
(Tyson Yunkaporta)
While much common animist knowledge has been mis-placed or purged from Western dialogue, there are still archaeological material traces which are reminders of earlier pagan ways. There is also a lively Western ecofeminist tradition, which considers the creative body as a site of resistance to the privatisation and destruction of the global commons and a space for nurturing the ‘natural’ world - both nonhuman and human. ‘Earth magic’ is resilient. The riverways and springs, groves, the common ‘wild’ grown-over spaces in the urban-rural landscapes are tangible links to regenerative place-thinking. Ancient river-names may hold the vestiges of the deity, the name-sound which echoes the absence, lest we humans forget.
Material objects made with place matter hold its alchemy too. This multi-media exhibition considers the genius loci and the matterings of place as agents, the absent-present beings whose narratives remain in steadfast flux.
Invoking Absence considers the entanglements of geological timescales and mineral layers, landscapes, waters and the invisible beings of place within a cycle of deep and neoteric time. It refers to contemporary animist narratives which acknowledge and learn from the complex interrelationality of ‘indigenous thinking’ (Yunkaporta) to re-interpret and expand upon ancient and contemporary Western pagan ‘thinking’ (Graham Harvey, Pegi Eyers). Obfuscated by time and linear narratives of colonial-capitalist progress, the entities and agents of place - water, mineral and deity - hold simultaneously past, present and future worldings.
Suitable for adults (& accompanied children). Donation suggestion £5.
Sunday 19 September - Guided visualisation shamanic journey
2pm - Lisa Fullbright Cossey - Guided visualisation journey with drum and chanting, £6. Bookings via email: patricia.brien16@bathspa.ac.uk
Workshop: Guided Visualisation Shamanic Journey with healer and shamanic practitioner Lisa Fullbright Cossey
2pm - 3pm: Sunday 19 September. £6
Follow the beat of the drum down into the heart of the land, and allow the timeless chant of shamanic song to carry you. This ancient yet modern journeying practice is profoundly relaxing and allows you to connect with
Suggested donation: £5
Exhibition opening: Friday 3rd September
3pm-4pm Anna Simson ‘Votive & Figurine Offerings’ with local Chalford clay Exhibition opening: Friday 3rd September
3pm-4pm Anna Simson ‘Votive & Figurine Offerings’ with local Chalford clay the ancestors of the land, and the ancient wisdom in the earth.
Hallidays Mill, Chalford, Stroud
Bookings & info: patricia.brien16@bathspa.ac.uk
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Dr Chantal Powell holds a discussion on the ‘Archetypal energy of the Spiral’. This interactive discussion will focus on the mystical traditions, creative energy, dynamic force, and materiality, of spirals (and labyrinths) as guides, meditation motifs and curious phenomena through the ages. (tbc)
Monica Sjöö, ‘Diana the Moon’
© ESTATE OF MONICA SJÖÖ. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. IMAGE COURTESY OF FEMINIST ARCHIVE SOUTH
‘Pyramid’ 2017 by Fiona Finnegan. 50 x 40cm. Oil on Wood
Image courtesy of Domobaal / Photo: Andy Keate
Artists
Artists that have been invited to join this exhibition work include Chantal Powell, whose sculptural tin casts are imprinted from fossilised rocks whose forms parallel embryonic shapes and cosmic spirals. The rock markings are oceanic memories that speak to the primeval waters of creation. Mair Hughes’ mixed media sculptural pieces draw on the potency of sites and the habit of depositing valued objects at features such as pits, caves, fallen trees and the egress points of underground streams.
Fiona Finnegan’s paintings play with a sense of the uncanny, the liminal spaces like the twilight of the day, where a presence is perceived but never quite tangible. The in between realms where the coexistent domains of mythology and imagination mingle.
Shrouded moments of shock and euphoria are captured in Morag Colquhuon’s Parangolés photography series which captures river swimming in Wales as a ritual which reconfigures rhythms and encounters with the modern and the ancient, the human and nonhuman.
Anna Simson’s ceramics are hollowed with a sense or a sound of a forgotten presence. Some are fired leaving a permanent legacy; other pieces are left raw; exposing their vulnerability and transient existence.
A selection of monoprint posters from Monica Sjöö (1938 – 2005) document her involvement and recurring themes of the cosmic mother in numerous ecofeminist, radical spiritual collectives and art exhibitions which have been a rich source of knowledge in contemporary ecofeminist & goddess thinking.
Patricia Brien’s painting and installations act as magnified aide-memoires referring to traces and ancient mythic entanglements associated with the Stroud Valleys; its modern-era heritage of textile production overlaying ancient spiritual networks which nonetheless have persisted.
The poetry of JLM Morton is a potent spoken and textual pilgrimage with nonhuman persons of the Cotswolds. Her work refracts the bodily and un-bodied experience of walking / wading / swimming the length of her 'home river,' the Churn, questioning notions of home, mother, genius / loci.
Mair Hughes, Earthscape Cosmography, 2021
Fired ceramic, feather, oil, paint, unfired local clay.
