Bookings will open Monday 5th May
FRIDAY 23 MAY
The Plant and Seed Exchange
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
10am – 5pm
Back by popular demand, the plant and seed exchange returns for the duration of Od Arts Festival 2025. We invite you to donate and/or adopt plants and seeds. You get to share your favourite plants and in return take one home for FREE.
West Coker Strop – Workshop
Vicky Putler (Flax Project CIC) & Rachel Dobbs
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker,
11am – 12:20 pm and 1.30pm – 3pm, Drop-in. Free
Visitors are invited to contribute to the making of the West Coker Strop while the artists ‘spin a yarn’, bringing to life the language and vocabulary of flax, linen and rope-making which still informs our everyday speech. The West Coker Strop will be a new community folk art object made from rope which is intertwined with people’s wishes, hopes, magic manifestations,and affirmations for the village and its community. All welcome.
Artist talk
Mónica Rivas Velásquez
3. OSR Projects, West Coker, 4 – 5pm, Free
Mónica Rivas Velásquez will be sharing key aspects of her practice and the context and ideas that have shaped this new series of collages and wall drawing. Mónica’s talk will be delivered as a performative reading expanding on the experience of mediation, remoteness and being in transit when we encounter the botanical world, as well as the notion of reframing attention and enlarging reality (notions borrowed from Isabelle Stengers’ work on magic and nature).
SATURDAY 24 MAY
The Plant and Seed Exchange
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
10am – 5pm
Back by popular demand, the plant and seed exchange returns for the duration of Od Arts Festival 2025. We invite you to donate and/or adopt plants and seeds. You get to share your favourite plants and in return take one home for FREE.
Printing in Circles
Tabatha Palmer
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
10am – 1pm. Drop-in workshop.
No booking required, £6
Printing workshop led by Tabatha Palmer
Taking inspiration from the festival theme you will get a chance to get your hands dirty making intaglio styled perspex etchings, contact and mono prints. Enjoy developing an etching from initial sketched image idea to final print, incorporating techniques to achieve line and tonal etching, prints can then be hand coloured. This is a drop-in workshop for all ages.
Flaxen Bodies
GroundMouth
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
1pm – 2:30pm Booking required, £6
Groundmouth will lead two workshops exploring the history of the flax industry: how hyperindustrialisation has led to a sense of disembodiment and how the tactility of flax can bring us back into relationship with ourselves and the land. We will navigate this through body meditation, storytelling, exploring the grounds, and making flaxen assemblages that will be suspended above a central altar space.
Soil Séance
Michelle Atherton
3. OSR Projects
12.30pm, 1.15pm, 2pm, 2.45pm, 3.30pm, 4.15pm.
Booking required, £6
‘What would it be like to commune with the ground?’
These individual sessions are an invitation to turn your senses downwards and take part in an experiment of transduction, where one form of energy is transformed into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted) and vibratory matter. Using an electrical device as a portal to the underworld, the sessions are offered on a one-to-one basis and may be quiet, or loud, tuning into micro frequencies communicating beneath our feet.
Live Music
t l k
7. St Michael and All Angels, East Coker
Drinks from 7pm, start 8pm
Free, no booking required
Join us for an evening of live music! t l k presents The Butterfly Effect
Responding to the festival’s provocation ‘Thinking in Circles’, t l k draws from chaos theory and psychoacoustics for Od Arts 2025. The butterfly effect suggests that small, seemingly insignificant events can have seismic and unpredictable consequences elsewhere: ‘the flap of a butterfly’s wings results in a distant tornado’. Using voice, electronics and field recordings, t l k explores how incremental changes to initial sonic material can lead to vastly different outcomes, highlighting the sensitivity and gravity of our microscopic actions in a chaotic system. The piece encourages reflection on the impacts of human behaviour within a paradox of chaos: we can examine cycles of human life and history, seemingly repeating themselves in deterministic ways, yet an unpredictable possibility of outcome remains.
SUNDAY 25 MAY
The Plant and Seed Exchange
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
10am – 4pm
Back by popular demand, the plant and seed exchange returns for the duration of Od Arts Festival 2025. We invite you to donate and/or adopt plants and seeds. You get to share your favourite plants and in return take one home for FREE.
Printing in Circles
Tabatha Palmer
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
10am – 1pm. Drop-in workshop.
No booking required, £6
Printing workshop led by Tabatha Palmer
Taking inspiration from the festival theme you will get a chance to get your hands dirty making intaglio styled perspex etchings, contact and mono prints. Enjoy developing an etching from initial sketched image idea to final print, incorporating techniques to achieve line and tonal etching, prints can then be hand coloured. This is a drop-in workshop for all ages.
Together we walk
PaC: placing artists in common / practicing artists commoning
Meeting point: Village Cafè, East Coker
11am – 12.30 pm
Free, Booking required.
Snacks maybe shared so please inform us if you have any dietary requirements or allergies.
Together we walk, explore and create a commons of exchange and peer support. Throughout Od Arts Fest PaC artists Gemma Gore, James Aldridge, Laura Eldret and Melanie Rose will be in residence and on Sunday you are invited to join them for an artists-led walk through the ancient holloways local to the Cokers.
Soil Séance
Michelle Atherton
3. OSR Projects
12.30pm, 1.15pm, 2pm, 2.45pm, 3.30pm
Booking required £6
‘What would it be like to commune with the ground?’
These individual sessions are an invitation to turn your senses downwards and take part in an experiment of transduction, where one form of energy is transformed into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted) and vibratory matter. Using an electrical device as a portal to the underworld, the sessions are offered on a one-to-one basis and may be quiet, or loud, tuning into micro frequencies communicating beneath our feet.
Flaxen Bodies
GroundMouth
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
1pm – 2:30pm
Booking required, £6
Groundmouth will lead two workshops exploring the history of the flax industry: how hyperindustrialisation has led to a sense of disembodiment and how the tactility of flax can bring us back into relationship with ourselves and the land. We will navigate this through body meditation, storytelling, exploring the grounds, and making flaxen assemblages that will be suspended above a central altar space.
To keep everyone safe, our events have strictly limited places. All welcome – no previous experience necessary for any workshops or events. Children under 16 must be accompanied by an adult.
To join a workshop or event you will need to book online via Eventbrite.
If the cost of an event is a barrier, we are happy to offer a free place (no questions asked) – please email info@odartsfestival.co.uk.