Coker Court

The Ouroboros encircles the Tree of Life surrounded by a celestial array of birds and stars, reconciling chthonic and celestial energies that honour the cycles of life and death, healing and regeneration in this  monochromatic boldly graphic tapestry. Through a masterful blend of primordial materials and timeless symbols, Popova invites us to contemplate our own mortality and the enduring forces that bind us to the earth and each other, from Breath to Dust.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Yelena Popova graduated from the Moscow Art Theatre School-Studio in 2000 and earned her Master’s degree in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2011. She has been living and working in the UK since 2003. Yelena Popova has exhibited her work in the UK, Russia, Germany, Sweden, Austria, the US, and Switzerland. Her works are part of prestigious collections, including the Arts Council Collection (London), Government Art Collection (London), RCA Collection (London), Saatchi Collection (London), Zabludowicz Collection (London), In4Art Collection (Netherlands), Jalima Collection (Düsseldorf), Nottingham Castle Collection, New Hall Art Collection (Cambridge), LWL Museum (Münster), CCA Andratx Collection (Mallorca, Spain), Sea Foundation (Netherlands), and various private collections.

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Using a combination of black light and wild meadow grass, Red Hot Haystacks explores ideas around the unseen environmental impact of human activity through a story of nuclear testing in the 1960s. High levels of radiation were reported on the coasts each side of the Pentland Firth that separates mainland Scotland from the Orkney archipelago. The seas proved too treacherous to complete any survey, but later, soil particles from haystacks contaminated by atmospheric nuclear testing, were described geologists as Red Hot.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Simon Lee Dicker is an artist based in south Somerset whose work explores a discordant relationship with landscape and human-made marks on the natural world. He describes an artistic practice that examines matter in a state of flux as being ‘restless’.

Dicker’s recent exhibitions include temporary sculptural installations with ceramics such as See-an-enemy in Lisbon made from chalk, unfired clay and ceramics, and The Flatlands at the Arnolfini in Bristol, a large-scale sculptural installation of a tyre stack and film inspired by Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque. His work exists alongside a practice in creative writing with drawing that continues to inform his ideas.

Simon is a co-founder of the artist-run organisation OSR Projects that run the bi-annual Od Arts Festival and regular Community Clay pottery workshops.

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The Pickers shows a group of young Romanian migrant workers at a strawberry farm in Kent. They alternate their intensive strawberry picking labour with another form of labour, the editing and mediation of a 20th century film archive collected by the artist, showing the activities of migrant hop pickers from London. Differences are blurred as to where and when events are set, the identity of an archive and its mediation, and who ultimately is holding the knowledge and therefore the power.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Adam Chodzko is a visual artist based in Whitstable, Kent. His work explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour by investigating the space of consciousness between how we are and what we might be. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work invents possibilities for collective imagination, wondering how we might perceive better in order to create better connections with others.

Recent exhibitions include; The Botanical Mind, Camden Art Centre, (2020); Towner International, Towner Eastbourne, (2020); Being Human, Wellcome Collection (2019-’30); Televistas, More Than Ponies (2020); Die Sonne does not shine like S?on?ce, Trafostacja Sztuki, Szczecin, Poland (2020). International solo exhibitions include: Because…,Tate Britain (2013); You’ll See, this Time it’ll be Different, The Benaki Museum, Athens (2013).

ARTIST WEBSITE

Writer and participatory artist Jack Young will be spending the festival developing a new piece of writing in response to the local landscape, its people, histories, and more-than-human life. The commission will also be developed through a critical and poetic response to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (from which the festival takes its name), exploring its history, ideas and complications. The resulting writing will be developed into a publication following the festival. Expect: folk-horror, experimental poetry, bricolage, queer ecologies, human/more-than-human metamorphoses and more!

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Jack Young writes experimental work with a focus on queer ecologies. He also works with young people using arts-based critical pedagogy, with a particular emphasis on multilingual filmmaking, applied theatre and creative writing.

Co-selected by Spike Island Associates.

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This moving image installation takes as its starting point the tradition of Welsh landscape painting. Created using the visual effects technique of ‘matte painting’ the mountainous terrain of North Wales appears in disconcertingly sharp digital quality and becomes the location for a futuristic mega city. As the cityscape changes from night to day, a voiceover, written and narrated by the artist, tells the story of the inhabitants of this brave new world.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Bedwyr Williams uses multimedia, performance and text to explore the friction between the deadly serious and the banal aspects of modern life. He often draws on his own autobiographic existence merging art and life with a comedic – and frequently satirical – twist, his work is instantaneously sympathetic and relational.

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A sculptural installation of fictive paper objects, designed to mimic rock forms. The rocks are connected to a low-fi geological ‘life support machine’, evocative of mid-twentieth-century ideas of the future, transforming them into slowly breathing masses. Ella’s work explores the fragility and temporality that exists even with seemingly solid and static natural forms with a wry humour and a nod to the fallibility of human attempts to interfere with imperfect technology.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ella West’s multidisciplinary practice engages with the relationship between human and geological timelines, using this as an artistic framework to address themes of ecology, family, collaboration and home. She creates installations that combine varying elements of sculpture, video and printmaking.

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Two site-specific sculptural installations have been created for the festival, one in each village. Nicola’s works combine found objects that hold traces of memory, the shapes of living forms and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair – a material traditionally used for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history and memory.

On Friday at 7.30pm collaborative artist and performer, Clare Whistler will make her own response to the sculpture at Coker Court, in the form of movement. FREE – no booking required.

See our events listings for details of this and other performances and workshops.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nicola Turner’s practice investigates the dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and the continuous exchange of ecosystems.

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Clare Whistler is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, poetry, music, visual art, site, landscape and communities. Movement and gesture infuse all her work.

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