JACK YOUNG
JACK YOUNG
WRITER
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.
BEDWYR WILLIAMS
BEDWYR WILLIAMS
Tyrrau Mawr
Film
Duration: 20 mins
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
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.
ELLA WEST
ELLA WEST
Becoming Geologic (Third Form)
Sculpture
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
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.
NICOLA TURNER WITH CLARE WHISTLER
NICOLA TURNER WITH CLARE WHISTLER
Echoed Ecstasy
Sculpture and performance
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
Performance Fri 26, 7.30pm
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.
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.