Dawes Twineworks

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.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Vicky Putler is the Founder / Director of Flax Project CIC. Previously a textile designer/printer, frustration at not being able to source UK linen led her to want to grow her own flax. In 2021, under the name The Flax Project, she began growing flax in Cornwall and seeking ways to create the necessary green infrastructure. In 2022 Vicky set up an experimental textile workshop for processing and experimenting with flax, offering workshops in flax crafts, natural dyeing and printing.

Flax Project CIC has run several grant funded community projects in Plymouth and is currently commissioned for the two year HLF funded ‘Blockhouse Folk: Past, Present & Future’ project (Stoke Village, Plymouth, UK) led by Rachel Dobbs. Vicky recently exhibited linoleum experiments in ‘Pull My Thread’ at Brantwood House, (Coniston, UK) and flax straw work at ‘Green Making-Materials-Objects’ at the Levinsky Gallery, (Plymouth, UK).

Rachel Dobbs (IRL) is an artist based in Plymouth (UK) whose practice spans a range of collaborative artistic and community-focused projects, all with a strong emphasis on people, relationships, communication and systems of exchange. Rachel’s work as one half of LOW PROFILE has recently featured in Social Fabric (Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance), and Faraway Festival Reims (Reims, FR), and their artwork is part of public collections at The Box (Plymouth, UK), Harris Museum, Library & Art Gallery (Preston, UK) and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims, FR).

ARTIST WEBSITE

Harry Martin and Milly Melbourne are Groundmouth, a collaboration born from The Field artist residency in the old headquarters of the National Coal Board in Derbyshire, where they worked and played together for 18 months. Groundmouth will weave new mythologies of industrialisation to intuitively understand its complex and haunting legacy, through a sprawling and scavenged installation of sculpture and sound. 

ABOUT

Harry Martin’s work describes alchemical transformations leading to a deepening sense of embodiment, interdependence and connection to the land, through shimmering pastel drawings, drag rituals and fragmented choral soundscapes.

Milly Melbourne is the founder of oB wear where pieces are slowly hand worked with care, incorporating labour-intensive historical garment making techniques and handpicking natural materials with a story to tell.

Geoff Diego Litherland  has been redefining his artistic practice; discontent with simply depicting an idea of nature and landscape within his work, he sought to delve deeper into the interconnected threads between painting and the environment. He has used slow, pre-industrial craft processes to create natural canvas materials grown from the land and explored using traditional lime plasters with earth and cosmic pigments.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Geoff Diego Litherland was born in Mexico and is currently based in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. In 2012 he completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, he is an artist with a considerable exhibition profile, a part-time lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and co-founder of Haarlem Artspace. Litherland explores our relationship to the natural world through an engagement with the materials and processes involved in painting, including the collaborative production of hand woven linen canvas. Awards include the Wardens Purchase Prize from Goldsmiths College 2012 and Material Seedcorn Research funding from Nottingham Trent University 2017. Solo exhibitions include: 2021 Catching Matter, Beam, Nottingham; 2020 Woven / Ground, Haarlem Artspace, Wirksworth; 2018 Beyond This Moment, New Court Gallery, Repton; 2017 The Other Side of the Sky, 60 TNS, London.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Artist Emii Alrai will produce a new commission for Dawes Twine Works in West Coker, the UK’s only surviving 19^th century twine works, and historic producer of twine for the maritime industry. Mimicking geological forms, ancient ruins and artefacts, her works will look at the role of map tables in the lands that empires conquer and their relationship to the maritime industry.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. Past solo exhibitions include Lithics at Quench Gallery, Margate (2024); A Core of Scar, The Hepworth Wakefield & iniva (2022); and Reverse Defence at Workplace Foundation in Newcastle (2022). Alrai’s work is held in public collections including the British Museum, London; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; the Arts Council Collection, London; the Government Art Collection, and The Hepworth Wakefield.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Seaweed in the Fruit Locker is an LGBTQIA+ sea shanty choir formed by artist Rhys Morgan, exploring queer motifs within seafaring history and collective performance in marginalised communities through the tradition of shanty singing. The choir have used their lived experience to rework existing shanties and inspire new ones, continuing the tradition of these hybrid folk songs being adapted time and again through generations and across cultures.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rhys Morgan is an artist and producer. His work often explores ideas around information and power structures and how these interact with queer life.

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An installation exploring plants on the move. Plants and trees made huge historic sailing journeys possible, and voyages around the globe led to the unprecedented movement of plants. In its production of flax twine, for the sail cloth industries, Dawe’s Twineworks played its part in this story.

At the beginning of the festival there will be a procession of Marcia’s works from OSR Projects to their final setting at Dawe’s Twineworks. The procession will set out at 10.30am. FREE – no need to book. 

Work by Marcia is also on show at OSR Projects, and she has organised a plant exchange and two drawing workshops. See events for booking details.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Marcia Teusink’s work explores climate change, collapsing environments and regrowth through painting, sculpture, video, printmaking and mixed media. Her recent projects look at the historical movement of plants – both the wonder of the range of plant species in the world and the problematic ecological effects of their unnatural redistribution.

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A film essay that uses Dale, a small place on the west coast of Norway, as a prism to look at global changes related to production and economy. The main industry in Dale was a textile factory, but production has moved to Pakistan, and the factory building now houses a server farm mining bitcoin. Labour forces are in flux as industry moves to lower -cost places, water runs through pipelines
to provide electricity, and data flows
through cables, adding to financial profits and speculation: capital is global and in constant motion.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Stine Gonsholt and Åse Løvgren are artists and filmmakers living and working in Norway. They have collaborated since 2017, exploring the effects of global changes on local landscapes. Their work focuses on transitions related to production and technology, and how such processes leave their mark on the environment and alter our understanding of a place.

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The process of making is fundamentally important to Will Cruickshank’s sculptural works. He devises his own complex, makeshift machines by repurposing parts from old cement mixers, bicycles, chainsaws and potters’ wheels. Most often these machines spool, wind, bind and overlay layers of yarn, in a way reminiscent of traditional industries like twine making, but here employed in the creation of objects with a primarily aesthetic and symbolic purpose.

You can also see sculptures made by Will Cruickshank at The Cemetery Chapel, East Coker.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Will Cruickshank has a multidisciplinary practice which often places an importance on colour, pattern and symmetry, whilst appearing to be connected to something unknown and sacred. His work is grounded in learning by doing, and thinking through making.

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Participate in a special bookbinding workshop at Dawe’s Twineworks or pick up a copy of Caitlin’s newly commissioned book.

Spooling, twisting, braiding, twine walk, rope walk, twisting heads, fast and loose – the process and machinery used in traditional twine making has a unique language that evokes movement. Taking this as a starting point Caitlin’s workshops will provide an opportunity to learn and enjoy slow and productive movement, and to reflect on the industrial history of the Twineworks whilst making. Her book invites its readers to follow a series of simple exercises in movement, twisting and twine walking.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Caitlin Akers works across artist’ books, printmaking and installation exploring place, history, poetry and language. Her work often involves workshops in hand made processes, inviting participants to learn new skills together to foster community, agency and conversation through making.

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