OSR Projects

Floriculture examines the concept of collapse within commercial horticulture and its profound environmental impact. Manmade materials replace the organic conditions, simulating an environment optimized for profitable growth but disconnected from the ecosystems these plants were once part of. The work is a reflection on the contradictions inherent in our manipulation of nature, the potential for these artificial environments to serve as temporary sanctuaries, and the inevitable collapse that awaits both the natural and artificial worlds we have created.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rowan Corkill was born in Scotland in 1986. He received a BA in photography & Electronic media at Robert Gordons University, Aberdeen, followed by an MSC in Sound Art & Design at Duncan of Jordanston University, Dundee. Exhibiting nationally and internationally with shows in Europe, North & South America and Canada, the artist has been working with nature as a prominent theme since 2010. Rowan’s works possess a sense of power as well as fragility, a duality which echoes that which exists within nature. Materials play a strong role in the artist’s practice, particularly the use of animals and plants which are collected and used in most of his works. The use of taxidermy in his work acts as a foundation on which to apply materials, most of which are imbued with symbolic meanings which elevate the objects beyond the norms of the everyday.

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Articulating interwoven narratives at the intersection of climate breakdown, ecological resilience, political and personal histories, Rivas Velásquez’s work addresses the currents that drive resistance to historical memory. In this new collage series, developed for Od Arts Festival, the work explores a re-composition of the gaps, glitches and failures that emerge from those very attempts to name and represent our encounters with nature and the botanical world.

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Mónica Rivas Velásquez is a Colombian artist and researcher. Her practice traces ideas of encounter and relation through expanded notions of drawing, embodied narratives and the coming together of image, text and voice. Her work explores the fragmented experience of national identities placed under erasure by violence and environmental destruction. Iterations of her latest project (AHRC funded PhD), I Want To Write To You Like Someone Learning, have been exhibited, published and performed, among others, in Theatrum Mundi’s, JOAN publishing, Café Oto, London, South London Botanical Institute, Stanley Picker Gallery, London, ICA London, Omved Gardens, London, Radiophrenia Glasgow, Clouds and Tracks, FieldNotes Journal Audio, Resonance FM.

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‘What would it be like to commune with the ground?’  This workshop is 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.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Michelle Atherton’s work holds a fascination with the complex relations, dynamics and contradictions at play in day-to-day experiences and phenomena. Recent artworks have involved celebratory gatherings paying tribute to the dead across species; alternative imaginaries from the ocean’s depths; examining the nature of everyday irrational gestures and On Demand cultures. Her work often uses a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image, text and installation to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world.  The aim is to look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics and new imaginaries. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and shown throughout Europe in galleries, museums, festivals and publications.  She teaches fine art to postgraduates at Sheffield Hallam University.

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The Owler’s Cloak represents a poor man’s fleece, made from pieces of sheep wool found in fields adjacent to the sea. Owling was a term for the smuggling of sheep or wool, and Owlers were so named because they operated at night. English fleeces were highly prized on the continent but between 1614 and 1825 the export of wool was forbidden. On beaches adjacent to sheep fields, smugglers loading goods at night would wear fleeces: if excise men came, the smugglers crouched down and pretended, in the dark, to be sheep and blend in with the flock.

Sara will lead two walks setting out from The Village Café, East Coker on Saturday at 2pm and Sunday at 10.30am. She has also worked with Simon Lee Dicker to produce Something to hold onto, a Community Clay project run by pupils from Perrott Hill and East Coker Schools.

For more details on Something to hold onto workshop booking required – £3

For the walks see events – Booking required for the walks, £5

Co-selected by Extra Ordinary People at East Side Projects.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sara Trillo’s recent work explores lost landscape features and vanished settlements: spaces that have been coastally eroded, ploughed up, built over, or which have simply become overgrown and forgotten.

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A series of paintings based on historic herbaria, which are dried plant specimens pinned to sheets of paper, used by botanists to study plants. Marcia is fascinated by the idea of separating and flattening nature to understand and organise it, but also the care and close observation given by the scientists.

Drawn with bleach on linen this large wall hanging has its origins in the idea of cartography as domination, but here the botanical map is old and battered and failing apart, a reference to colonialism and the current climate situation.

More work by Marcia is on show at Dawe’s Twineworks,  where two painting workshops and a plant exchange organised by Marcia will also take place. See our events listings for more details and booking.

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Marcia Teusink’s work explores climate change, collapsing environments and regrowth through painting, sculpture, video, printmaking and mixed media.

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This short film brings together images of naturally occurring calcified architectural forms including heart urchin shells and aquatic worm husks, alongside decommissioned modernist architecture and archival footage of seismic research, all in an endless loop of construction and disintegration.

Co-selected by Primary.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Nastassja Simensky is an artist who often works collaboratively to make writing, place-specific performances, events, sound work and films as a form of ongoing fieldwork. Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology Heritage Art Research Network.

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A temporary assemblage of found, natural and human-made materials, which will be dismantled after the festival – the objects discarded, lost or re-used in other works, or returned to their point of finding, to resume their place in cycles of decay.

Tom will lead a circle-building workshop on Saturday 26, opening up the processes of his practice for anyone to try. See our events listings for more details – Booking required.

Co-selected by Hogchester Arts.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tom Sewell works across sculpture, drawing, installation, print, performance, photography and writing. His practice investigates human relationships with nature, using research into (pre)history, mythology, language, landscape and life to open up the porous border between nature and culture, questioning that dualism and exploring how it shifts through time and space.

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Tracy Hill’s drawings reflect on experiences of walking through landscape – exploring the human body’s capacity to sense almost imperceptible material forces, vibrations and energies in the world.

Two parts of Tracy’s research project ‘Porosity’ are being shown together at OSR Projects: a series of lithographic prints, along with temporary drawings created by dropping water and tusche (ink) onto a ground lithographic stone. As the tusche dries on the stones, at a speed dictated by the warmth of the day, subtle air movements and changes in the atmosphere are captured on the stone surface.

Co-selected by AirSpace Gallery.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tracy Hill’s work explores how trans-disciplinary engagement can offer new ideas and ways of seeing landscapes. Her practice connects the act of walking, beliefs and
processes of performative drawing and hand-printing.

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