a boards rested up against a wall with 4 long lengths of tubes cascading down into a tangled cluster on the floores

ROWAN CORKILL

a boards rested up against a wall with 4 long lengths of tubes cascading down into a tangled cluster on the floores

ROWAN CORKILL

Floriculture (artificial environment 1)

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.


ARTIST WEBSITE


collage of coloured paper on a white background

MONICA RIVAS VELASQUEZ

collage of coloured paper on a white background

MONICA RIVAS VELASQUEZ 

Noticeboards and large scale drawing

VENUE

3. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am  – 4pm

And various noticeboards in East and West Coker

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.


ABOUT THE ARTIST

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.


ARTIST WEBSITE


person sitting in long grass wearing a cap and headphones

MICHELLE ATHERTON

person sitting in long grass wearing a cap and headphones

MICHELLE ATHERTON

Soil Séance Sessions

Workshop

VENUE

3. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am  – 4pm

‘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.


ARTIST WEBSITE


painted fabric archway suspended in a church ruin

ELLA YOLANDE

painted fabric archway suspended in a church ruin

ELLA YOLANDE

Find Us in the Slip Spaces

Installation

VENUE

5. Cemetery Chapel, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm

and

3. OSR Projects, West Coker (Film)
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am  – 4pm

Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human.

The Cemetery Chapel is inhabited by a textile archway embedded with medicinal and symbolic plants. Touching on ideas of thin spaces within folklore, the sculpture provides a portal through which to imagine what might lie just on the other side, moving just beneath the surface of our understanding of the perceived world.

Video at OSR Projects

But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower uses recorded attempts to virtually access and experience botanical gardens and glasshouses via Googlemaps combined with 3D scans from Kew Gardens, to consider the colonial histories of these sites. 

The video emerged from an online residency with 11:11 Residency in 2022, looking into botanical histories and the extraction and commodification of plants through the legacies of plant hunters. 


ABOUT THE ARTIST

Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by queer ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture, textiles and text, with references to speculative fiction, botanical architecture and protective wear. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants, as well as the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores our interwoven existence with our surroundings through playful thinking on speculative ecologies. Ella is currently based in London studying a Masters in Art and Ecology. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Skaftfell Seyðisfjörður, Melkweg Expo Amsterdam, Artcore Gallery Derby, with screenings including the Coventry Biennial 2024, Videoity’s Utopia Today 2024 and Fiber Festival 2021 with a solo exhibition in Nunhead Cemetery Chapel, London 2024.

 


ARTIST WEBSITE


dream like layering painted in pastel blues and pinks and purples

DERMOT PUNNETT

dream like layering painted in pastel blues and pinks and purples

DERMOT PUNNETT

Painting

VENUE

3. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am  – 4pm

and

5. Cemetery Chapel, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm 

Working from personal photography and found images, Punnett utilises the effects of reproduction and pixelation on a painterly aesthetic. Within geometric abstractions, he plays on the impermanence of form, examining spaces observed or remembered or perhaps, irrationally desired; conveying an attempt to understand and internalize perception and experience, whilst reflecting on a sense of modern day anxiety.


ABOUT THE ARTIST

Dermot Punnett was born in 1980 on the island of St. Vincent. He received his BFA from Falmouth College of Arts in 2004. Punnett went on to receive his MFA from Bath Spa University in 2007. His work is informed by studies in psychology, psychedelia, medieval art and the esoteric with imagery inspired by medieval, alchemical and visionary art of early manuscripts and  modern reinterpretations of folklore. His paintings are an amalgamation of landscape, body, symbol and painterly abstraction. They are the crystallised impressions of an interior mythos connected to landscape, elemental nature and notions of soul. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including Charlie Dutton Gallery and A.P.T Gallery in London. He has also been featured in Arc magazine, a Caribbean contemporary arts publication and is currently represented by Tarpey Gallery in the UK and Nuedge Gallery in Barbados.



a person wearing a sheep coat in a field with other sheep

SARA TRILLO

a person wearing a sheep coat in a field with other sheep

SARA TRILLO

Owler’s Cloak

Textile

VENUE

4. OSR Projects
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

Holloways and Hide-aways – Walk
Sat 27, 2 – 3.30pm
Starting – 7. The Village Café, EAST COKER
Booking Required £5

Book Walk

and

Sun 28, 10.30am – 12pm
Starting – 7. The Village Café, EAST COKER
Booking Required £5

Book Walk

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.


FIND OUT MORE


collection of plant drawings on black paper in white paint

MARCIA TEUSINK

collection of plant drawings on black paper in white paint

MARCIA TEUSINK

Herbaria and Botanical map

Painting and drawing

VENUE

4. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

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.


ABOUT THE ARTIST

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


FIND OUT MORE


rocks falling on a black background

NASTASSJA SIMENSKY

rocks falling on a black background

NASTASSJA SIMENSKY

Concrete

Film

Film duration: 7 mins

VENUE

4. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

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 tripod sculpture made with sticks, feathers and bits hang off the sticks on string

TOM SEWELL

a tripod sculpture made with sticks, feathers and bits hang off the sticks on string

TOM SEWELL

Anti (23) Idol for Eris

 

Sculpture

VENUE

4. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

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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lines on a big flat rock

TRACY HILL

lines on a big flat rock

TRACY HILL

State of Being Porous and Veins of Transmission

Print

VENUE

4. OSR Projects, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

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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