Seminar

This year’s Od Arts Festival delves into themes of growth, production, and consumption. As a precursor to the festival, the seminar on Friday 25th April is a day of critical exploration through presentations, workshops and a specially curated lunch by artist Cherry Truluck.

Bringing together artists, curators and cultural producers, five Od Arts Festival artists will prompt seminar participants to reflect on ecological grief and the impacts of Western consumerist and colonial culture. 

Join artists and creative practitioners Emii Alrai, Michelle Atherton, Geoff Diego Litherland, Vicky Putler and  Laura Eldret in a day of activities that will foster reflection, renewal, and inspire transformative ways of thinking together.

Introducing invited artists and creative practitioners:

Emii Alrai will give a talk about her practice.

Emii Alrai  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.

Michelle will give a talk on how undertaking a natural burial for a close relative led to developing the participatory audio artwork the Soil Séance Sessions, taking place this year as part of the Thinking in Circles festival. The presentation, in short essay form, considers the difficulty secular societies in the Northern hemisphere have when dealing with death and dead bodies. Michelle speculates on what affective relations might be created through time spent listening to frequencies from the soil.

Michelle Atherton Making work that 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.

For the seminar Geoff will be leading a workshop exploring music/drawing as a gradual process. This is  an opportunity to draw from environmental sounds to create layered patterned drawings that share similar approaches to minimalist music composition.

Geoff Diego Litherland Born in Mexico Diego Litherland 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.

For the seminar Vicky will be leading  a ‘taster’ flax craft workshop that incorporates elements of flax processing, weaving and making cordage from flax fibres.

Vicky Putler  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).

Laura Eldret will be leading a workshop; through circular acts together we will explore the possibility of interspecies commoning as an approach to sustainable ways of being, kinship and reciprocity.

Laura Eldret is an artist, researcher and organiser. Her installations, posters, drawings, textiles,videos and events have been exhibited internationally in major galleries worldwide. She has been awarded commissions by major art institutions and undertaken extensive projects and residencies, from England to Argentina. Laura has organised numerous exhibitions, events and conferences. She is founding director of More Than Ponies, an occasional artist-led programme of contemporary art for/about the New Forest and beyond. She was co-founder/director of CollectingLiveArt (2007-10) and was an Associate Artist on ‘Schools of Tomorrow’ at Nottingham Contemporary (2019–23). Laura is interested in the commonalities that bring diverse groups of people together and the productive tensions of social encounters. Drawing on methodologies of  ethnography, sociology and ecology, she explores ways to affirm the value of conversation and social encounters across species. Her art and research explores how commoning can be a creative social collective practice that creates new forms of environmental care and sustainable exchanges between human and non-human ecosystems. She is concerned with establishing new values of engagement, ruralities, collective imaginations and artistic exchange that foster wellbeing, resilience, and sustainable ways of being in a time of climate emergency.

Cherry Truluck has carefully curated the lunch for the Thinking in Circles Seminar. Gathered around a communal long table, ‘Breathy Encounters’ is a rhythmic offering which proposes eating as an act of relational becoming, making conviviality a site of more-than-human entanglement across time, matter and community. The menu embodies moments of delicious encounter between temporalities of growth and decay, embracing seasonality.

Cherry Truluck is an artist and researcher, who tends towards edible, convivial, collaborative and sometimes curatorial work. Her transdisciplinary practice explores symbiosis, attunement and interdependence in more-than-human ecologies, as both an artistic strategy and agroecological methodology. Working with community building, plant science, cooking, farming and performance, she seeks rhythms and temporalities in the dialogue that food creates between the body and the land, leading audiences on journeys of speculative fabulation through muddy landscapes.

Cherry has been working with food and conviviality as a means of exploring interlocking cycles of time and growth for several years, most recently collaborating with the Conscious Food Systems Alliance to embed mindful eating into her practice. She is also working on a PhD with the UK Food Systems Centre for Doctoral Training and based at the University of Aberystwyth. Her research project – “Pluriversal Porridge” is an arts-based/transdisciplinary enquiry into pluri-temporality in (agri)cultural food systems through the lens of the oat plant.

Recent performative feasts and exhibitions have included: Municipal Kitchens (nGbK Berlin); The End is the Beginning (Cement Fields/University of Greenwich and BIRCA, Bornholm); Chase and Chalke (Young Gallery Salisbury); Alive In Us (The Wilson Cheltenham), Out of Time (Dear Earth, Hayward Gallery); Rudimentary Rhythms (Delfina Foundation); The Oat and the Oyster (Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation).

The Seminar will take place at OSR Projects and Dawe’s Twineworks. Please note there is a short walk bewteen venues of max 10 mins
Arrival 9:30 – 10am
End 5pm

Thinking in Circles Seminar is part of Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles  (23-25 May 2025) organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England.