MICHELLE ATHERTON
MICHELLE ATHERTON
Soil Séance Sessions
Workshop: Saturday and Sunday
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.
JENNIFER TAYLOR
JENNIFER TAYLOR
Portal
‘Portal’ also featured in the evening event on Saturday night in the church. The sound which played from inside this golden sphere is an extract from: ‘Let it All Wash Over’ by t l k.
The full-length track can be found here: tlkvox.bandcamp.com
VENUE
7. St Michael and All Angels, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm
A glowing giant sphere spills out an eclectic mass of bizarre clutter onto the floor: low-tech shiny objects, tangled wiring, old electronics, and discarded novelty ephemera. This human-scale performative object tempts the viewer inside with sound and internal illuminations, almost as an autonomous robotic life-form. Reminiscent of religious regalia and ceremonial objects, this golden orb is over-sized like a pantomime prop, with the aesthetic of cheap fake gold that satirises these colonial rituals of power.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jennifer Taylor works with live performance, film and installation to explore ritualistic behaviour, systems of control and post-human possibilities. By merging ancient mysticism with sci-fi futurism, she creates absurd narratives with ambiguous fictional realities. For her anarchic live events, groups of performers in illuminated theatrical costumes, join her to re-enact historical fertility festivals and elaborate make-believe ceremonies of transformation, within colourful immersive stage sets.
Jennifer was born in Pembrokeshire and is now based in Cardiff. She studied at the Royal College of Art, London and the Ruskin School, University of Oxford. She has completed the g39 Fellowship with the Freelands Artist Programme, the Stella Fellowship at Castro Projects Rome and the Creative Wales Fellowship at the British School at Rome. Recent projects include Exolaris, Freelands Foundation, (London, 2021); Sentinel, KARST, (Plymouth, 2021); Materia Nova, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, (Rome, 2021); and Lunar Dawn, g39, (Cardiff, 2020).
GEOFF DIEGO LITHERLAND
GEOFF DIEGO LITHERLAND
Within The Surface and Tangle Formations
(in D Major)
Films
VENUE
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am – 4pm
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.
EMII ALRAI
EMII ALRAI
Waypoints
VENUE
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10 am – 4pm
Artist Emii Alrai will produce a new commission for Dawes Twine Works in West Coker, the UK’s only surviving 19th 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.
ELLA YOLANDE
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.
DERMOT PUNNETT
DERMOT PUNNETT
Noontide
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.
CHANTAL POWELL
CHANTAL POWELL
A Summoning
Sculpture
VENUE
5. Cemetery Chapel, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm
A Summoning explores transformation, nourishment, and the cycles of life and rebirth, drawing on ancient myths, alchemical symbolism, and the symbolic language of the unconscious. At its core, A Summoning is an invitation to consider a new way of being—one that is fertile, nourishing, and deeply intertwined with the alchemical processes of life, myth, and the psyche.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Chantal Powell is a British artist whose practice is deeply informed by Jungian psychology, alchemical symbolism, and her personal exploration of the unconscious. With a PhD in psychology, she follows a Jungian art-based research approach, using artistic process to engage with archetypal material and the psyche.
Her current work examines the archetypal motif of dismemberment as a transformative process in myth, alchemy, and psychology. Drawing on figures like Osiris and the cosmic man, Powell explores the fragmentation of the self as a necessary phase for rebirth, where dissolution becomes creation. Through a feminist lens, she engages with the embodied and vegetal aspects of alchemy, rejecting mind-body dualisms and promoting a regenerative model rooted in nature and transformation.
Powell works across various mediums, including ceramics, glass, textiles, and painting, to express archetypal imagery. Her recent research into 15th- and 16th-century alchemical manuscripts informs her practice and blends with her exploration of mythology and personal inner work.
Chantal has exhibited at galleries and institutions across the UK and internationally, including The Lightbox Museum, Woking; La Boulangerie, Paris; and Guildhall Art Gallery, London. She is the founder of Hogchester Arts residency program, host of The Red Book Club, and a faculty lecturer at JungAcademy. Chantal also offers talks on archetypal symbolism and psychological alchemy and has co-curated exhibitions focusing on archetypally symbolic art.
ADAM CHODZKO
ADAM CHODZKO
The Pickers
Film
Single Screen Video with Sound
17 minutes 52 seconds
VENUE
6. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm
The Pickers shows a group of young Romanian migrant workers at a strawberry farm in Kent. They alternate their intensive strawberry picking labour with another form of labour, the editing and mediation of a 20th century film archive collected by the artist, showing the activities of migrant hop pickers from London. Differences are blurred as to where and when events are set, the identity of an archive and its mediation, and who ultimately is holding the knowledge and therefore the power.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Adam Chodzko is a visual artist based in Whitstable, Kent. His work explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour by investigating the space of consciousness between how we are and what we might be. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work invents possibilities for collective imagination, wondering how we might perceive better in order to create better connections with others.
Recent exhibitions include; The Botanical Mind, Camden Art Centre, (2020); Towner International, Towner Eastbourne, (2020); Being Human, Wellcome Collection (2019-’30); Televistas, More Than Ponies (2020); Die Sonne does not shine like S?on?ce, Trafostacja Sztuki, Szczecin, Poland (2020). International solo exhibitions include: Because…,Tate Britain (2013); You’ll See, this Time it’ll be Different, The Benaki Museum, Athens (2013).
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.
DARLYNE KOMUKAMA
DARLYNE KOMUKAMA
TUNES BY DJ DECAY
SILENT DISCO + BAR
VENUE
2. Village Hall, WEST COKER
Saturday 27 May
7.30pm – 11.30pm
Booking Required £5
We have a very special guest sending over some incredible tunes from Uganda!
Ugandan born and raised Darlyne Komukama @darlkom aka DJ Decay aka Cardi Monáe has been commissioned to create a special playlist for the Od Arts Festival silent disco!
With her sonic explorations that share the joy of the power of the femme – whether she’s playing trap, dancehall, ballroom or the stankiest twerking music, it celebrates freedom for the femme body and spirit.
As a producer, Cardi Monáe is interested in translating her artistic pursuits, which include photography, videography and installation art, into music.
Her music will be released soon on the Hakuna Kulala label.
Support Decay’s queer community in Uganda by donating to the rescue fund here
🎧 Grab some headphones, choose your sounds and make some shapes. Join us for an evening of awesome beats and sonic treats!
Photo credits: Martin Kharumwa.