OWEN LLOYD AND ELEANOR DUFFIN
OWEN LLOYD AND ELEANOR DUFFIN
A Grounding
Audio and performance
VENUE
11. St Michael and All Angels, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
(Closed for a service until 1.30pm on Sunday)
Performance Fri 26, 7pm
An invitation to lie down and think slowly, at a geological pace. Originally created as an imagining of the substrata in St Ives and Carbis Bay, Cornwall, A Grounding is a spoken text which aims to evoke a dreamlike state, and provoke you to imagine your own journey to those locations or a place familiar to you.
There will be a live reading of the work at 7pm on Friday evening. FREE – no need to book. See our events listings for more details.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Eleanor Duffin is a visual artist, whose practice explores; the role of verbal and text-based language in the process of making; the relationship between the female body and traditional sculptural materials; and the nature of co-working with both human and non-human entities.
Owen Lloyd is a composer, sound artist, designer and researcher with a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration that integrates art, science and technology.
BEDWYR WILLIAMS
BEDWYR WILLIAMS
Tyrrau Mawr
Film
Duration: 20 mins
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
This moving image installation takes as its starting point the tradition of Welsh landscape painting. Created using the visual effects technique of ‘matte painting’ the mountainous terrain of North Wales appears in disconcertingly sharp digital quality and becomes the location for a futuristic mega city. As the cityscape changes from night to day, a voiceover, written and narrated by the artist, tells the story of the inhabitants of this brave new world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Bedwyr Williams uses multimedia, performance and text to explore the friction between the deadly serious and the banal aspects of modern life. He often draws on his own autobiographic existence merging art and life with a comedic – and frequently satirical – twist, his work is instantaneously sympathetic and relational.
ELLA WEST
ELLA WEST
Becoming Geologic (Third Form)
Sculpture
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
A sculptural installation of fictive paper objects, designed to mimic rock forms. The rocks are connected to a low-fi geological ‘life support machine’, evocative of mid-twentieth-century ideas of the future, transforming them into slowly breathing masses. Ella’s work explores the fragility and temporality that exists even with seemingly solid and static natural forms with a wry humour and a nod to the fallibility of human attempts to interfere with imperfect technology.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ella West’s multidisciplinary practice engages with the relationship between human and geological timelines, using this as an artistic framework to address themes of ecology, family, collaboration and home. She creates installations that combine varying elements of sculpture, video and printmaking.
NICOLA TURNER WITH CLARE WHISTLER
NICOLA TURNER WITH CLARE WHISTLER
Echoed Ecstasy
Sculpture and performance
VENUE
9. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
Performance Fri 26, 7.30pm
Two site-specific sculptural installations have been created for the festival, one in each village. Nicola’s works combine found objects that hold traces of memory, the shapes of living forms and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair – a material traditionally used for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history and memory.
On Friday at 7.30pm collaborative artist and performer, Clare Whistler will make her own response to the sculpture at Coker Court, in the form of movement. FREE – no booking required.
See our events listings for details of this and other performances and workshops.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nicola Turner’s practice investigates the dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and the continuous exchange of ecosystems.
Clare Whistler is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, poetry, music, visual art, site, landscape and communities. Movement and gesture infuse all her work.
ELAINE WONG
ELAINE WONG
Reflecting a shift (Barreiro – Terreiro do Paço)
Film
VENUE
8. Cemetery Chapel, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
Projecting movement into space, Elaine Wong’s subtle interventions exist in corners and cracks, suggesting slippage into another time or place. The fluctuations of light are in fact small windows onto the motion of bodies of water. They are part of an ongoing attempt by the artist to unravel her own explorations of daily life and encounters with the world around her.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elaine Wong works with videography, sound and installations. She is interested in the experiential quality of work. Her practice explores and unveils experiences of everyday encounters and inner conditions.
WILL CRUICKSHANK
WILL CRUICKSHANK
Plaster and thread works
Sculpture
VENUE
8. Cemetery Chapel, East Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
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. But in the case of pieces on show here, the process is somewhat reversed, with the full force of pressurised water employed to shape spinning plaster objects revealing layers of thread embedded within. The resulting collection of works are mostly vessels, with a votive or ceremonial air – suggestive of both the water and the industrial technologies that formed them.
Video documentation of Will’s processes is on show at Dawe’s Twineworks.
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.
JENNET THOMAS
JENNET THOMAS
The Great Curdling
Film
Duration: 24 mins 30 seconds (film starts on the half hour)
VENUE
6. Jubilee Pavilion, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
A folk-sci-fi film, this darkly comic musical explores the feeling of a reality at tipping point. Although the sea is dying, it’s spawning a new kind of life – creatures that are half-cartoon, in the form of tiny flexing hands. They teach women how to re-format the colonised, curdled bodies of the dead into a new substance.
Co-selected by More Than Ponies.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jennet Thomas makes films, performances and installations exploring connections between fantasy, ideology and everyday life. Often darkly comic and absurd, they collide genres and explore collective constructions of meaning.
TOM SEWELL
TOM SEWELL
Circles
Sculpture
VENUE
5. The Orchard, East Close, West Coker
Sat 27 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
Workshop Sat 27
11am – 12.30pm Booking Required £5
Two collaboratively made circles, inspired by the prehistoric stone and timber circles of the Atlantic archipelago and their history of communal construction, and intended to echo the relationship between the two villages of East and West Coker.
The first circle will be made by school children on Friday. Anyone interested in making the second is invited to join Tom’s workshop on Saturday at 11am, £5 – booking required.
Work by Tom Sewell is also on show at OSR Projects.
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.
LAURA HOPES
LAURA HOPES
Cuckoo
Sculpture and audio installation
VENUE
5. The Orchard, East Close, West Coker
Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm
You are invited to enter this specially constructed bird hide, and take a moment to step away from other festival goers, to anonymously survey the scene beyond and to listen.
Throughout the world, the cuckoos’ lengthy migrations herald the arrival of spring. Famous for laying their eggs in the nests of other smaller birds, they provide an apt metaphor for the asymmetry between the global rich, their fellow humans, and their more-than-human kin.
Co-selected by CAMP.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Hopes is an artist and researcher working with installation, sculpture, sound and film to generate playful interventions to illuminate terrifying themes.
SARA TRILLO
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
and
Sun 28, 10.30am – 12pm
Starting – 7. The Village Café, EAST COKER
Booking Required £5
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.