SIMON LEE DICKER
Red Hot Haystacks
VENUE
6. Coker Court, East Coker
Fri 23 – Sat 24 May, 10am – 5pm
Sun 25 May, 10am – 4pm
Using a combination of black light and wild meadow grass, Red Hot Haystacks explores ideas around the unseen environmental impact of human activity through a story of nuclear testing in the 1960s. High levels of radiation were reported on the coasts each side of the Pentland Firth that separates mainland Scotland from the Orkney archipelago. The seas proved too treacherous to complete any survey, but later, soil particles from haystacks contaminated by atmospheric nuclear testing, were described geologists as Red Hot.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Simon Lee Dicker is an artist based in south Somerset whose work explores a discordant relationship with landscape and human-made marks on the natural world. He describes an artistic practice that examines matter in a state of flux as being ‘restless’.
Dicker’s recent exhibitions include temporary sculptural installations with ceramics such as See-an-enemy in Lisbon made from chalk, unfired clay and ceramics, and The Flatlands at the Arnolfini in Bristol, a large-scale sculptural installation of a tyre stack and film inspired by Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque. His work exists alongside a practice in creative writing with drawing that continues to inform his ideas.
Simon is a co-founder of the artist-run organisation OSR Projects that run the bi-annual Od Arts Festival and regular Community Clay pottery workshops.