Issue 3 sPRING 2011

WWW.FeRMYNWOODs.CO.uK

TelleRvO KalleINeN & OlIveR KOChTa-KalleINeN

COMPLAINTS CHOIR

Encounters, journeys through language and landscape will connect Fermyn Woods Country Park to Lyveden New Bield along a three mile bridleway, and is taking place during August and September 2011 as part of the Cultural Olympiad Igniting Ambition programme across Northamptonshire. The project concerns the way we feel about and respond to rural loca­tions, how open spaces become places with meaning and how we develop a sense of belonging. In order to investi­gate these ideas, Paula Boulton and Rebecca Lee are looking for contri­butions from people who visit Fermyn Woods and Lyveden New Bield. Please see below for details.

COMPlaINTs ChOIR Do you enjoy complaining? Finish artists, Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta­Kalleinen, decided to transform the energy people put into complaining to create Complaints Choirs. (In Finnish the expression Valituskuoro or complaints choir describes situations where many people are complaining simultaneously.) We would like to hear from you if you would like to voice a complaint about the rural environment, rural life and culture, or your own life in general. These complaints will be composed into music and lyrics for a choir by Paula Boulton. The resulting songs will be perf­ormed by the choir at the opening of Encounters, journeys through language and landscape.

See www.complaintschoir.org for background information about this ongoing international project. For information about joining the choir or to send us your complaints, please contact Paula Boulton via email positivepaula2@aol.co.uk or telephone 07892 489 163. Alternatively, email your complaints to info@fermynwoods.co.uk – all complaints will remain anonymous.

ORGaN (WORKING TITle) Rebecca Lee was an artist in residence at Sudborough Green Lodge last year and is developing a new work for Encounters. During her stay at the Lodge, Rebecca experienced the woods as a place for reflection and she is interested in exploring why other people visit the woods and what they mean to them. Rebecca will be in Fermyn Woods on 15–17 and 22–24 April, to talk to visitors about the music that might convey or represent their experience of the woods. Rebecca is planning to work with elements of these songs to create a new sound work for Encounters, journeys through language and landscape.

suDBOROuGh GReeN lODGe We are looking for volunteers to help us to develop the garden area around our artist residency venue this spring and summer. If you are able to help and can spare an hour or two please contact Kenneth Martin kenneth@fermynwoods.co.uk

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eXhIBITION

— until 14 November 2011 —

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George Barber (UK)

J. R. Carpenter (UK)

Rowan Corkill (UK)

sarrita hunn (USA)

Garry hunter (UK)

Jaykoe (UK)

lina Kruopyte (Lithuanaia)

adeniyi Odeleye (Nigeria)

Richard O’sullivan (UK)

—We invite you to view our first Open Online exhibition to discover work by 9 artists who have responded creatively to the opportunity for new ways of thinking, modes of production and engagement with art, provided by the Internet. The work reflects the transient nature of the Internet, its possibilities as a site for research and documentation and as a place where truths and fiction are merged. George Barber’s video Welcome asks if we have invited global warming as a guest into our home and City Distortions by Jaykoe reflects on the possible future of global cities. The artists appropriate found footage from the Internet, TV and iconography from Hollywood films to explore questions around climate change and the impact of urbanisation. Garry Hunter’s work, ImaginedStates addresses the excess of images in both the real and virtual worlds by encouraging us to imagine narratives and locations through evocative texts. Adeniyi Odeleye uses the Internet to expose the results of the Nigerian tendency to find temporary, easy solutions to the lack of basic infrastructure through his photographic series Shifting Realities.

In Ferndale, Western Canyon, Los Angeles, Richard O’Sullivan alternates negative film footage with positive photographic stills and uses recorded sound, to reveal the mediated nature of what we often consider to be the natural environment. Portrait of a species by Rowan Corkill depicts man as a dominant predator and highlights our increasingly lost relationship with the natural world and other species. We are invited to navigate through J. R. Carpenter’s website The Cape, which presents found data alongside family photographs and portrays our inclination to reinvent childhood memories through the creation of new stories. Lina Kruopyte’s Are you alive? appears to be an interactive work that invites the viewer to make choices, but the questions are based on familiar slogans and fail to produce satisfying answers. Sarrita Hunn’s animation 99x9.2 is an aesthetic exploration of space and was created from 99 individual drawings, each one relating to the size and number of the artist’s sketchbook pages.

The work was selected by Andrew Langford (University of Northampton) and artist Simon Woolham. The exhibition is located at http://goo.gl/hvgyt

(FeRMYNWOODs.CO.uK)

— 12–25 July 2011 —

INTeRChaNGe FlOW

aRTIsTs ResIDeNCY

(NaRROW BOaT)

David littler Jo Roberts simon Woolham —

Interchange is a fortnight of artistic activity and dialogue along the Grand Union Canal and River Nene in Northamptonshire, taking place around the Olympic Open Weekend on 22–24 July. Fermynwoods Contemporary Art has invited artists David Littler, Jo Roberts and Simon Woolham to be based on a narrow boat for a fortnight to make new work and engage with communities based alongside the banks and on the water as part of FLOW Northamptonshire. The artists will explore the changing rural, urban and industrial landscapes through collaborative and research based art practice and take inspiration from traditional cultural activity associated with inland waterways such as canal songs.

Look out for Jo’s Letterpress Posters produced on an 1866 Albion Hand Press, which will be distributed prior to departure and Simon’s invitations which will be hand delivered to boats along the way. Follow the artists’ progress and engage with the project through Twitter, the artist’s blogs, Flickr and the Fermynwoods’ website. Join us at one of the events listed overleaf or meet us en route, see the map for dates and locations. FCA would like to thank James Boulton and Wyvern Shipping for their assistance with this project.

Interchange is part of FLOW Northamptonshire, a project organised by Northamptonshire County Council (NCC) as part of the 2011 Cultural Olympiad Igniting Ambition Festival, delivered in partnership with British Water-ways and anglian Water. Interchange will be followed by an installation by steve Messam on the River Nene in august; projections by Jo Fairfax one or more of the county’s water towers in september; and an installation by Charles Monkhouse on one of the county’s reservoirs in October. FLOW has primarily been funded by arts Council england, NCC and legacy Trust uK. Igniting Ambition, a Cultural Olympiad programme in the east Midlands, invests in projects and people that take the london 2012 Games as their inspiration to create once-in-a-lifetime cultural opportunities for audiences and communities. Igniting Ambition is funded by legacy Trust uK, an independent charity set up to create a cultural and sporting legacy from the london 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the european Regional Development Fund and the east Midlands Development agency, with the support of arts Council england and many others.

INTeRCHANge FLOW

— 12–25 July 2011 —

FROM COsGROve TO WaDeNhOe

aND BaCK aGaIN

David Littler’s residency will continue his ongoing project sampler–culture clash, through which he collaborates with a range of people including vocal percussionists, DJs, performance poets and embroiderers to create events exploring sampling as a creative process and the connections between people, sound and textiles. The project provides an opportu­nity for different practitioners to mix, match and clash… a time when embroiderers can exercise their latent writing talents and writers and musicians can sew…

Littler is interested in bringing people from different disciplines together ‘to experiment, to question and to learn from each other through the process of research and collabor­ation. Posing the question ‘What if?’ – what if we try this? What if we mixed this with that? What if he/ she got involved? In that sense the research is never complete its an organic process of creating, learning and sharing through participation’.

Visit David’s blog for more information about the project via http://goo.gl/wpVko

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Jo Roberts calls herself a ‘Comment­ariographer’, a word last used in 1576 to describe ‘someone who writes, mediates, ponders, portrays or records. One who comments on current events and produces an expository treatise.’ She is interested in the minutiae of everyday life, highlighting the specific and responding to the way people communicate with one another. These observations and interactions result in unique drawings, maps and records. For Interchange, Jo is exploring the impact of slow travel, and will record her journey through various markers of time and distance.

‘Slow travel re­engineers time, trans­forming it into a commodity of abundance rather than scarcity. And slow travel also reshapes our relationship with places…’ Nicky Gardener, Manifesto of Slow Travel

Jo invites you to follow her journey through www.canalworld.net

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Simon Woolham is concerned with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold in them. His biro drawings of playing fields and underpasses often include excerpts of dialogue and these often­dilapidated places come to life as tree stumps or broken fences are filled with the meanings from the events happening around them. Simon also creates sculptural works from paper, pop­up drawings and animations that hint at personal stories and histories.

During his residency, Simon will map and create an alternative antho­logy of local urban myths, stories and folk songs associated with the canal and river and make new text based drawings based on found narratives. As part of the artist collective M4SK22 – that mixes music and film, soil and dust, samples and software, Internet archives and drawing – Simon will collect atmospheric and incidental sounds throughout the journey to create a new sound track.

sIMON WOOlhaM

aRTIsT ResIDeNCY & INsTallaTION

— 14–26 May 2011 —

a CONveRsaTION BeTWeeN TRees

Top lodge, Fineshade Woods, Northamptonshire, NN17 3BB10am–5pm — Closed Mondays

Preview with the artists — 13 May 2011, 3–5pm

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active Ingredient —

‘Welcome to a forest that spans time and location… from the temperate north to the tropical south. Take a journey through the forest to discover the invisible forces at play, where the air speaks as you travel through time and space – to reveal a story of 150 years of climate and environmental change.’ Active Ingredient

Active Ingredient is a group of artists who work collaboratively to create interactive, playful interventions that merge art, science and technology, to explore the world around us. As part of a year long project, this spring Active Ingredient is creating a link between trees in Fineshade Woods and the Mata Atlantica forest at the edge of Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. They are using environmental sensors connected to mobile phones placed in the trees to uncover the traces of a conversation between the trees and the results of our presence in the forests. Each day, the story of the forests will be revealed through a set of clues, generated through a series of data readings, recording the temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, decibel and light levels. This data is sent from the sensors in the trees and projected as a visual interpretation of the data readings from both forests. The artists are also creating a kinetic sculpture, that will respond to historical climate data, visually depicting how our climate has changed. The artists describe this project as… an experience that takes the audience into an augmented forest, using a mobile phone as a lens to reveal that which we cannot see in the forest.

The journey then takes us into a space where a climate machine interprets the scientific data collected from both trees, in the UK and Brazil. During the residency there will be a range of ways that visitors can get involved and collect their own sensory data in the woods. The artists will lead woodland walks and demonstrate how to use the mobile sensor tech­nology. The walks will also be a time when people can continue the ‘conversation with trees’ by sharing their observations, memories and thoughts about woodlands, forests and the future. To follow the project and find out more about the events please see the website www.thedarkforest.tv Visitors will also be able to download the forest mobile experience on to their phones (you can check if the experience will work on your phone through the project website) or borrow a phone from Top Lodge during the exhibition on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays (a form of identification will be required).

A Conversation Between Trees has been developed in collaboration with horizon (university of Nottingham), silvia leal (estudio experimental Movel), Carlo Buon-tempo (senior Climate Change scientist, hadley Centre, uK MeT office), Juliet Robson and Mark selby. The project has been funded by arts Council england and Nottinghamshire County Council. With thanks to the Rio Botanical Gardens, Bruno Rezende, the Mixed Reality lab (university of Nottingham), the Forestry Commission, lizzie haines and Bronac Ferran.

(FINeshaDe WOODs)

INTeRChaNGe: FRee eveNTs

15 July 2011, 7pm til late The Britannia Pub Bedford Road, Northampton —

Artist Discussion – Contemporary Art, Participation and the Public Realm.Join us for a beer, share your thoughts about collaborative art practice and hear others’ experiences.

19 July 2011, 4–6pm Wadenhoe, near the King’s head — 22 July 2011 10am–12noon Beckets Park Marina, Northampton —

Meet the artists David Littler, Jo Roberts and Simon Woolham and join them in a range of unusual collaborative activities, including embroidery workshops based on traditional canal songs, badge making for friends, surrealist games, unusual uses of printmaking techniques and a live Jackanory style performance.

23 July 2011, 6–8pm Blisworth Tunnel Grand union Canal between stoke Bruerne and Blisworth —

David Littler will work with vocal percussionist Jason Singh, to create a new sound piece with projections of visualised sound onto the walls of the tunnel, responding to the natural acoustics and echo of the third longest tunnel in the UK. Please contact us to book a place at this event since numbers are limited.

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As part of their residency at Fineshade Woods, Active Ingredient will be working with schools in Northamp­tonshire to help children understand different environmental and climatic factors such as light, sound, humidity and carbon dioxide. Becoming ‘human sensors’ and using Active Ingredient’s mobile phone technology the young people will visualise the invisible forces around them in the forest, bringing together art, science and technology. This will follow on from two days of workshops between Active Ingredient and Irthlingborough Nursery and Infant School in March. If you are a teacher or a parent and would like your school to take part in a workshop with Active Ingredient during May please contact James Steventon on 01832 733009 or via james@fermynwoods.co.uk

The weekly workshops with children from William Knibb Complimentary Education Centre led by artists from around the country continue with Simon Woolham (filmmaking) and Susie Turner (printmaking).

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CONTaCT

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art Montague House Chancery Lane, Thrapston Northamptonshire NN14 4LN

T +44 (0)1832 733009E info@fermynwoods.co.uk www.fermynwoods.co.uk Company Registered no. 5434735 Registered Charity no. 1122678

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