Writing

The Eilean Shona Residency 2024
Robin Tarbet

I’ve never set out to deliberately spend time on my own, so I wasn’t totally sure how I’d deal with being alone on an island with only occasional signal from my mobile phone for an entire month... but it turns out I’m quite good at it. Working as an artist in a studio is a solitary act, so relocating to an island was not the big leap out of society I’d feared.

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Afterlife:Time Travelling with Robin Tarbet
Elizabeth Perrotte

“Who gets to count as one who has the ability to die? A rock, a river, a cloud, the atmosphere, the Earth?” (Karen Barad, 2012, 93).

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SolasArts – What’s in a Name? Reflections on Pedagogy
Elizabeth Perrotte

‘Solas’ conducts static from other terms: solace, solar, solastalgia. Solastalgia brings with it a vibration of eco-anxiety: a feeling of mourning for something lost, a sense of displacement from environment, an existential dread about what is to come. Solar’s molten energy and solace’s tranquil relief reverb against this melancholia with imaginative intensity providing agency for transformative passage.

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Burton Museum Environmental Art Commission 2024
Andy Hughes

"Shimmer is a mesmerising and weird blend of photographs, archival footage, and video game visuals that presents plastic pollution simultaneously here on Earth and in an alternate universe!"

Dianna Cohen, CEO
Co-Founder Plastic Pollution Coalition
@plasticpollutes | FB: Plastic Pollution Coalition

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Listen: The Unteacher
Philip Guston and pedagogy as practice. Chaired by Ben Street, with Sepake Angiama, Dana Clancy and Alexis Harding.
https://freelandsfoundation.co.uk/event/talk-the-unteacher-philip-guston-and-pedagogy-as-practice

“Teaching is a way to lose interest in what you thought you were interested in..” wrote Philip Guston in 1966. In the following decade, his work as an educator was highly influential on a generation of painters, but is often overlooked in discussion of his practice.

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Coral Communities
Dominica Williamson

Coral Communities looked at how to improve the resilience of communities and coral reefs to changes anticipated as a result of climate change; an issue of huge global importance. Hundreds of millions of people rely on coral reefs to provide essential services such as food and coastal protection.

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EMBEDDED
Andy Hughes

Surfboard under my arm and walking along the sand dunes back to my car after surfing at Sker Point, South Wales, I suddenly felt a sharp pain in my left hand. I noticed that some sort of splinter had embedded itself into the palm of my hand. While it hadn’t bothered me while out there, concentrating on catching that wave, it was really starting to bother me now.

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CREATIVE CONTAGION CATCHING SEA FEVER
Lizzie Perrotte

‘We hurry to catch the tide or catch something’ (Bloomfield, 2023)

Last October I caught a sea fever (more of a shimmer than a shiver) and I discovered something rich and strange in its delirium. Flotsam and jetsam of memories, sensations, and wild thoughts have now washed up from the experiences of Sea Fever 2 (2023), a SolasArt pop-up exhibition, curated in the Borlase Smart studio, overlooking Porthmeor Beach, St Ives in Cornwall. This exhibition, entwined work by four creatives, three visual artists and a poet; all surfers and eco-critical thinkers based in the South West of England.

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RED CREEK
Lizzie Perrotte

‘Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.’ (1) (G.K.Chesterton, 1910)

Writer/philosopher, G.K.Chesterton, suggests porosity between an inside and outside, a notional body and precarious environment. His words are weighted with a sense of uncanny threat, impending ruin. A similar entropic imaginary permeates work by British artists, Andy Hughes and Peggy Atherton, who have collaborated for a project, Red Creek, in response to the site of Frenchman’s Creek, a steep wooded ‘valley drowned by the sea’, (2) extending inland from the Helford Estuary, Cornwall.

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