Continuum - Summer

During our research period Jo Dacombe and I took plenty of images of the leaf canopies in Thoroughsale Woods plus a few other woods during the summer months of 2016.

Our original intention was to hold the walk in March 2017 when the surrounding trees would still be bare to give a contrast between what was and what would be but rain made this impossible and the walk was rescheduled for May. However this change of plan worked in our favour and created shifting perspectives and experiences.

Three fabric canopies were printed giving different viewpoints through the photographic leaves. These were tied high above ground level, ground cover and mats were laid beneath them and participants were invited to lay down, look up and view both the artworks and the actual trees through specially made kaleidoscopes

The photographs from this part of the walk can be found here

Continuum was commissioned by Deep Roots Tall Trees as part of the Our Woods Festival

deeprootstalltrees.org/

Our Woods - Spinning New Dreams - Scoping

For the past few years artist Phiona Richards and I have been working together, mainly in Lincolnshire for Transported Art, as The Eloquent Fold. 

We are delighted to have been commissioned to create a walk and a workshop for the Deep Roots Tall Trees "Our Woods" Festival. 

Our events are called Spinning New Dreams taking place on Sunday 4th and 11th September in East Carlton Park. The walk is quite short in terms of distance but we hope to help participants make a hop, step and a jump in terms of imagination and inspiration!

We have spent quite a bit of time

scoping in the park, getting to know it's pathways

deciding which way to go and what to do where.

We also spent a rainy afternoon in the cafe

embellishing some rather plain, spotty teapots

as we're planning a lovely afternoon tea at the end

of our print and stitch session on the 11th.

We've been enjoying changing colours of 

the leaves and berries and are looking forward

to sharing this lovely woodland park with you.

If you feel tempted to join us for the walk on Sunday 4th - Book Tickets here and / or for the creative workshop on Sunday 11 September - Book Tickets here.

What Are You Doing Sunday?

I will be hosting the Made in Corby Fun Palace event at Stephenson Way Community Centre as part of the Made in Corby Big Days In programme which aims to reach new audiences and give communities what they want - more arts activity on the doorstep, in the local community centre. MiC are delighted to be teaming up with the national Fun Palaces initiative, with FREE arts activities for all at Danesholme, Oakley Vale and Stephenson Way Community Centres - please spread the word!

S.W.A.G have created large paper rosettes to decorate the hall, we are using Torchtastic torches, Perspex flowers and a mobile sculpture kit, felted landscape vessels to create our Fun Palace. There will be free drawing and making activities. Paper Sculptor Phiona Richards will be joining us for a mini paper Make and Take. There will be opportunities to draw your own Fun Palace and share your hopes for creativity in Corby. Celebrate your community space! Come and find out more about S.W.A.G. Tea and cake on sale. All welcome!

For a flavour of our event please visit our page on the Fun Palaces website and look out for updates on all the Corby Fun Palaces here

Attending the Flaming Skirt Festival - Virtually

Derbyshire's Contemporary Arts Festival 

in Village Halls · 27th April 2014

Air hostess in red, artist Sophie Cullinan 

who offered me a virtual ticket to ride

I was a bit cheeky and asked if I could have an actual Personal Appreciation Pack which arrived before the tour. In return and for fun I said I'd tweet my own virtual tour with vintage Air Hostess fashion dolls. I would have loved to have gone on the actual tour and the links at the end of this post will take you to where all the real action happened. I think Sally Lemsford's idea to take art to out of the way spaces is wonderful!

Eagle flask ready to come fly with me - virtually

Mod Barbie, Hair Fair Barbie and Midge

in their flaming finery, take in some culture

whilst waiting for the virtual tour bus.

Medium sized Sindy Air Hostess

Francie and Palitoy Tressy wonder

 if they will need an umber ella ella

Virtual Tour Exhibit 1 - 

Flaming vintage glass firing up the view

Italian - 1960's - a little bit chipped here and there.

Miniature Air Hostess Sindy and 

two Diahann Carroll Nurse Julia Dolls 

take their ease and consider a cup of tea.

Virtual Tour Exhibit 2 - Tulips 

Virtual Tour Exhibit 3 -

Flaming Acer Leaves

hide artists' studio

Palitoy Mary Make-Up, Tressy Air Hostess 

& Tressy stop for lunch

This hostess was a present from my paternal Grandmother

and flew to Western Australia and back during the

Miles family grand adventure as £10 Poms.

Virtual Tour Exhibit 4 - flaming tipped acer leaves

and a bucket of mosaic tiles - evidence of mosaic

making somewhere in the garden

Pedigree Vicki, Air Hostess Sidepart Sindy and Mitzi

holding a torch for the Flaming Skirt Virtual Tour

Virtual Tour Exhibit 4 - Flaming Shedstallation

We're all fired up

Virtual Tour Exhibit 6 - evidence artist has been at work

Virtual Tour Exhibit 7 - flaming tulip

Virtual Tour Exhibit 8 - it's hot on the streets

Surely not another Diahann Carrol Nurse Julia

health and safety well covered on this virtual tour!

Virtual Tour Exhibit 9 - Flame coloured tulips 

consider making a break for it

and now our tour is virtually done, all Tweets delivered,

all Instgrams complete, all dolls back in their boxes.

Time to examine the very wonderful Flaming Skirt 

Personal Appreciation Pack 

as one final flaming petal falls.

(part of the Do One Thing Initiative)

The End

CREDITS

The Flaming Skirt Festival

The Real Idea

Sally Lemsford

The actual Flaming Skirt Festival tour route

The Flaming Skirt Festival on Tumblr

The Flaming Skirt Festival on Facebook

The fabulous Flaming Skirt Artists

The Flaming Skirt tour Hostess with the mostess - artist Sophie Cullinan on Success

A FINAL NOTE

Why do I collect vintage fashion dolls - terrible role models you say, but the only two I had as a child saw me to Australia and back, reminded me of home and spent most of the time with their very few outfits packed in a case! Later on when my life went momentarily pear-shaped the collection took my mind of things that broke my heart. When I was too large for fashion I got to dress up by proxy. Later still I organised an exhibition for Sindy's 40th Birthday from my collection at the Museum of Childhood at Sudbury Hall. In the lean years selling off part of my collection has helped keep me afloat. It's a bit of a guilty pleasure but if Grayson Perry can be Claire and elevate his teddy Alan Measles then a bit of dolly daydreaming can't be all that bad. I've had hours of fun, expressed my inner anorak and demonstrated the importance of play ie :- creative thinking, throughout life. 

A Walk to Remember

SCIBase is a collaborative project between BasementArtsProject, Leeds and the SCI collective based in the Northwest of England. The collective includes members not just from Leeds and Merseyside, but also Sheffield, the Midlands, Sweden and the USA. I donated to their Kickstarter project and was able to send a piece to be included in the Colonized exhibition. 

You can find out more about the project by following the links below

basementartsproject.com/event/ scibase-colonize-2014/

sciartistprojects.wordpress.com/

The piece I made is called A Walk To Remember and is based on a walk taken between Knotting and Souldrop in Bedfordshire in 2013. It grew larger than the original size specified in the brief and is A6 rather than A5. 

This was a walk that has stuck in my memory, Souldrop and Knotting are such memorable names. We walked through a muddy woodland path deeply rutted by quad bikes, there were signs of bluebells to come, a bee hive in an oak tree, it was warm and the sky was dotted with small puffy clouds. Dead tree branches stretched dramatically between live trees. We came out into a field and walked down towards a farm. There was some sort of insect nest caught up in a weblike structure, there was a half devoured hare's leg in the middle of the path. 

There was a long walk on pavement through a village before we reached Knotting and our destination St Margarets Church. There was a war memorial, an impressive clock face, cobwebs capturing corners, ancient carvings, dusty light and old warm stones. There was a long walk back through another village which had the largest horse chestnut trees I've seen, all decked out with blowsy flower spikes, deep pink, speckled white. Open windows breathed in the drowsy air. 

We are sun soaked, tired, happy. We catch the Singer treadle gate, the power cable disks, the white doves, the yellow wagtail, the hunting birds, the ancient bomber in our cameras. Our nostrils and clothes saturated by oil seed rape pollen, my whippet picking his way through the sharp, dried bracts on the ground. 

The field seems endless, we pass another dog and walker, smiling, pollen painted. A golden afternoon. A walk to remember the past, wars, countryside, seasons, friends, family, sense of place, the mystery of the unexpected, the busy world of nature, the ground underfoot, the light, the passage of time. A memorable walk, for closeness, for love, for being part of and inside a quieter landscape.

This sense of an older community and quieter time influenced the way I made my subsequent piece of work. I wanted to use some donated woollen fabric, it made me think of tweed jackets, hunting ,  farming and weather. 

I printed the yellow wagtail in blue onto the fabric, added a spare Listen left over from the REFractal blindfolds to the reverse and created a gold silk lining with a frayed edge to the pocket.

On the front I added some saved charms and string,and pinned on a small copper medal embossed with the word Sigh. I recycled a free machine embroidered piece from Invisible Threads - an imagined portrait of a country woman from another time, and backed it with a page from Walks in the Wheat-fields by Richard Jefferies. 

I made two small books which have photographs from the walk applied to Zoffany wallpaper samples and are backed with a postcard stamp, words and phrases to conjure my imaginings from the day. All of the fabric and papers remind me of the people who donated they and the time they came into my possession. I imagine a young man in the American airforce uniform meeting a girl in one of these villages - our wide skies saw many planes flying overhead during WWII. I imagine him sending postcards to the woman, this piece is her pocket full of memories, an unfinished story, a life cut short perhaps, these words treasured and stored in a drawer in an old mahogany chest, in a bedroom where time paused and passed on. 

You see the contents of the books and read the postcards here

You can see the photo set from the walk here

I have more pockets and I'm making a larger intervention to take back to the church later this year as part of a current Back To Books project which will involve a participatory walk.

remember |riˈmembər|verb [ trans. ]have in or be able to bring to one's mind an awareness of (someone or somethingthat one has seen, known, or experienced in the past) : I remember the screech of the horn as the car came toward me | no one remembered his name.• [with infinitive ] do something that one has undertaken to do or that is necessary or advisable : did you remember to mail the letters?• [with clause ] used to emphasize the importance of what is asserted : you must remember that this is a secret.• bear (someone) in mind by making them a gift or making provision for them :he has remembered the boy in a codicil to his will.• ( remember someone to) convey greetings from one person to (another) :remember me to Charlie.• pray for the success or well-being of : the congress should be remembered in our prayers.• ( remember oneself) recover one's manners after a lapse.