Living Landscape
An Arts Trail
Wednesday 1 Sep - Sunday 28 Nov
Book your slot for £12 (+ booking fee) which covers 2 people for exclusive access to the arts trail.
Book your slot by clicking on the link below or email us at info@thehopbarn.org.uk
Looking for other events and attractions to see while you are visiting Southwell? Visit the link below
‘Living Landscape’ - an artist’s trail of the farm that will unite art and nature. The HopBarn’s wildlife rich land is inspiring some of the area’s most interesting contemporary makers and artists to create an outdoor arts trail that presents a fascinating cohesion of art and nature. Visitors will be able to walk our farmland where pointers along the trail tell the stories of trees, plants and birds, of growing and preparing food and foraging. Each artwork will help visitors to discover meanings and memories and uncover their relationship with land in surprising ways.
Artist Geoff Molyneux displaces stones from various locations around the world as part of a personal creative practice he terms 'Moving Mountains'. By collecting these stones and relating each one to a moment in time, it becomes a meaningful and memorable reminder or token.
We encourage visitors to bring their stone to exchange with various stones dotted on various platforms throughout the entire trail. Take this stone for walk along the trail and by doing so memories and experience of artworks are embedded in the stone. At the end of the visit, leave the stone for another visitor or take the stone with you and display it either on a shelf or window sill.
Begin on your adventure with ‘Living Landscape’ which has been conceived
by curators Angie Atmadjaja and Rebecca Blackwood who are presenting artists
whose work is inspired by the land using materials from the land.
Geoff Molyneux is a Manchester based artist. For more than three decades he has displaced stones from various locations around the world; some have travelled short distances, others have transversed continents. It is a personal creative practice he terms 'Moving Mountains'. By collecting these stones each becomes a meaningful and memorable reminder or token of a journey undertaken. The act of relocation is a continuation of the journey.
We encourage visitors to bring their stone to exchange with various stones dotted on various platforms throughout the entire trail. Take this stone for walk along the trail and by doing so, memories and experience of each artwork are embedded in the stone. At the end of the visit, leave the stone for another visitor or take the stone with you and display it either on a shelf or window sill.
Moving Mountains
Haris Kittos is a composer and visual artist from Thessaloniki in Greece and currently a professor at the Royal College of Music teaching composition. His music has been performed internationally by various well known ensembles such as the Arditti Quartet, the London Sinfonietta amongst others and has been part of various festivals such as Ear London Festival, InTransit Festival and Taukay Contemporanea Festival. With every composition, both aurally and through the score, his artistic expression shows a strong parallel process of exploration between the musical components and visual elements. An articulation he also wishes to explore as sculptures in space.
...and a shadow echoed in the mist...
Jane Thomson lectures fashion knitwear design, illustration and design communication at both De Montfort University and Nottingham Trent University. In her artistic practice, she explores form and inspiring ways in which to visually communicate a concept. Her interest is mainly figurative, studying the captivating subject of the human body and its ability to depict emotion and connectivity through subtle gestures and posture. Through the layering of conflicting images and the combination of interrelated medium, her artwork explores self-concepts and portrays the disordered world we find ourselves in.
"From as early as I can remember, I have never been far from a pencil. Part of me, it is always my first port of call when wanting to express thought, emotion or just simply show gratitude to my existence.”
Self .(un)Centered.
Susan Isaac, born in Cardiff, is a painter and sculptor. Her paintings, with subjects typically of towns and seascapes, are mostly in a loose figurative style, occasionally dissolving into the abstract elements of her compositions. They combine strong drawing skills with bold use of colours and application of texture. Her sculptures are a fusion of human and landscape forms, hand-built stoneware geomorphic heads, referencing the mining landscapes of her birthplace, enhanced using a variety of glazes and are often wood fired to produce exciting and contrasting surfaces. A common thread in Susan’s work is an “endeavour to capture the spirit of things or places I have known, to seek to illuminate aspects of the world that have captured my imagination - to evoke feeling.” Originally trained in fine art sculpture, Susan worked for some time as a landscape archaeologist in Shropshire and Lancashire before returning to her creative practice.
Green Fuse
Danica Ognjenovic, whose father was originally from Croatia, was born in London. Always taken with words, she studied English and Related Literature at York University and has been writing poems for around 10 years. Her poems have been placed in National Poetry Competition (UK) 2013 and in the top ten of first Rialto pamphlet competition (2017). They have also been published in Abridged, Acumen, Honest Ulsterman, The Moth and Rialto.
2 Foraging poems and 5 HopBarn poems
Linden Harris graduated in Fine Art from Sheffield Hallam University. She is a multi-discipline artist whose practice revolves around a conceptual enquiry into the question ‘What is Freedom?’ Her work incorporates live art, installation, assemblage, photography, sculpture, drawing, collaboration and documentation.
She views all ‘matter’ and ‘sensation’ as potentials for manipulation, often working with everyday and ephemeral media such as sunlight, organic materials, intention, breath and found elements. Much of her work is site specific resulting in what she describes as Post Performance Sculptural Drawings.
For more info https://lindenharris.life
For the Living Landscape arts trail Linden has collaborated with visual artist Samantha Hook whose practice includes photography, writing and mixed media collage. Sam graduated in Film and Drama from Reading University, and studied Photography at the London College of Printing. Her practice explores the potential of the unseen to suggest multiple narratives.
Surrender
Caitlin Hickiling
Caitlin’s work is called ‘Where Water Gurgles From Beneath The Ground’
Somewhere deep in the ground or stranded in a plain of ceaseless yellow sand, Caitlin Hickling’s sculptures and installations sit awaiting their moment of finding. Hickling draws from sci-fi and fantasy novels to manifest a world of sentient tools; a rudimentary furnace, an ink stick, a stone cairn, all humming with quiet voices of beckoning.
... sat at the bottom of the bowl of earth, writhing with slow trickling intent, the Golden Map waits to be read. Tunnelling greedily through the earth in a reach of shining black, it’s fingers grip the ground beneath. Protruding in a facet of obsidian, stunted by the light, unable to reach to the high sky, unable to match the height of the trees of it’s surroundings…
The roots of the tree revealed by the lapping of liquid and the falling of stone, twist to make the trails of the Golden Map. Hickling entices the viewer to succumb to the quite murmuring stories of the sculptures and surroundings, to ask the question of why, is to fall unknowingly in the role of the Follower, entering a possibly never ending cycle of finding and following.
... it’s monument of ink glistens under the deluge, silent now, listening forward, questing among the green filaments, it craves to be hidden in the quiet and the dark it knows lies below, but it will wait here, for a moment…
Where Water Gurgles From Beneath The Ground
Alison Squire is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer. Having graduated with a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Nottingham Trent University they are a resident artist at Surface Gallery (Nottingham). Their work has been shown at Surface Gallery (Nottingham) and Bonington Gallery (Nottingham). Their practice encompasses installation, soft sculpture, graphic design, printmaking, embroidery and spoken-word soundscapes.
As a collector, gatherer and hoarder; their practice is influenced by an affiliation towards materiality and an affection for inanimate forms. Found objects; such as fabric off-cuts, paper ephemera, beach debris and sea boulders all play a part in the making process.
Intriguing an audience to create links between levels of tactility, encouraging the joining of points between natural spaces once they are distanced from them. Alison endeavours to recreate feelings of curiosity and tranquility in spaces which may not be at first apparent.
The installation in Living Landscape reimagines a sense of value onto natural objects in a hope to reinvigorate their importance, Alison does this through a process of wrapping, re-making and concealing in a bid for protection. The work in Living Landscape should provide a safe haven, inviting visitors to be concealed from the key route, along with the protected rocks, in order to create a sense of sanctuary.
The Caress of The Cove
“There is a story behind everything I make.”
Steve Hunt started making simple things from wood at a very young age. His love for this medium has never faded and instead has grown to include a deeper understanding and appreciation of green wood, its role in material culture and the ecological importance of trees. His finished works are made from reclaimed cherry, apple, plum, beech, hawthorn, chestnut and rowan, using traditional tools such as adze, gouges, chisels and carving knives. Steve adapts Scandinavian designs to develop finished items with well-proportioned, elegant shapes that are both practical and sculptural.
The social distancing spoon
Emergence
Viv Payne is a ceramist who is mainly self taught, creating a variety of works from the tiniest beads to large sculptures from both wheel thrown domestic ware, handbuilt forms vessels. In her studio, made from reclaimed / recycled materials encasing an old goat shed, she pursues her passion of this creative medium for the last 50 years which, inspired by her mother, began from days spent at a teacher training college at school holidays. She continues to be excited by clay and its infinite possibilities to this day just as it did all those years ago.
muTable
open table lunches
Rebecca and Angie have also created an installation centred around a majestic [oak] table where artists, farmers, animals and plants will all eat as equals which they have called muTable (adjective defined as ‘capable of change’). Ever conscious of human dependence on the land - on oxygen from plants, food from plants and animals (who eat plants), animals that pollinate plants and water purified by plants – Rebecca and Angie are hosting three Open Tables serving foraged and allotment foods as well as lively conversationto encourage recognition of the rich, complex role humans play in landscapes aiming to inspire change.
Lunch 1
For this table lunch, we will be joined by Nastassja Simensky, whose practice is informed by fieldwork which she uses to explore and understand how issues around history and heritage, power, governance and ecology, - notably agriculture, mining, and disposal – are crystallised in specific geographies.
For this table lunch, we will be joined by artist John Newling, internationally acclaimed, Nottingham based, a pioneer of public art with a social purpose. His works explore the natural world and the social and economic systems of society. He belongs to a generation of artists whose work evolved from art movements of the 1960s - Conceptual Art, Land Art and Arte. In 2018, Newling wrote to nature every day for 81 days. His letters form a manifesto for our relationship with the natural world. Part impassioned plea, part truth and reconciliation, part advocacy of an urgent need, part thoughts for future social ecologies. Frankly and intimately written as if to a loved-one, his letters attempt to forge a closer, more fruitful relationship with nature.
Lunch 2