SUMMER 2016

I BRING MY BODY TO THIS PLACE, TO OBSERVE THE COMING AND GOING OF LIFE

BEYOND SEVEN MOUNTAINS

ASSOCIATE ARTISTS

THE REMOTE LAB 2

THE FREE EXCHANGE ON TOUR

OPEN ONLINE SIX

THE SPACE PROGRAMME

This page: Jason Singh, I Bring my Body…, 2016

NORTH (PALMER) BIRD HIDEAldwincle Lake, Titchmarsh Nature Reserve off A605 Thrapston to Peterborough Road, Thrapston.

The nearest car park is on Lowick Lane (NN14 3EE).

Note: the car park is not signposted. Once parked, follow the sign for the Nature Reserve, then turn left at the gate, follow the grass path for about 10 minutes, walk over the small bridge to the bird hide.

Open everyday, 6am-8pm.Duration: 1 hour, divided into 20 minute sections — open door to trigger the next section.

Jason Singh’s new site-responsive sound installation links Thrapston and Washington DC, exploring themes of home, sep aration and migration for people and wildlife.

Thrapston has a special link to the USA; George Washington’s great-grand uncle, Sir John Washington, was Mayor of Thrapston in the 17th Century and lived in Montague House on Chancery Lane. The Washington family’s Coat of Arms is considered to be the origination of the Stars and Stripes design of the American flag.

America is ‘a country built on migration’, according to one of Singh’s interviewees from the National Museum of American History (The Smithsonian Institution). Singh interweaves the historical with the present day, through stories, conversations, birdsong and field recordings from both places, to create a new sonic landscape that reflects on the meaning of home and presents an alternative perspective on the emotive subject of migration.

Singh relates the movement of people and the migration of birds to his own history, as a British-Asian from a nomadic Indian tribe. Reminding us of what we share, as humans with freedom to move from one place to the next, and with birds and their patterns of migration. The North Bird Hide becomes both a sonic experience and an observational space, enabling audiences to simultaneously reflect on their inner self and their surrounding environment.

Sounds shared between The George Washington National Forest and the Titchmarsh Nature Reserve provide an anchor; a sense of homeland, a moment to contemplate the migration between these two countries. The interviews with people from Washington DC and Northamptonshire reveal how we as individuals relate to the worlds that we move through and inhabit, and our shared need for a safe space, where we can truly be ourselves, where we belong.

I Bring my Body to This Place, to Observe the Coming and Going of Life JASON SINGH

Until 31 August

Beyond Seven Mountains KENNY HUNTER

ROBIN RIMBAUD — SCANNER

HOLLY SLINGSBY

1 August-31 October

THOROUGHSALE WOOD, CORBYThe nearest Car Parks are Westcott Way (NN17 1QB) or Cottingham Road (NN17 2UN).

Open everyday.

LAUNCH EVENTCitadel of Dwelling led by Sam Francis Read in the cabin near the boating lake.

2-4pm, Sunday 31 July.

Maps available online or from the Boating Lake cafe.

Organised in Partnership with Corby Borough Council.

Kenny Hunter, Black Swan, 2013

Sound Installation (Rebecca Lee for Encounters, 2011)

Holly Slingsby, Cloud of Witnesses (detail), 2014

Beyond Seven Mountains features artist interventions in Corby’s woodlands that evoke a sense of narrative and builds on Sophie Herxheimer’s residency and artist book (The Listening Forest). The exhibition title originates from the beginning of Central & Eastern European fairy tales; ‘A long time ago, beyond seven mountains, beyond seven forests’ and refers to the way contemporary artists continue the tradition of storytellers, reinventing myths and legends, to create new folklore for our time.

For the launch, Sam Francis Read will lead a collaborative event to explore ways in which stories are told collectively by a group of narrators. Read is interested in how ancient myths relate to contemporary culture and participants will be invited to craft dwellings, which will then be combined into a composite structure, a new town. The word ‘dwelling’ not only describes the physical appearance of the sculptures (makeshift architectural models as shelters) but also: to think, speak or write on a particular subject over a period of time, with no predetermined outcome.

Kenny Hunter employs anthropomorphism to explore cultural changes within our modern environment, and their relationship to the social and artistic legacies of the past. He often depicts the natural world at the point where it interacts with manmade structures. The swan has many symbolic associations, including Love and Partnership, as pairs are known to bond for a lifetime. However, before the discovery of Australia, Europeans were convinced that all Swans were white, and the phrase ‘Black Swan’ was a common expression as a statement of impossibility. The discovery of black swans in 1697 by a Dutch explorer invalidated this long held belief. In 2007, the writer Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the phrase ‘Black Swan Theory’, which he used to describe any event that is unexpected and makes a strong impact, against the prevailing view of the time. In this sense, Hunter’s Black Swan

sculpture, looking out across the Boating Lake, stands as a metaphor against the prevailing view held by many of Corby.

Robin Rimbaud is a composer whose work traverses the territory between sound and its environment. He experiments with technology to create absorbing, multi-layered soundscapes that connect spaces and places through the narrative of sound. Rimbaud’s new work connects language, outer space and history. During his research he was drawn towards stories associated with Corby, including its emblem the Raven. The name of the town means ‘Dark as a Raven’, which suggests a very cinematic soundscape and the Raven is well known as a mythological oracle; a messenger between the Greek god Apollo and human kind. The work responds to the capacity of a raven to mimic human sounds, so recordings of ravens speaking have been spliced into emblematic phrases, both abstract and strange. The work also reflects on stories of Corby’s links to outer space; the grandmother who composed a prayer of peace dedicated to the lost crew of the Apollo 11, and Corby’s namesake, a large crater on the planet Mars.

Holly Slingsby reworks ideas of the divine from different cultural traditions. She explores ways in which images and ideas overlap, how particular classical symbols are adopted and adapted as they pass from ancient mythology into the present. In the past, religious iconography attempted to visualise the invisible and articulate the unknowable, and this notion has influenced contemporary consumerism; from Venus razors to Nike trainers and Mars bars. The three installations suspended from the trees throughout the Woods form a Cloud of Witnesses. They are made up of the accoutrements that represent the stories of mythic deities and saints, as if they had been left behind after the stories were told. The iconography of the Greek god Hephaestus, a blacksmith who made weapons for the other gods, alludes to Corby’s steel history.

Our Associate Artist programme provides a critically supportive environment for eight artists, to enable them to continue to develop their practice. The programme also enables Fermynwoods to continue its ongoing work with artists we have previously commissioned and to test out new ideas and ways of working.

Tim Simmons, 42.97°, 2014

Associate Artists SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

REBECCA LEE

VIRGINIE LITZLER

NIKKI PUGH

JO ROBERTS

TIM SIMMONS

JASON SINGH

SIMON WOOLHAM

Sophie will be taking part in a week-long residency, creating new work alongside a group of writers in playwright John Osborne’s former home, The Hurst.

SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

Arvon Foundation Residency, 17-21 October. The John Osborne Arvon Centre, Clunton Craven Arms, Shropshire, SY7 0JA.

JO ROBERTS

Earlier this year Jo received a fellowship from Random String, a development programme offering opportunities for artists and the public to explore creative, interactive and connected technologies. She will be exploring hand stitching alongside digital technologies and building upon her current series of work, The Fragments of my Life.

TIM SIMMONS

Tim will be exhibiting 0.01 Seconds – Forks WA; a digital C type print, which seeks to make visible the rotation of the earth during 0.01 seconds.

Tim’s video 42.97° is being presented as part of GroundWork’s first show, alongside Richard Long and Roger Ackling. The work explores our experience of sound at a particular latitude.

Sunlight & Gravity, until 30 October.GroundWork Gallery, 17 Purfleet Street, King’s Lynn, Norfolk, PE30 1ER.

Out of the Woods, 4 November-17 December.GroundWork Gallery (address as above).

REBECCA LEE

Rebecca will be performing with Samuel Rodgers in concerts across the UK in summer and autumn this year. In July, she will be taking part in Nottingham Trent University’s Summer Lodge residency. She has recently been working with Yelena Popova on a soundtrack to her new film commission for Nottingham Contemporary, open 16 July-25 September.

JASON SINGH

Please see page 2 for details about Jason’s new commission, made as a result of his recent residency with Fermynwoods Contemporary Art.

VIRGINIE LITZLER

Experience shadows in the woods at dusk, where light and technology will play with our perception, with support from Tobias Zehntner. On Sunday, Virginie will lead an experiential workshop to shift the way we perceive trees and how we might feel weightlessness in the forest.

Natural Vestige, Saturday 24 September, 5-8pm and Sunday 25 September, 10am-1pm.Thoroughsale Wood, Corby (meeting point: Parkland Gateway, near Corby Cube).

SIMON WOOLHAM

Simon will be showcasing a selection of drawings and content from his website www.insearchoftheshortcuts.com at his solo show within Art On Paper, an international contemporary drawing exhibition. The event is hosted by Bozar, the Belgium Centre of Fine Arts.

Art on Paper, 8-11 September.Terarken Rooms, Rue Ravenstein 23, 1000 Ville de Bruxelles, Belgium.

NIKKI PUGH

Nikki will be in conversation with socio-logist Kat Jungnickel and athlete and writer Emily Chappell at this free event exploring understanding-through-doing and the similarities and differences in each of their working processes. Places are strictly limited, please register online: www.linksandshifts.eventbrite.co.uk

Links & Shifts, 2:30-5:30pm, 21 August.Birmingham Open Media, 1 Dudley Street Birmingham, B5 4EG.

SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

Sophie Herxheimer is an artist and poet who teaches and collaborates extensively. Shared experience and storytelling are central to both her poetry and her visual art practice. She has held residencies for LIFT, Southbank Centre, Transport for London and the National Maritime Museum. Her exhibitions include The Whitworth, The Poetry Library and The National Portrait Gallery. Sophie is creating drawings for National Poetry Day 2016 and will feature as a Poetry Ambassador.

REBECCA LEE

Rebecca is a musician, artist and educator. She produces audio works, performances, site-specific installations, film scores, broadcasts and publications. Her work brings attention to a spectrum of listening forms and understandings of sound. Recent activity includes two commissions for the National Trust and being part of the Soundfjord programme at Full of Noises Festival, Barrow-in-Furness. She performs in various ensembles including the Standard Hill viola consort.

Rebecca is in the process of developing a new body of work involving sound and video. This work has in part been developed during her residency at Sudborough Green Lodge in April this year and she’ll return to the Lodge later this year to continue the work. In June she performed at Wysing Arts Centre’s music festival, Polyphonic.

Rebecca Lee in residency

Sophie Herxheimer reading from The Listening Forest

Associate Artists

VIRGINIE LITZLER

Virginie Litzler is concerned with the dialogue between people, space and motion. She observes and interacts with people in their everyday; how they belong to, and move through places. The resulting installations explore the intermittent shift that occurs between the perception of a photograph, its constituents, its surroundings and the unpredictability of images.

As part of Deep Roots Tall Trees’ Our Woods programme, Fermynwoods has commissioned Litzler to lead a series of workshops in response to her recent residency in Shanghai. Virginie experienced western style parks, squares and other green public spaces that she described as ‘ruins made of vegetation’. Inspired by that encounter, Virignie will hold workshops with participants to explore the potential of woodlands as vestige – please see page 7 for details.

NIKKI PUGH

Nikki Pugh explores questions relating to how we perceive, move through and interact with our surroundings, harnessing various tools and techniques adopted from walking-based practices, guided tours, physical computing, locative media, pervasive gaming, installation and collaboration. Specific areas of research interest currently include: the use of making, prototyping and participatory playtesting as tools for – and sites of – knowledge production; and investigating the relationship of her practice to Mobilities Studies, non-representational theory and human + technology + place assemblages.

Nikki Pugh, Where the Sky Widens, 2015

Virginie Litzler, Blossom (SH), 2015

TIM SIMMONS

Simmons makes sense of the world through his own experience. Using photography and film, he explores themes of time, motion and place, and the idea that landscape acts as a link between the past and the present. His work has a visual clarity and a quiet, reflective quality, which offers space for personal contemplation. Attempting to make the unseen visible, he encourages the viewer to consider the constancy of the land, and our inherent relationship to it.

JO ROBERTS

Jo Roberts is fascinated by the human condition, exploring the people and places that she encounters and her relationship, and response, to them. Her findings are recorded in a map form, either through drawing or hand stitching. Jo gained an MA in Fine Art in 1996 from Birmingham City University. Since then she has worked nationally with a wide variety of organisations, including Grizedale Arts and Ikon Gallery. She has also exhibited in solo and group shows at Manchester Art Gallery and the Pump House Gallery, London.

Jo Roberts, Interchange residency, 2011

Associate Artists

JASON SINGH

Jason Singh is a musician, composer and sound artist, he is predominately known for his work as a vocal sculptor and beatboxer. Singh’s musical beginnings started with drums, percussion, turntables, computers, electronic instruments and samplers. Today, his sound and music output is generated through his ongoing exploration of the human voice in collaboration with music technology and its application to all art forms.

SIMON WOOLHAM

Simon Woolham describes his practice as primarily concerned with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold in them, using biro drawings, paper interventions, animation, video and text to unearth the unpredictable and fragile process of memory. More recently Simon has made a series of interventions, films and animations and text that focus on recurring motives that often feature in the work, ditches, unofficial dumps and breached security fences.

Simon Woolham, The Leftovers, 2016

The Remote Lab 2Rural Heritage, Modern Thinking SOPHIE HERXHEIMER

REBECCA LEE

VIRGINIE LITZLER

TIM SIMMONS

JASON SINGH

SIMON WOOLHAM

17-18 and 24-25 September

The Remote Lab offers our Associate Artists the opportunity to research, experiment and make new work in an isolated setting. Visitors are invited to meet our Associate Artists (Sophie Herxheimer, Rebecca Lee, Virginie Litzler and Simon Woolham) and hear about their recent experiences responding to the unique environment of Fermyn Woods. Different artists each weekend will also lead collaborative drop in workshops, including drawing, photography and sound based activity. There will also be the opportunity to see new work by Tim Simmons and Jason Singh.

The Remote Lab 2 is part of the Nene Valley Festival and Northamptonshire Open Studios and delivered in partnership with East Northamptonshire Council and Kettering Borough Council.

Sophie Herxheimer, Welcome Child Eat or be Eaten, 2013

SUDBOROUGH GREEN LODGEFermyn Woods off Harley Way, Brigstock NN14 3JD.

Open weekends 17-18 and 24-25 September, 10am-5pm.

The venue is accessible via a two mile forest track, so please meet us at the Forestry Commission gate to the track on Harley Way (near the Gliding Club) or contact us for directions.

Ongoing

Our monthly discussions exploring connections between artistic practice and everyday life continue in a new format. The Free Exchange on Tour takes our discussions relating to Public, Art and Interaction into different communities, with artist led discussions taking place directly with the groups concerned.

The forthcoming programme:

ART + DRAMA

Marcia Farhquar and Sally CookSeptember (date TBC)

ART + ARCHIVES

Pavel Buchler and Northampton Archive StaffOctober (date TBC)

ART + WILDLIFE

James Bulley, Daniel Jones and Cheryll Tipp1 November

Please sign up to our mailing list on our website, or contact us to receive confirmation about the dates and venues.

Every discussion is filmed and streamed live via our YouTube Channel, and can be viewed anytime after the event. Our channel currently contains recordings of our first two On Tour events:

ART + LONELINESS

Featuring David Cutler (Director of the Baring Foundation) and Sharon Paulger (Director of Arts for Health, Milton Keynes) at Corby VCS.

ART + ASTRONOMY

Featuring Marek Kukula (Public Astron-omer, Greenwich Royal Observatory) and Joanna Griffin (Artist and Researcher) at Newton Field Centre.

Joanna Griffin, Satellite Stories, 2008

Anthony Abrahams, Figure With Bird

The Free Exchange on Tour

An online exhibition challenging the limits of online presentation and exploring offline digital culture.

Terre Thaemlitz’s 2011 album Soulnessless included a 30-hour piano solo filling an MP3 file of 4GB – yet the file playback was limited to 2 hours 40 minutes. Challenging the era’s dominant media format, the album was sold only as a 16GB microSDHD card, drawing a distinction between online and digital culture and honouring the authors’ ‘specificity of content’. Our sixth annual open online exhibition, selected by Antonio Roberts, seeks to examine whether there still exists a distinction between digital and online cultures following the advent of the Internet of Things, and if so, what forms this may take.

Pete Ashton’s The Droids is a series of 401 re-encoded copies of copyrighted and highly protected film footage – ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for’ from Star Wars, which were then re-uploaded to YouTube, some of which were censored. The work looks for the edge cases in our emerging algorithmic police state; searching for the points where a copyright infringement evades the pattern-matching robots.

Marc Atkinson’s Sound Lines is a 45 minute walk through Fermyn Woods, with an online soundtrack. The artist describes the work as a type of ‘wild release’ since the artwork is only fully experienced through the park itself. Each section of the work corresponds to a delineated section of the walk, connecting field recordings and electro-acoustic music with observations of the real world forest.

Emma Jarvis’ Matigital Culture (a fusion of material and digital cultures) takes different photographic media and presents them online through a series of photographic layers, which represent a particular stage of fragmentation caused by the digitisation of the original objects; from slide film to digital images, to their computer codes and their location details on social media.

Sam Mattacott’s Infinite Edition presents an infinitely changing series of drawings created through a Processing programming language written by the Aesthetics & Computation Group (MIT Media Lab). However, the results are prevented from being displayed by the use of CSS; a style sheet language for the presentation of online documents. In order to see an edition of the digital drawings we are required to print a physical copy and engage with it in the real world.

Open Online Six Too Long for iTunes PETE ASHTON

MARC ATKINSON

EMMA JARVIS

SAM MATTACOTTAND A COMMISSIONED TEXT BY CHRISTINE LUCY LATIMER

Until 31 December

Visit: www.fermynwoods.co.uk/ current-programme/open-online-six/

Fermynwoods Contemporary Art is joining the space race by working with artists and students to design and build a sculpture that will be launched to the edge of the earth’s atmosphere.

Our Space Programme is an opportunity to literally expand student horizons, whilst simultaneously helping them to understand and value their place in the world. Students will work with sculptor Clare Abbatt and near space photographer Chris Hillcox, to design their own sculptures that will be launched into space as an artistic first for Northamptonshire.

In designing the sculptures, students will consider practical elements such as the weight, the dimensions and impact of landing, as well as conceptual elements including how they want to represent

themselves from a universal perspective.The ‘space-craft’ will be launched from Fermyn Woods and tracked via GPS. The on-board camera will capture images of the sculpture as it rises through the earth’s atmosphere. Our first launch is taking place with students from the CE Academy during Arts Award Week (2-10 July) where the activity will contribute towards Arts Award qualifications.

If your school would like to take part in future Space Programme activities please contact our Education Officer, James Steventon via james@fermynwoods.co.uk or on 01832 731257.

Fermynwoods’ Space Programme is kindly supported by Green Energy, SFXC (Special Effects & Coatings) and The Mighty Creatives.

The Space Programme CLARE ABBATT

CHRIS HILLCOX

Education Workshops

FERMYNWOODS CONTEMPORARY ART

Thrapston House, Huntingdon RoadThrapston NN14 4NF

Telephone +44 (0)1832 731257 Email info@fermynwoods.co.uk Website fermynwoods.co.ukTwitter @FermynwoodsFacebook fermynwoodscontemporaryart

Company Registered No. 5434735 Registered Charity No. 1122678

Front cover: Virginie Litzler, Les G

éomètres, 2015

Fermynwoods also gratefully acknowledges the support of St Crispin Lodge, through a donation from the Douglas Compton James Charitable Trust.