“Deepenings”- A proposal for Cudmore Grove.
A sound art commission 2022-2023
On the Essex coast there are places that still feel wild, places that remember when the water was lower and remember when it was higher. Here the elements sing and squabble. Doggerland feels close. Ancient spirits tell of the homes lost to the water, the hand that built them and the giant creatures that once sailed up there in the water above where our heads are now.
We invite you to join us on an adventure that aims to illustrate poetic versions of the deep past and imagine prophetic versions of possible things to come. Three female artists collaborate to read and retell the landscape, developing an AR and online experience that can bring magic outdoors to Cudmore grove…or transport it’s special landscape back home to you.
We will begin simply, on our feet. Delivering a series of workshops in which we will imagine and collaborate together with local participants. We will look for stories, significant sites and objects in the park. We will seek out the possible future of the place if the water rises as expected and the storms come howling more loudly and more often. We will think about what has already disappeared and what we stand to lose here.
Text from the lead artist, Gemma Abbott:
To do this we will each deliver two open workshops that reflect our creative specialties. Bethan will offer time to draw and paint outside together, Elinor will collect words and sounds through creative writing and I will lead “walkshops” that open up space for conversations about the local, personally significant and colloquial particulars of our site. We will all explore mythology, folklore, history, ecology and climate science in our own ways with the participants. This will allow us to build a world within the app which is site-specific but also lets the wider local and global environment leak in. Any coastal community is (and always has been) affected by things that happen for beyond the reach of its own shoreline, this has perhaps never been more apparent than now as the tide creeps steadily higher.
Our workshops (and the resulting outcome) will be consciously accessible, reflecting our lived experience as Neurodivergent and Disabled artists. Elinor may need to deliver online which can more easily open up the opportunity to utilise BSL interpreters and Subtitling, and the chance to participate form home. Through her Magical Women project we have found that this can really level the participation field.
After this period of R&D with the community we will then put our three heads together to build a digital landscape that engages with the site. I will expand on our individual practices later in this document. For the project Bethan will create illustrative backgrounds and characters, Elinor will construct a poetic soundscape and I will tackle the task of collecting and compiling stories, directing and constructing the trail and app.
I will also be leading on the outreach and participation strategy, seeking out as many ways of engaging with the local community on Mersea Island as possible, recording the workshops and how their impact and outcomes can feed collaboratively back into the project. I will be looking to invite the local participants to contribute to the app as augmented actors…reading their own stories and texts and if willing adding their own performances or providing direct visual inspiration for the characters we build into it. So this Roman soldier, this Oysterman or that Mermaid may look or sound familiar to a local eye and ear.
As lead artist I’m keen to visit local community groups and schools to share information about the project and offer excercises, talks and short workshops there to widen opportunities for community collaboration and participation further. The reach of open workshops can be limited. Finding or facilitating these other places to meet, co-create and share is integral to my practice and is useful in capturing participation that may otherwise be missed.
The storytelling will be rich and imaginative but also steeped in scientific fact, allowing us to examine the very real effects to be visited by climate change on this kind of precarious landscape, inspired by the findings presented in maps such as these. Rewinding backwards and forwards through real and imagined/predicted time users of the trail app will be able to look through their phone screen as if they were hag stones. They can watch the water fall and rise and see prehistoric giants in the landscape, as well as hearing stories gathered locally during our participatory explorations on the island and on the site.
These stories will be told by historic and folkloric characters encountered at different points around the trail and developed in collaboration with participants. And while there will be warnings about the future these will be delivered in the hope that there is still time to effect change and to adapt in ways that can care for out local and global environments.
A website will offer access to this experience remotely via films, and recorded trails that can also offer interactive elements. Space will be made here for visitors to add to the text, leaving memories or messages of hope in a generative repository that can be used to inform future decisions about the site and also to build into any updated versions of the app and trail should the opportunity arise in the future.
The trail, app and website will be launched at an open community event, bookending the project. Here we can celebrate the site with the folk who will have contributed along the way and invite further participation from new faces once there is some solid material to respond to.
In this way we will work together with local participants to tell the story of this very special site. Our collaborative, participatory, site-specific and socially engaged practices are a personal invitation to others to speak out about their life, memories, loss and ecological mortality. To join their voices with each other, with us and with the work.
We are practitioners who have a strong interest in the investigation of site and place. We document, interrogate and explore the power of the Neurodivergent voice out in the wild encountering nature to articulate ideas of loss, grief (life and death) and ecocide.
Artist Biographies and Links
Gemma Garwood – Lead Artist
Gemma is a site-specific multidisciplinary artist, born and bred in Essex. Her lifelong obsession with myth, folklore and women’s histories stoked a relentless passion for exploring the hidden and colloquial mysteries of our significant places. She tells stories about people, seeking the individual within larger social and historical narratives and celebrating the ways in which people, places and stories collide and collude in landscape and imagination.
Her practice digs into the idea of creative ‘cunning’, exploring ideas of ritual actions and the power of the imagination to build inviting and collaborative spaces. She has been sharing and exploring self-production through video work, zine making and developing workshops designed to work with things we find to hand, to make locally significant explorations and performative expressions.
This has manifested through 2021 in a triptych of video works for Magical Women, the development and delivery of a ritual walkshop for Sudbury Walking Arts Project, and in OTHERLAND, a deep exploration of Essex creted in collaboration with Lucy Gayler.
She was the youngest Town Crier in the UK for a while and started UNFAMILIARS, a multidisciplinary arts zine/event platform in Colchester in 2017. Additionally she has taught and delivered various theatre, live art, writing, devising and acting lessons and workshops at both HE and FE levels, most recently working with Norwich Theatres to deliver Town Crying/Troubadour workshops to young adults (16-25) and ESOL students.
There is nothing more beautiful than watching someone else find, explore and proudly showcase the things that are important to them.
Elinor Rowlands - Sound Artist
Elinor's practice is moved by feelings of “otherness” offered through the prism of ritual and magic. Using repetitive and rhythmic gestures, her autistic/ADHD/synaesthesia filter explores texture, voice, recorded media and live performance. She layers sound, sculpting it around repeated images from nature.
Her work has a phantasmagorical feel, overwhelming and immersive, secretive, yet particularly revealing to diverse audiences; It has been compared to a Leonora Carrington psychological landscape: At one level displaying a consciousness echoing an ancient sensibility. At another level expressing something intensely contemporary. It has been supported/presented by: ACE, Unlimited, LADA, Shape, Tate Modern, Guerrilla Zoo, Lyric, CPT, Drake Music, Disability Arts Online, EIB.
https://www.elinorrowlands.com/projects
Bethan Briggs Miller
Bethan uses a variety of media to create dreamlike landscapes with a hidden narrative. Working with alcohol ink and watercolours she applies these to the paper then uses sea salt and alcohol to create different textures and patterns. This process allows scenes and characters to emerge organically with even the smallest areas containing a hidden story.
A common theme she explores is the contrast between what is observed on the surface and the hidden stories beneath. Using this location as a map to explore these ideas, a scene that is so well known to many could still reveal secrets.
Bethan is one half of the Eerie Essex podcast team, and that project has been going form strength to strength since being founded earlier this year.
From Elinor:
As I still breastfeeding/nursing my baby, Gemma Abbott, lead artist invited my baby and my partner who is also my carer up so that I could participate and continue to breasfeed my baby. Below are my photographs of the R&D weekend I spent with Gemma and Bethan, discovering and listening to the island.
— Elinor Rowlands
