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29/09/2020 News

Q&A With Louder than the Storm. To read the Q&A please click here.

This September - Intertwine our Branches, A Digital Exhibition on Climate Intersectionality. September 18th - Ongoing. To see the exhibition please click here.

Rural Slop: Subverting Notions of Contemporary Rural Art

Please click to see the photos and to read the issue here

‘This publication challenges and subverts traditional notions of contemporary rural art, featuring 18 fantastic contemporary artists that offer a fresher and more exciting view of the countryside, opposed to the chocolate box depictions of landscape often exhibited. We want this project to act as a catalyst for discussion, bringing artists together from often isolated environments and promoting discussion around opportunity and access in rural regions. ​Slop is a curatorial project formed in April 2020, working to promote underrepresented artists through exhibitions, collaborations, and publications. As a partnership between a philosopher and a visual artist we understand the elitism that permeates the art world and will challenge this with projects based on the value of the artwork as opposed to the education, connections, or privilege of the artist. Currently working on a volunteer basis we hope to grow Slop with ambitious projects; our first priority being gaining funding to pay artists fairly. ‘ - text taken from www.slopprojects.com

My two photographs and text are published in the above online publication. My submitted photos are in relation to, and about rural edge lands and the mythical mind.

A far cry away from today's monoculture, these wild areas have always existed on the edge of a deep temporal community farming past, although no longer retaining folkloric tales that these edge-lands are the well-known habitat of the local wild woman or wildman, witch or even shaman. Unmanicured and unconditioned unlike much of the countryside today, sit rich pockets of wild ecosystems that become inextricably linked with the shadowier habits of modern human society, much like edge-lands throughout human history, albeit telling a different, but a similar story about the local populations to one our ancestors would have told, together still creating an ecosystem that intermingles our abandonment and attitude toward the more wild rural places that cling onto edge-lands, in this case, the M27 motorway and the village where I grew up that has its roots in past of strawberry production, Sarisbury green. Redundant tractors remain still like standing stones whilst their seats becoming populated with forest-like microcosms, roe deer skulls hang in trees like ancestral ritualistic sacrifices. Collapsed caravans sink in on themselves, buried by wet leaves and surrounded by a funeral procession of catkins. The wildman resembles one of our more ape-like relatives. Car pedals rust away next to the battery like some antiquated farming tools. A contrasting yet similar to the once rural folkloric and mythic tellings of countryside dwelling inhabitants towards neighbouring borderlands.

Victoria Lucy Williams, 2020

Betwixt Three Ants Nests. A short film in an exploration on thinking about the symbiosis between forms. The sensory exchanges made between animate beings in which I include wind, air and other elemental forces like rock and the soil itself. The language and symbiosis between the Earth, sun and moon. Thinking about the ways in which the Earth endlessly gives rise to an eminent array of beings and formations as a means to feel and explore itself as well as interact with itself as they/we interact with each other. In keeping within the practice of exploring and documenting places on the marginal edges of society that may also be deemed as wild, or fringe and to take that concept of interbeing into such a place. I, as a being observing therefore the earth observing itself through my being, my body in a transient place. During the lockdown in this area of land I witnessed the construction of an altar devoid of the constructor as well as the silencing of a nearby normally busy road. I found myself transported to a familiar yet a somewhat unknown or lateral timeline to say a timeline in which felt without me having any personal sensory experience of such existing a time that I can only imagine of a somewhat distant past. The offering up of the altar was one of only a few (construction of two stick forts) exchanges in human activity within the edgeland that I witnessed during lockdown. It was as if they became the two marker points of that shift between pre and post lockdown and since the end, the fort has been demolished and the altar abandoned by human hands. Historically edgelands were places where exchanges of a spiritual nature were made, where the local healer, hedgewitch or shaman wandered, or wildman or wildwoman roamed. I found it interesting that these narratives echoed in such a place during a pandemic.