Neverends: art, music, text in place

Seminar

Grimsby Fishing Heritage Centre, Alexandra Dock, Grimsby, North East Lincolnshire, DN31 1UZ

Saturday 29th April, 10am – 3pm

£10 – Booking Advised

TO BOOK: e admin@artsmeridian.com | t 07379 502230 | www.artsmeridian.com

This seminar is held in conjunction with the Neverends: art, music, text exhibition

April 2017 - June 2017

This exhibition offers an opportunity to see renowned landscape artists on loan from the Arts Council Collection alongside work by artists deeply engaged with the landscapes of North and Northeast Lincolnshire. Never Ends is a consideration of the ways in which personal, industrial and recreational memories linger in place. In their series, Far & Near Linda Ingham and David Power explore our Expressions of Continual Bonds to Absent Others from their studies of memorial benches.  In Outfalls Harriet Tarlo and Judith Tucker present poems and drawings from their collaborative work on the Louth Navigation. They are interested in the relationship between the original River Ludd and the canal itself as its industrial past becomes absorbed into semi-wilderness, creating niches for local flora and fauna in its culverts, bridges and locks. David Ainley shows work from his series Quarrying, Landscape Issues and Veins. He is interested in how landscape has been shaped by overlooked labour. This work can be viewed in relation to pieces by Andy Goldsworthy, Richard Long, Martin Parr, Jane Harris, Brian Alterio, Birgit Skiold and Hamish Fulton.

For the Neverends seminar the exhibiting artists: Judith Tucker, Linda Ingham, David Ainley, poet Harriet Tarlo and composer David Power will be joined by the following distinguished speakers to develop discussion of aspects of landscape, place, countryside and memory.  Avril Maddrell, associate professor in Human Geography at the University of Reading will discuss her work on memorial benches and wider vernacular memorials and their meaning. Rosemary Shirley, an Art Historian from Manchester Metropolitan University, and Verity Elson, curator, will discuss their exhibition Creating the Countryside currently installed at Compton Verney. The poet Frances Presley grew up in Lincolnshire and Somerset and now lives and works in London, she will reflect on her Lincolnshire childhood. Visual art has always played an important role in her writing and research and she has collaborated with artists Irma Irsara and Peterjon Skelt'.

Programme

9.45-10.00 Welcome and coffee. David Power's music playing.

10.00 Introduction to the day, the exhibition and the symposium: Linda Ingham.

10.10-11.00 Avril Maddrell.

Chair: Judith Tucker

11.00-11.15 coffee and tea break

11.15-12.30 Exhibiting Artist talks  

• Linda Ingham: Far & near: expressions of continual bonds to absent others
• David Power: Remember me
• Judith Tucker and Harriet Tarlo: Outfalls: lines of navigation
• David Ainley: Landshape: excavation, inscription, abstraction

Chair: Rosemary Shirley

12.30-1.15 lunch - There will be opportunity to purchase this at the café.

1.15-2.45  

• Frances Presley: The language and landscape of my Lincolnshire childhood: An Alphabet for Alina

• Rosemary Shirley and Verity Elson: Creating the Countryside

Chair: Harriet Tarlo

2.45-3.00

• Closing remarks - all speakers.

Chair: Linda Ingham

 

Contributors’ biographies

David Ainley is an artist and lecturer. For nearly fifty years his paintings have involved approaches in which changing states and 'histories' have been significant concerns. The human endeavour that shapes places is rarely the subject of contemporary painting and drawing but lies at the heart of David Ainley's work arising from a critical engagement with process in art informed by studies of mined and quarried landscapes near his Derbyshire studio. He has extensive experience since 1964 in teaching Fine Art practice and theory in universities, colleges and schools (extensively at the University of Nottingham), and for many years in art education and initial and postgraduate teacher education in art (University of Derby).

Verity Elson is a curator whose recent exhibitions at Compton Verney include The Hart Silversmiths: A Living Tradition, Martin Parr: The Non-Conformists and Picasso on Paper. Creating the Countryside was developed in response to a lifetime spent living and working in rural communities and an interest in social themes in British art developed during her MA at the University of St Andrews. The exhibition has been shaped by her experience of and passion for programming contemporary projects in historic settings.

Linda Ingham is a visual artist and curator whose practice considers the passing of time, place and the human condition through drawn and painted constructions, found objects and participatory projects. The self-portrait genre is one through which Ingham frequently explores her subjects, described by Michele Bechtell of MMofA as communicating ‘a powerful and fearless life force.’ Observation of process and material are of particular interest. Exhibiting internationally, Linda’s work is represented in public collections including the Priseman-Seabrooke Collection, East Contemporary Art Collection at UCS, Swindon Museum & Art Gallery, Rugby Art Gallery & Museum, Brentwood Cathedral, and MMoFA Ohio, USA. She curates shows nationally and is the curator and founder of The Nature of Landscape.

Dr Avril Maddrell is associate professor at the University of Reading, she is a social and cultural geographer interested in historical and contemporary issues. Research interests include gender; emotional-affective geographies; deathscapes; sacred mobilities; place, landscape and heritage; historiography; and charity shops as socio-cultural spaces. Recemt research projects include 2017-2018 Deathscapes and Diversity in multicultural England and Wales. Making space for established minorities' and migrants' bodily remains and associated ritual and remembrance, with Yasminah Beebeejaun (UCL), Katie McClymont (UWE) (PI, AHRC-ESRC) 2015-16 'Creating a virtual pilgrimage trail in the Isle of Man: faithscape, landscape and heritage' 2015-16 Economic Migrants in Bristol, Research Consultancy Project, Bristol City Council).

David Power studied composition with Richard Steinitz, Steve Ingham and Roger Marsh. His Three Chamber Pieces was premiered at the 1987 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and since then his work has been performed widely throughout the UK and, more recently, in Europe and the USA. He has received several commissions over the years and his work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 as well as on various regional radio stations. His work has also been used as soundtracks for art installations and short films, notably with artist Linda Ingham and film-maker Annabel McCourt. He co-founded the Vestiges multi media group whose Arts Council funded tour of Northern English churches was highly acclaimed and seen by over 3,000 people and was featured on BBC Look North. He is also the founder of Sounds Lyrical, a collaboration between York based poets and composers to create new songs. They have recently secured Arts Council funding to deliver four concerts at the Basement at City Screen York and make and broadcast a one hour Radio Show on Leeds East FM. His Eight Evening Songs appear on the acclaimed Songs Now: British Songs of the 21^st Century CD on the Meridian label and preparations are underway to record his Shades 3 for a forthcoming CD by the Delta Saxophone Quartet.

Frances Presley lives in London. Publications include An Alphabet for Alina, with artist Peterjon Skelt (Five Seasons, 2012), Halse for Hazel (Shearsman, 2014) with images by Irma Irsara, and Sallow (Leafe, 2016).  Her work is in the anthologies Infinite Difference (2010), Ground Aslant: radical landscape poetry (2011) and Out of Everywhere2 (2015).

Dr Rosemary Shirley is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory and Practice at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research centres on everyday life and visual cultures, with an emphasis on contemporary rural contexts. She is interested in how the English landscape might be explored through discourses of modernity. This has led her to write about topics as diverse as litter, motorways, folk customs, scrapbooks and the Women’s Institute. She is the author of Rural Modernity, Everyday Life and Visual Culture (Routledge, 2015).

Dr Harriet Tarlo is a Reader in Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University, her publications include Field; Poems 2004 – 2014; Poems 1990 – 2003 (Shearsman 2016, 2014, 2004); Nab (Etruscan 2005) and with Judith Tucker, Sound Unseen and behind land (Wild Pansy, 2013 and 2015). She is editor of The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011) Critical work appears in volumes by Salt, Palgrave, Rodopi and Bloodaxe and in Pilot, Jacket, English and The Journal of Ecocriticism. Her collaborative work with Jem Southam has appeared in The Lowry, Salford and Tullie House, Carlisle and with Judith Tucker at Catherine Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, 2012; Musee de Moulages, Lyon, 2013; Southampton City Art Gallery, 2013-14; and the New Hall College Art Collection, Cambridge, 2015. Her work with Tucker and McCourt on the Fitties plotland can be seen at www.projectfitties.com.

Dr Judith Tucker is and artist and senior lecturer in the School of Design, University of Leeds. She has exhibited extensively both in the UK and abroad recently in collaboration with Harriet Tarlo. Exhibition venues are very wide ranging and include Wenzhou, Nanjing and Yantai in China and Lyon, France Brno, Czech Republic, Minneapolis and Virginia, USA.  She also writes academic essays which can be found in academic journals and in books published by Manchester University Press, Rodopi, Macmillan, Intellect and Gunter Narrverlag, Tubingen. She is co-convenor of two place-based networks, Land2 and mapping Spectral Traces. She has recently been invited to be one of the artists in the Contemporary British Painting network – a new platform for contemporary painting in the UK.