In The Open | Anne-Marie Creamer & Laura-Gray Street

Anne-Marie Creamer is a British artist based in London whose work experiments with cinematic and theatrical forms using digital film, fiction, drawing, written films, filmed staged scenarios, and live voice-over. For Anne-Marie narrative is complexly entangled in place - always underpinned by her interest in the relationship between representation and presence.  Anne-Marie's work will feature in a forthcoming solo exhibition at the Foyle Project space, the Sir John Soane's Museum, London, 2018. Her work has been exhibited at: FRAC Bretagne, (France), Exeter Phoenix Galley, Exeter, UK), Sogn og Fjordane Kunstmuseum (Norway), Palm Springs Art Museum, Kunstvereniging Diepenheim (The Netherlands). She received the Derek Hill Scholarship in Drawing at British School at Rome, (2012).  She was educated at Middlesex University & the Royal College of Art and lives in London where she is a Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

Laura-Gray Street is the author of Pigment and Fume (Salmon Poetry, 2014) and co-editor of The Ecopoetry Anthology (Trinity University Press, 2013) and A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (forthcoming University of Georgia Press). She has been the recipient of poetry prizes from The Greensboro Review, the Dana Awards, the Southern Women Writers Conference, Isotope: A Journal of Literary Science and Nature Writing, and Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments. Her work has appeared in The Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, Gargoyle, ISLE, Shenandoah, Blackbird, The Notre Dame Review, and elsewhere; and been supported by fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Artist House at St. Mary's College in Maryland. Street holds an MA from the University of Virginia and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. She is an associate professor of English and directs the Creative Writing Program and the Visiting Writers Series at Randolph College in Lynchburg, Virginia.

American poet Laura-Gray Streetand British artist Anne-Marie Creamer have made a new moving image work, ‘Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough’ that takes as its subject the ‘Longdendale lights’, which are said to originate from a valley in the moorlands of Derbyshire, not far from Sheffield. The valley has gained a reputation for strange phenomena including witness accounts of encounters with unexplained lights, especially around an area known as the Shinning Clough and the Bleaklow Mountains. While the valley has been regarded as a site of folklore it has now been suggested the phenomena may be caused by the earth’s internal traumas; literally in an area of geological fault pressure can grow on underlying rocks leading to a build-up of electrical charge released as luminosity. Through a process of call and response Creamer and Street have each visited the valley and sent images, sounds, and words to each other during 2017. The resulting work is a new text-poem by Street and a new collaborative video, filmed at Longdendale. in which Creamer enacts a performative reading of Streets text-poem, intended as a sort of incantation to, and with, the landscape.