Claudia Dharamshi – artist

ClaudiaDCLAUDIA DHARAMSHI – ARTIST

Claudia started rowing with the Bridport Gig Rowing Club in West Bay a year ago and it has since become the subject of her work. A fascination with the movement of the oar and the patterns it creates in the water led Claudia to explore ways to recreate this through drawing. Through trial and error she created Concept 3 rower, a playful motorised drawing machine which aims to mimic the motion of a gig boat oar. The machine has been constructed out of wood as much as possible both for the aesthetic and for the sound created. Although automated, the mechanism has a human quality to it.  The force of the machine which is powered by a car wiper blade motor suggests the physical exertion of gig rowing.

The Boat Sings is an audio piece made from interviews with members of Bridport Gig Rowing Club. Sound is central to the experience of rowing, the click clack of the oars in the wooden pins is familiar, comforting, and part of the experience. The rowers’ comments reveal that gig rowing provides a tangible connection to the landscape and to other people.  As with rowing where the experience is both individual and collective, the soundscape is a collaborative piece of work but everyone has a voice.

Adam Chodzko – artist

Adam Chodzko’s multidisciplinary art practice explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour, in the gap between how we are and how we could be.  Exhibiting work nationally and internationally since 1991, working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, and with a practice that is partly sited within the gallery space and partly within the wider public realm, Chodzko’s work explores our collective imagination in order to speculate how, through the visual, we might best connect with others.
Deep Above 2015
Single screen video with sound. 28 mins.
 
We know climate change is happening; we experience extreme weather conditions and observe the wealth of data, imagery and analysis as evidence, and ‘everyone’ seems to be talking about it.  Yet, individually, we seem to have paralysed ourselves from taking immediate action to avoid the consequences of climate change.  Deep Above uses a distilled, intense combination of moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. Adopting the languages of a tutorial in meditation, hypnosis and ‘self help’ Chodzko evolves an art work developed from a series of approaches to the subject, including the work of psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, sociologist John Urry, theorist Brian Massumi and George Marshall’s book Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change.
Deep Above, suggests that the poetic, reflexive and critical structures of contemporary art itself might be the only form capable of rewiring and subverting our deeply entrenched behaviour of ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’. The reason we can’t see it is that somehow we have ended up inside it.

Lise Autogena + Josh Portway – artists

FOGHORN REQUIEM kb 3466Foghorn Requiem (2013)
Foghorn Requiem was a performance marking the disappearance of the foghorn from the UK’s coastal landscape. Conducted from afar, a musical requiem was performed by Souter Lighthouse Foghorn, three brass bands and 60 ships on the North Sea for an audience of 8-10 000. Foghorn Requiem was an attempt to incorporate space and reverberation of the landscape directly into the musical composition: Sound-influencing factors, such as atmospheric conditions, tide, distance and the sonic impact of the landscape were calculated to position vessels off the coast and programme their horns to perform in time with conventional brass instruments and Souter Foghorn on-shore.
Commissioned as the flagship project for Festival of The North East. Created in collaboration with composer Orlando Gough and Joshua Portway. Funded by Arts Council England, Arts Council of Denmark . The National Trust and South Tyneside Council. Produced by Grit and Pearl.
www.foghornrequiem.org

Beatty Hallas: artist

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Socialism, a family film

A number of spurs (including the loss of a great aunt who had fled Czechoslovakia the day before the Nazi invasion) conflated, with the realisation that there are great gaps in my knowledge of socialism. My practice is social: concerned with others, how we communicate with and care for each other. It seemed vital to set an informed foundation for my work, to further educate myself and look at how these ideologies might be discussed with younger people. I put forward a project examining socialism – its history, key figures and relevance in modern life. This was used by us to make a short film: a rare opportunity to conduct a family residency.

 

Beatty Hallas is an artist based in London. The film was developed whilst staying at The Mothership, Dorset.

Alex Murdin: Artist

r u r a l r e c r e a t i o n is a grassroots campaigning body set up to put forward new social visions of the rural, exploring what the rural means to people in the countryside, to people in the cities, suburbs and subrurs. We’re particularly interested in expanding the borders of accessibility, environmentalism & inclusivity and do so through action research projects, both without and with authority, community and agency.

 

Likeness Farm

Likeness Farm’s vision is to provide a fast, reliable and fairly traded critical feedback and testing service for emerging and established artists that enhances their career prospects, builds cultural value in the UK and makes new international connections.

Alex Murdin is an artist based in Devon.

Jo Burlington: Artist

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Jo occupied the Methodist Chapel overnight for 12 hours from 8.30pm, Thursday 4th august – 8.30am Friday August 5th and produced this extraordinary drawing from her experience

“Responding to the space and the place and the night, reflecting something of the immensity of the space outside. The process of the drawing echoing the movement of the shingle on the beach, swept on and washed off over and over, every motion changing the shape of the beach.
12 hours uninterrupted time on 10 meters of paper, the length of the church. Time and space to just draw and draw and draw in contrast with the fractured busyness of day to day family life. Physically moving, drawing, seeing the changes made, a task large but defined. A drawing but not a drawing of anything – just of itself.”

The drawing will be exhibited at The Chapel from day 5th August – Sunday 7th August.

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London Fieldworks: Artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson

Based in east London (nr. London Fields, Hackney), artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson formed London Fieldworks (LFW) in 2000 to promote their interdisciplinary and collaborative arts practice that works across social engagement, installation, and moving image to situate works both in the gallery and in the landscape.

www.londonfieldworks.com

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London Fieldworks will screen their short film “End of The Road”. A moving, emotive film about the production of caravans and a dystopian warning about the consequences of our contemporary consumer lifestyle.

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All images by London Fieldworks 2012.

Sound, Music, Robot: a sound improvisation

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SOUND MUSIC ROBOT

Alex McKechnie, David Rogers and Adrian Newton will be improvising live electronic sound on the theme of world religions.

They will be joined on stage by Muffy, who will be listening to what they are playing and responding with sounds and images. Muffy is a piece of DIY software, designed to improvise sounds and images in response to live musicians.

Alex Mckechnie (Barbed)
Alex is a composer known for his experimental sound and music work withBarbed Empire. He lives locally and is Course Director of Digital Arts at Weymouth College.

David Rogers (Electricbackroom)
David’s creative practice includes installation, combining 3D construction, performance and screen based work, single screen, projections, multiple screen works and audio, ranging from soundscapes to compositional sound. Work exhibited in both gallery and non gallery situations.

Adrian Newton (Nemeton)
Nemeton is the ambient music project of Adrian Newton, a sound artist based in Dorset, UK. Soundscapes are constructed from microloops and grains of sound, which are typically derived from field recordings, electroacoustic improvisations and other found sounds. Rather than focusing on the use of purely digital or synthetic sound sources, the aim is to create evolving organic textures from sounds rooted in the living world. In this way, the music provides a metaphor for nature, and our relationship with it. The name ‘nemeton’ refers to the ancient sacred groves that once characterised the landscapes of Dorset and other areas of southern England.

Adrian is also a member of the critically acclaimed free-improvisation group Zaum, the improvising electronic ensemble ‘No Context’ and the ambient jazz group ‘Echo Engine’. He has also provided sonic art contributions to numerous community theatre events and arts festivals, both in Dorset and beyond.

Supported by DIVAcontemporary STUDIO >www.divacontemporary.org.uk

 

 

 

Mark Aitkin: “Dead When I Got Here”

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Film-maker, writer and lecturer Mark Aitkin presents his moving documentary DEAD WHEN I GOT HERE, followed by a talk about his unique film-making process.

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Compassion and redemption are discovered by a man as he manages a mental asylum run by its own patients in Juárez, Mexico. The seeds of hope profoundly brought to life by his daughter in L.A who thought him dead.

 

“A masterpiece, epic and intimate. The faces in this film are like a thousand Caravaggios – they are us and we are them.”
Ed Vulliamy, THE OBSERVER

“…as beautiful as anything you will find in Bresson or Tarkovsky,
it is one of the finest examples of documentary filmmaking I’ve
ever seen.”
Scott Graham, SCOTTISH MENTAL HEALTH FILM FESTIVAL

“Gripping and tender.”
THE LANCET

“The film takes people to a place they did not know and did not
expect to visit, the humanity of the insane.”
Charles Bowden, WRITER

www.deadwhenigothere.org

An exhibition of objects donated by the public

We are inviting residents and visitors to West Bay to loan us objects for a public exhibition at the Methodist Chapel over the summer holidays.

Loan us  an object that means something to you and could inspire others;

It could be a family heirloom,  have historical significance, have it’s own story or trigger a memory. Or it could be an  object no longer used, an object that has been abandoned or simply like.

Surprise us!