Creta & 56/26 Fe
Photography, a portfolio of Fine Art Giclee prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag & digital film
85% of the 285 chalk-streams worldwide are in the UK. Primarily fed by spring water from the chalk aquifer ensures a constant flow of clear, cold water. It is this stable current across flinty gravel beds that make them a perfect source of clean water – ideal for a thriving biodiverse ecosystem.
During my residency I have spent days attempting to follow the Nar, Gay & Bawsey from the centre of town out to the countryside on foot as I am car free and I thought it would be straightforward. I was shocked to discover how undervalued these unique waterways were in the town and was determined to discover more.
Many chalk aquifers – the source of chalk streams – are sadly polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus from fertilisers spread on farmland. The seemingly clear waters of chalk streams are often tainted with invisible contaminants as a result. As they flow downstream, water running off urban and rural areas bring pollutants, including fine sediments, pesticides and sewage.
The natural courses taken by many chalk streams have been straightened, dredged, rerouted and rebranded as ‘drains’ to make space for agricultural, urban and industrial land uses. The rivers dwindle as water companies cynically extract water from streams and aquifers.
These negative effects are compounded by climate change. As a result, the Environment Agency reports that not one of England’s rivers – chalk or otherwise – is in good overall health. The contrast between a thriving chalk stream and a denuded one is stark. We need to value these mercurial sources of pure water that are life giving and regenerative.
A strategy for restoring England’s chalk streams recommends granting chalk streams new statutory protection that reflects their globally unique value to ecology and culture. Radical action is needed to better protect our chalk streams and ensure these ecosystems remain worthy of their iconic status.
56/26 Fe
Castle Rising / Ling Common iron-rich mud
Photography, Fine Art Giclee print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
Iron is made from the fusion of elements in stars. It arrived on Earth millions of years ago in the form of meteorite showers after a powerful luminous stellar explosion or supernova, when the lifetime of a star is exhausted.
Iron is an essential element for life as it participates in a wide variety of metabolic processes, including oxygen transport, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) synthesis, and electron transport. Every living thing: plant, animal, bacteria, even cancer cells rely on iron to flourish. The movement of iron through the biosphere is mainly controlled by plants and is an essential trace element required for the production of chlorophyll.
“The Castle Rising / Ling Common iron-rich mud demonstrates how apparent pollution (the lurid red ochre) in fact belongs to a natural chain of biogeochemical reactions in the sands and their hydrology, rather than an anthropogenic pollution story. There is a moral as well as a chemical difference. For some reason the word ‘catena’ (Latin for chain) comes to me although it is a soil scientist’s jargon word referring to an interlinked suite of soil variants which develop on slopes within a similar geological substrate and under a certain climate.”
Tim Holt-Wilson, Geological specialist
River, art and activism by Veronica Sekules, Director Groundwork Gallery
Algae Bloom in the Barents Sea NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC, 2011
Printing by The Printspace, the UK’s first Fine Art & Photo printing service that is completely carbon neutral
The Ground Beneath Our Feet
Groundwork Gallery Summer Residency and Exhibition 2023
Groundwork On Tour Bridport Dorset 2024
Brighton OpenEco 2024
Tate to Thames 17 - 25 June 2021
Working with the artists, Ackroyd & Harvey in collaboration with the poet, novelist and activist Ben Okri, and the Writers Rebel Collective, to produce a large-scale performative work in two acts to address the climate and ecological emergency.
Over nine days, a 16 x 4m banner grew in the Turbine Hall with a text written by Okri stencilled into the seedling grass. Equivalent to a photogram, his words were revealed in bright yellow as the letters were removed.
On Friday June 25, a cellist played and eighteen performers congregated to roll and remove the grass banner from the Tate to the Thames.
The installation followed Tate’s declaration of a climate emergency in 2019.
Act 1 On the Shore Tate Modern, London – link to film
To the call of the trumpet, and led by a dancer, the performers processed to the embankment. Lowering the banner over the railings, a crew awaited to secure the grass to a cork floatation raft.
At 11am, to the sound of St Paul’s bells, the banner was lifted by the waves and floated on the river. Speeches and music followed.
Act 2 On the Shore Bankside Beach, London – link to film
Creative team – Ackroyd & Harvey and Ben Okri with Liz Jensen, Kelly Hill, Paul Ewen, Laura Toms, Gus Mitchell, Ben Anderson
Production – Kelly Hill
Performers – Angel Pollard, Ashley Goh, Cara Mahoney, Claire Parry, Ella Faye Donley, Gaby Soly, Hanna Kelly, Henry Hayward, Holli Dillon, Jan Pearson, Josh Mortor, Katherine Bristow, Lauren Eliza Philips, Linn Johansson, Melina Khalifi Rad, Olivia Gosling, Oliver Lyndon, Paul Barnes, Rhea Chandratreya, Toby Litt, Tom Jensen, Venice van Someren
Stage Management – Ally Southern, Anoushka Bonwick, Tyler Southern
Photography – Andy Sewell, Elaine Duigenan, Harry Hawkins, Kelly Hill, Dan Harvey and others
Acknowledgements – Misia Gobdeski, Harry Hawkins, BOST, Southwark XR, Helena Smith, XR Creative Circle, Alice English, Andrew Darnton and XR Rebels
Kelly has collaborated with Michael Pawlyn and Exploration Architecture for several years on the curation and production of creative content for exhibition, film and web.
2019 / 2020 Learning from Nature, Museum of Design Atlanta
2019 Beuy’s Acorns, Ackroyd & Harvey, Bloomberg Arcade
2018 Future Knowledge, Modern Art Oxford
2014 Designing with Nature, The Architecture Foundation
2000 Nurture & Desire, Breakthrough, Evolve Design, Hayward Gallery & South Bank Centre
1999 The London Overground, Car Free London, The Architecture Foundation
As well as photographing works, curating displays and website content, Kelly has produced and edited four specially made films that describe Exploration Architecture’s projects. Offering a unique insight into the practice’s approach and describing the wide variety of biomimetic solutions that the studio has applied in architecture and other fields of design.
I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads
Comprendo que no existe
El camino derecho
Solo un gran labertino
De encrucijadas multiples
extract, “Los puentes colgantes / Floating Bridges” from Suites
by Frederico Garcia Lorca
Arriving at night, crosscountry from Granada to Vélez Rubio, past the castle at Vélez Blanco - a white dust road meanders into the Sierra Maria-Los Vélez Natural Park - a stark landscape silhouetted against the star filled sky. Perhaps the very effort of arriving is part of the allure, and the warm hospitality that harbours in the expansive land where all are free to walk, think and make.
Through the medium of photography, drawing, walking and installation, my work investigates what it is to be a part of nature, how to establish a reciprocal relationship with it while recording and taking note of detail. I arrived with a box, some pencils, notebooks and a camera. Every morning I would rise early to wander, initially exploring the barranco (dry riverbed) that channels flash flood water from the hillside to the valley, then up through almond and olive terraces to deserted farmsteads.
Simon had told us that there had been very little rain in the area since April and that the land was particularly dry following summer heatwaves across Europe. Andalucía is one of the most vulnerable regions in Europe to climate change and without careful land and water management desertification of this region will intensify.
My instinct was to collect rock, old tins, roots, seeds, snail shells and broken objects discarded in the landscape and bring them back to the studio to draw, photograph and, where cracked or broken - repair. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by applying a lacquer dusted with powdered gold. As a philosophy, it regards breakage as part of the history of an object and the repair remembers the fault rather than make it disappear.
I have returned to the UK with a collection of material that feels like the start of a body of work and an imagination reignited by the experience of being embedded in a new and remarkable place.
Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill is one of the co-founders of Culture Declares Emergency, a growing community of creative practitioners concerned about the dire state of our living planet. Since launching in April 2019, over 1000 individuals and organisations have ‘declared’ an emergency as part of a movement demanding systemic change to support life on Earth. Kelly works closely with Writers Rebel - a group of novelists, poets, screenwriters and academics who use the power of words to claim a safer, fairer future for all the planet’s inhabitants – human and non-human. Most recently on the development of the Paint the Land projects that link high-profile writers with well-loved and emerging visual artists to create landscape graffiti with a powerful ecological message to address the climate and ecological emergency.
Land art is not new. From prehistory, humans have made marks on rocks, shores, mountains and every conceivable kind of landscape. The most enduring marks reveal the evolution of the human mind. Some geoglyphs, like the Nazca Lines in Peru, are so vast that they can only be seen from a height impossible for their creators to have reached.
In the year leading up to COP26, the Writers Rebel Paint the Land team - Liz Jensen and Kelly Hill - began to link high-profile writers with well-loved and emerging visual artists to create landscape graffiti with a powerful ecological message to address the climate and ecological emergency.
“Once out of the jurisdiction of Tate, On the Shore then assumed a new incarnation as a ceremonial activist banner. Accompanied by a dancer and crowds of iPhone snappers, including the artist Gavin Turk, the weighty grassy text was paraded like a religious artefact to the Thames walkway before being lowered down over the railings and onto the foreshore of the river. This procession marked the launch of Paint the Land, a new project initiated by XR Writers Rebel which teams up writers and artists to make work with the landscape in order to raise awareness of the climate and ecological catastrophe threatening us all. On the Shore at last fulfilled its name as, at the water’s edge it was eased onto a floatation platform fashioned from 150 panels of cork. Now the work shape-shifted yet again into an animated furry raft, floating on the Thames with its surface undulating and rippling with each watery flurry of the incoming tide.”
Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper
From Turbine Hall to Thames: Ackroyd & Harvey's enormous grass banner pleads for our planet's future
Kelly’s portraiture has developed over the past twenty years.
Her approach has been described as ‘always personal, making the work both delicate and accessible. As an image maker her style is fluid and poetic which results in an intriguing tableau of contemporary life. The work is suggestive without ever speaking too loudly’. EJ Major
This gallery includes work from CUSP * NOUN
A point of transition between two different states
"I have been photographing teenagers for many years and have a particular interest in this transitional period between childhood and adulthood." Kelly Hill
Featuring
Maria Camahort, Spanish Classical Guitarist
Ade Adepitan, TV Presenter & Wheelchair Basketball Player
Farhana Yamin, environmental lawyer, climate change & development policy expert
Zadie Smith, British Author
Sir Mark Rylance, British Actor
George Monbiot, British journalist, author, environmental and political activist
Heather Ackroyd, British Artist
Dan Harvey, British Artist
Jasper Morrison, British Furniture & Product Designer
Johnny Flynn, Musician & Actor
Sian Berry, Leader of UK Green Party
Caroline Lucas, MP Brighton & Hove
Susie Orbach, British psychotherapist, psychoanalyst & writer
Zena Edwards, Performance Poet
Glyn Maxwell, British Poet, Playwright and Novelist
Michael Pawlyn, British Architect & Consultant
Umi, Sol, Lyra, Maud and the Wingfield School Girls
My project is a game. I arrive at an unfamiliar home at dusk and ask what worlds the children would like to create. They select their own props and I withdraw to observe them from the outside.
I believe there is a connection between the way we learn to read the world as a child and the way we absorb information intuitively as adults. Part of my own nature as a child was to get lost in the way things felt, to become absorbed in the game to the point where imagination and reality become one and the same.
Thresholds, windows and membranes that divide the interior from the exterior are important in the work as they explore the separation between the internal (psyche) and the external (culture), and the boundary between the personal and the shared.
The series developed out of a documentary practice that observed the city as a stage and has culminated in a series of unnerving mini-narratives that appear to have been drawn from the everyday.
By repeating the game and creating a series the work takes on a strange mythical quality that delves into the imaginative world of childhood, suggesting both a light and a dark realm, and a transition from the known into the unknown.
Lacuna - an unfilled space; a gap
Work in progress
Touch
What is it about our hands that tell us so much about ourselves and, the work that we do?
Take a look at your own hands – what story do they tell?
What is it that connects the eye to hand to heart?
'Our sense of touch', said Barbara Hepworth, 'is a fundamental sensibility ... giving us the ability to feel weight and form and assess its significance'.
The touch of a hand is what gives us the capacity to communicate as unique individuals – with all our faults and idiosyncrasies.
My journey into magic realism led me to study Wim Wenders, Wing’s of Desire. The film is an atmospheric and reflective mood piece that relates more to music and poetry than the structure of a conventional film or novel. In the film Wenders would have his audience savor the details of a pedestrian existence and the inherent beauty of everyday experiences. The opening sequence resonated with my own project – the children in the city can see the angels who gently observe the community, the poem ‘When the child’ touches on the elements I wanted to communicate – the lightness of being a child, imaginative play, fantasy inspired by the everyday, inhibition, daydream, curiosity, intelligence and a sense of the ‘envelope of time’.
'David was born in Great Yarmouth between the Norfolk Broads and the depositional sand spit formed from tides divided by the blunt nose of Norfolk. Spending his childhood in Lowestoft from the age of seven, David must have witnessed the steady decline of the herring fleets, and the gradual silting-up of the harbour and degradation of its quayside. He was always wistful in his relationship to such places, whether it was a student site at Rotherhithe or Tenby or his school at Gravesend. His teaching was always grounded in his own experience, whether from architectural practice or a familiar landscape.'
from David Gray: a life of architecture, landscape and friendship by Peter Salter, professor of architectural design at the Welsh School of Architecture
