Allotment Arts Project: Dream Into Moss
Part of Open Space 70
Inspired by Calderdale’s historical working-class botanists and the lost plant species of the valley, artists Alison Cooper, Helen Mather and Anna FC Smith invited allotment holders and the wider Hebden Bridge community to join them in exploring their local natural history, present and future.
Using visual and sound art, the group shared knowledge, observing, and documenting local nature, to create artwork, a zine and a sound installation for the Open Space 70 Arts Trail happening on 15 and 16 July.
Using visual and sound art, the group shared knowledge, observing, and documenting local nature, to create artwork, a zine and a sound installation for the Open Space 70 Arts Trail happening on 15 and 16 July.
Ode To Moss - A Song Cycle
This composition accompanies three lagre scale textile banners and responds to workshops run with allotment holders during the spring and summer. Composed and performed by Alison Cooper of the music project Magpahi.
This composition accompanies three lagre scale textile banners and responds to workshops run with allotment holders during the spring and summer. Composed and performed by Alison Cooper of the music project Magpahi.
Weave Deep Time
Using sound samples from a cassette tape loop workshop, allotment holders worked with Alison Cooper to refelct on the cycles of ecology and nature using analogue equipment. Sound design by Alison Cooper.
Using sound samples from a cassette tape loop workshop, allotment holders worked with Alison Cooper to refelct on the cycles of ecology and nature using analogue equipment. Sound design by Alison Cooper.
Meet The Artists
ALISON COOPER
Alison Cooper is a musician, composer, visual artist and curator. Her experience as a creative educator, community mentor and project manager brings together a socially engaged practice combining these unique elements. Her work seeks to develop new understandings between narratives from the natural world, material culture and human interaction. Influenced by the intriguing nature of what has gone before (often working from narratives linked to archive and museum collections) Alison works to bring a fresh understanding to stories which can never truly be replicated, only re-visioned. Recent studying of botany and herbal medicine has brought a new dimension to the her work. |
HELEN MATHER
Helen Mather is a freelance artist and educator working in community settings, museums, education, and art spaces. As a practicing artist she is interested in the language of materials and the tacit knowledge gained from working with them. Taking social and political history as starting points, she explores these narratives through materiality connecting the past with the present. Her practice involves community engagement with communal making, discussion, and collaboration at the centre. |
ANNA FC SMITH
Anna FC Smith is a Wigan (UK) based multimedia artist. She studied Critical Fine Art Practice at the University of Brighton, graduating in 2007 and has exhibited internationally. Smith has an obsession with folk culture and communal tradition. Her works develop through historical and anthropological research, emerging as multi-dimensional symbolic collages spanning eras, and forms of material culture. Touching on politics and performative space, she examines ‘low culture’, bawdiness, irreverence and ambivalence. She explores the role history plays in our interpretation of the present, seeking links contemporary society has to its predecessors to find an understanding of humanity. |
