Their Colours and Their Forms

Their Colours and their Forms has been curated by John Strachan, Brian Thompson and myself. It is an exhibition that shows new work by artists, composers and creative writers responding imaginatively to Wordsworth’s life and poetry and the manuscripts of William and Dorothy Wordsworth displayed in the Museum. For this exhibition, my work was shown alongside the manuscripts of Dorothy and William Wordsworth held by the trust, and as a direct result of this project, four new pieces have been acquired by the Wordsworth Trust and are now on permanent display next to the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth that my work reference

Walk ON Conference

The last decade has seen an upsurge in the study of walking across a number of disciplines; many walking-related events and research groups have been established in the arts and within academia. This two-day conference, held at the University of Sunderland, organised by the research group W.A.L.K. in association with WALK ON, an exhibition at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, aimed to provide a critical and discursive meeting-point for artists, writers, thinkers, and academics engaged in the study of walking, documenting the many diverse approaches to the study of walking. ON WALKING sought to examine and interrogate the practice and process of walking in all its cultural, ethnographic, poetic, and geographical ramifications. It brought together innovative and speculative ideas on walking, considering walking in relation to landscape, social, cultural, artistic, and geographical constructions of space. Over 80 delegates presented papers at the conference. As well as from the UK, they came from as far afield as Canada and North America, South America, France, Spain, Italy, Holland, Hong Kong and Australia

Wordsworth and Bashō: Walking Poets

Wordsworth and Bashō: Walking Poets was an exhibition of original and facsimile copies of manuscripts by William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Matsuo Bashō. They were shown alongside new work by contemporary UK and Japanese artists who responded to the manuscripts, and what originally inspired them, in ways that were as fresh, creative and radical now as Wordsworth and Bashō were during their lives. Artists in the show include: Ewan Clayton; Ken Cockburn; Alec Finlay; Christine Flint-Sato; Zaffar Kunial (Poet in Residence at the Wordsworth trust, 2014); Eiichi Kono; Manny Ling; Chris McHugh; Nobuya Monta; Inge Panneels; Andrew Richardson; Autumn Richardson; Nao Sakamoto; Minako Shirakura; Richard Skelton; Ayako Tani; Brian Thompson and myself (with two new works based on the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. The exhibition (which is showing at Dove Cottage - click here for more information) was organized and curated by myself assisted by Janet Ross for WALK in collaboration with Jeff Cowton (Curator, the Wordsworth Trust) and was accompanied by a significant publication and opened to the public on the 24th May, running until the 2nd November 2014. The publication, which was published in English and Japanese, includes essays by: Professor Emeritus John Elder: Middlebury College, USA; Professor Shoko Azuma: Jumonji University; Tokyo; Dr. Kaz Oishi: University of Tokyo; Professor Ewan Clayton University of Sunderland; Pamela Woof – President of the Wordsworth Trust; Dr. Carol McKay – University of Sunderland and myself. Thanks also to Ayako Tani and Christopher McHugh for their help in liaising with the Japanese museums involved (Kyoto National Museum; Iga City Bashō Memorial Museum; Waseda Library and Kakimori Bunko)

Street Flowers: Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land: Conference Paper and Published Essay

The paper was for the international conference ‘Tourist and Cultural Itineraries: From Memory to Development’,organised by Laval University, Québec, and an essay Street Flowers: Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land has been published by Laval University

Street Flowers: Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land Conference Paper

I have presented papers about Street Flowers: Urban Survivors of the Privileged Land at 'Duration’ - an international, interdisciplinary conference exploring the temporality of contemporary public arts practice

Singing the World

Imitating with the mouth the fluid voices of birds came long before men were able to sing together in melody and please the ear. Lucretius (94-55BC): De Rerum Natura This exhibition was inspired by listening to the Dawn Chorus at Cheeseburn Grange in Northumberland – a choir of sixteen birds heard early one morning in May 2016. Together their songs, represented in the exhibition variously as digitally manipulated sonograms and musical transcriptions, form the basis of this show of screen prints, music, digital prints, relief sculpture, poetry and glass. The idea for Singing the World arose from a series of conversations between painter Siu Carter, musician and composer Bennett Hogg, artist and printmaker Alex Charrington, natural history sound recordist Geoff Sample and myself about music, art and bird song. The installation gradually grew to encompass not only the Dawn Chorus, but also that liminal time between night and the dawning of a new day (represented by Ayako Tani’s glass chandelier in the Hayloft), as well as the more spacious and ‘laid-back’ Evening Chorus at Cheeseburn. Bennett Hogg’s musical piano and electroacoustic compositions developed accordingly as the discussions about the project progressed

WALK ON - From Richard Long to Janet Cardiff - 40 years of Art Walking

This is the first exhibition to examine the many and varied ways in which artists since the late 1960s have used what would seem like a universal act – that of taking a walk – as a means to create new types of art. ‘Walk On’ includes photography, film, and installation works, bringing together a diverse group of artists inspired by their travels on foot. It offers an as-yet-unwritten history of a major strand of recent art practice. It argues that from land art and conceptual art, and from street photography to the essay-film, an exceptionally wide range of first-rate artists have created their work from the act of walking, in the city or the land

Wordsworth and Bashō: Walking Poets

An exhibition of original manuscripts by William and Dorothy Wordsworth shown alongside those of Matsuo Bashō. This is the first time any manuscripts by William and Dorothy Wordsworth have been lent to public institutions in East Asia for over twenty-five years; and it introduces the work of Dorothy Wordsworth to new audiences in Japan. These internationally significant manuscripts are shown alongside new work by contemporary UK and Japanese artists which has been inspired by the poetry and prose of all three writers. Although William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived a century apart from Bashō and in two very different cultures, it is, perhaps, surprising to find that there are a number of similarities between both their writing and the ideas that lay behind it. The Wordsworths and Bashō were innovators in their time. We anticipate that the wide range of contemporary work included in this project will give readers and visitors to the exhibition at Kakimori Bunko ways of seeing their words and manuscripts afresh – to see them as lively, exciting, living documents – and as part of a creative and radical continuum that stretches from the past through to the present. The writing of William and Dorothy Wordsworth and Bashō also emphasises, in different ways, the importance of our emotional response to an experience of nature, developed through our active imagination - an approach which is shared by many of the contemporary artists in this exhibition. It is an important part of this project that the 2016 JAER Conference, held at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, is hosting a special symposium as part of the conference entitled 'Wordsworth, Bashō, Walking Poets - the Value of Nature in the 21st Century'

'Ghosts of the Restless Shore: Space, Place and Memory'

'Ghosts of the Restless Shore: Space, Place and Memory' was an exhibition of new contemporary art by four artists (Tim Collier, Jake Campbell, Rob Strachan and myself) integrating visual, aural, historical and oral/written/textual experiences of the natural/social history of the Sefton Coast. The artists walked the Sefton Coastal Footpath together in the summer of 2014 and the work in the show is based around experiences of that walk as well as a sustained period of research in 2014/15 undertaken by the artists into the social and natural history of the coast. All the work in the exhibition examined, in one form or another, the way we (as culturally and socially informed people) interact with the natural environment, not just in terms of the way in which the landscape is experienced, but also the way in which it is interpreted and imagined

Listening Project

In an effort to better serve Southeast and Coastal Georgia, The Coastal Rivers Water Planning & Policy Center tapped the thoughts of several key stakeholders on water issues in our region.The Center was created in 2001 with a continuing mission to "assist policymakers in the formulation of policy designs to best manage sustainable economic growth and natural resource conservation via water planning, research, education and technical assistance." In order to best accomplish this mission, it is necessary for us to engage stakeholders in our region to determine those issues of critical importance.The Listening Project is designed to identify the perspective of water users throughout the Coastal Rivers Region by listening to the actual concerns and ideas for improvement of those who have a stake in the water future of the region. Using this information, the Center can better meet the research needs of stakeholders in the region.The objective of the first round of listening sessions is to identify issues, and not to take a quantitative measure of any given constituency. Thus, the results of the process do not lend themselves to conclusions that any one constituency has a certain viewpoint, but rather gives an idea for the type of issues that arise when representatives of one particular constituency gather to discuss their hopes and fears around the future of water use in Coastal Georgia region.The balance of this paper is organized in the following way: In Section II we discuss the process used in this first round of five listening sessions. In Section III we report the verbatim ideas of the participants in each of the five sessions. Section IV reports the same verbatim ideas put forward by the participants, but the ideas are organized according to dominant themes emerging from the sessions, where various constituencies' ideas on each theme are easily readable in the same place. Finally, in Section V we offer concluding remarks and describe our plans for Phase II of the project. Working Paper Number 2005-00