28th May to 23rd October 2022 (opening Friday 27 June 6pm)
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose
Hestercombe Gallery presents a major exhibition of artwork including new work from artists Brendan Barry, Feral Practice, John Newling, Sophy Rickett and Marjolaine Ryley.
The exhibition brings together new projects by five artists that engage with gardens and landscapes as sites for practice and enquiry, addressing questions of ethics and value, community and collaboration and exploring art and sustainability in the face of climate emergency and declining biodiversity. Across a diverse range of media but with a shared interest in process and materiality, the five artists will present new work made after visits to Hestercombe and discussions with the Trust’s curators and gardeners.
Engaging with current debates about the generative possibility of plants and our engagement and communication with other species, the exhibition asks questions about artistic engagement with the natural world, and about how we might represent our place in it. With a nod to Gertrude Jekyll’s description of her own garden as ‘my study, my workshop, my place of rest’, the exhibition will evolve and grow over the summer as each artist creates new work and/or carries out participatory workshops in response to Hestercombe.
Feral Practice presents Leave to Remain, a new body of work inspired by a residency at Hestercombe in 2021.
Leave to Remain explores the evocative, precarious nature of home and migration for human and nonhuman beings. Seen through a multi-species lens, Hestercombe is revealed as ‘an intensely ‘nested’ ecology, embroidered at different scales with diverse threads of domesticity'. No longer a human dwelling, the house, outbuildings and gardens provide habitat and shelter to many other species. Leave to Remain comprises a sound piece and suite of new works that reinterpret architectural plans of the house through creaturely eyes. Sound, image and text combine to foreground the domestic arrangements of different species, that all make their home here but have unequal status in human eyes, including Lily Beetles, Greater Horseshoe Bats and Swallows.
Coming up in June:
Listening Station
Mangotsfield Folly is a year-long creative project on the Bristol-Bath Railway Path at the old Mangotsfield railway station. The station closed to trains in 1966, and now forms a natural rest point on the 13-mile Bristol-Bath Railway Path beloved by cyclists, walkers, dog walkers, and wildlife. Feral Practice has been invited to explore the biodiversity of the old station at Mangotsfield, including the inner garden that once belonged to the Stationmaster.
Saturday 18 June 8-11am - Meet the Birds: walk, talk and draw with Feral Practice and ornithologist Aurora Gonzalo Tarodo. Aurora will be placing mist nets in the bushes, so we may be able to look at birds close up, while learning about the journeys they make and how they navigate, how they meet their mate, and many other fascinating topics!
Listening Station is inspired by the site’s history of travel:
‘The theme of meetings and partings, arrivals and departures lends itself to thinking across species boundaries. It includes for example the movement and nesting habits of birds, and how breeding pairs reconnect after time spent apart. While modern humans use Satnav and timetables, birds navigate by the sun, the stars, and the earth’s magnetic field. Rooted species borrow the wind and the wings of other species, evolving fascinating strategies including mimicry and narcotics to tempt insects into helping them find a mate.
The theme of arrivals and departures also evokes the losses and gains of species that Avon has experienced due to climate change, habitat loss and other factors. For example, until recently the old station was illuminated on summer nights by the magical greenish love-lights of glowworms. What strategies might make it possible to bring them back?'
During her residency Fiona will explore and make field recordings of wildlife, and collect personal stories from people, towards creating a new audio drama for Mangotsfield.
Please get in touch if you are interested in contributing!
