Landscape. Place and Identity:
a multi-diciplinary symposium

We're sorry that the Symposium is cancelled.
Specialist workshops will proceed with slight alterations to times and venue


Specialist Workshop Day including The Big Draw
Sunday 11th October 10:00 - 12:00, 14:00 -1600
Museum in the Park, Stratford Park, Stroud, Gloucestershire GL5 4AH

An exciting programme of 'hands on' workshops, engaging with ideas of 'landscape' and offering the potential to develop skills and collaborative projects.

The Big Draw | a Free event

Endangered Species

Drawings of the Dawn Redwood made in Stratford Park, hung in Dawn Redwoods in Shanghai.

Land artists Walking the Land are working with local people to send 1000 drawn leaves of the endangered Dawn Redwood Tree (a specimen is in Stratford Park) to it's native China.
Join Walking the Land artists to make drawings which will be added to the growing leaf collection in Shanghai.

Cost: Free
Time: 10:00 -12:00 & 14:00 - 16:00
Location: Stratford Park meeting outside The Museum in the Park

Drawing a Landscape of the Mind
Join artist Maxine Relton for a day of experimental drawing, interpreting your visualisations of place. All abilities welcome.
Cost: £37 per person, plus £3-5 for materials depending on use. All materials supplied.
Time: 10am - 4pm
Location: Museum in the Park, Stroud. Meet outside main entrance, first hour outdoors, warm clothes advised.
Payment details: cheque made out to Maxine Relton, £37 payable on booking, small materials charge on the day
Contact: Maxine Relton, 5 The Street, Horsley, Stroud, Glos GL6 0PU
e: maxine.relton@tiscali.co.uk
t: 01453 832597
Booking essential.

Creative Writing in the landscape
Writer Philip Rush will use four key poems as cornerstones for four inter-related poetry exercises. These poems will address: the narrative landscape, the spiritual landscape, the emotional landscape and the prospect poem, though not necessarily in that order.
Cost: £5
Time: 13:30 - 16:00
Location: TBA
Contact & Payment details:
e: philip@yewtreecottages.fsnet.co.uk
m: 07768471275
Booking essential (Maximum 6 participants)

Performance, Process and Place
One of the areas leading conceptual artists, Dominic Thomas guides you into developing new ways of seeing the landscape.
Cost: TBA
Time: TBA
Location: TBA
Payment detailsTBA
contact: TBA
Booking essential


Symposium Contributors:

Suze Adams
Suze Adams is a multi-disciplinary artist and currently part of the PLaCe doctoral research team at UWE, Bristol. She is an associate member of Land2 and exhibits regularly throughout the UK and Europe.
www.suzeadams.co.uk

Carolyn Black
Carolyn Black has an MA in Fine Art and exhibited widely before, (as she describes it) ‘moving over to the dark side’, when she became involved in curating and commissioning temporary public artworks. She has curated several events in Bristol, most notably ‘dialogue’ in 2003. Following a year working as project assistant to Claire Doherty on Thinking of the Outside, she took up post as Projects Director for the Forest of Dean Sculpture Trust. Carolyn is now pursuing a PhD relating to curatorial decision-making and its impact on the visitor experience.

James Dixon
Trained as an archaeologist, over the past three years James Dixon has been examining links between public art and contemporary archaeology during which time he has been involved in the Cabot Circus project in Bristol. He has been using contemporary archaeological methods/theory to develop an in-depth understanding of the relationship between planners, residents, consumers and the built environment with a view to proposing new ways that developers and public art commissioners might approach the local places in which they work. James is currently completing his doctoral studies at UWE Bristol.

Colin Glen
Colin Glen has a studio base at SVA in Stroud and regularly exhibits work – locally, nationally and internationally. He is also an art writer and publishes with magazines ArtMonthly and a-n as well as contributing commissioned essays to artist catalogues. Colin is currently reading for a research degree at the University of Bristol.

Owain Jones
Owain Jones describes himself, broadly, as ‘a cultural geographer with a range of theoretical and substantive interests’. These can be grouped under the headings; nature-society relations, landscape and place, geographies of children and childhood, geographies of the non-human. Owain is interested in developing ‘non-representational’ approaches to landscapes – focusing on memory, emotion, affect and performativity. He is currently a Research Fellow with the Countryside & Community Research Institute and based at the University of Gloucestershire.

Andrew Langford
Andrew Langford is currently based at the University of Northampton where he is Research Leader in Fine Art and Design in the School of The Arts. His image making has involved a wide range of photographic and digital technologies and conceptual approaches to collage and to document. His most recent work entitled, Winter Growing Fields: Landscape and Estrangement uses photography to explore the impact of rapid change around the agricultural and business use of semi-arid desert lands in Almeria, Spain.

Hellen O’Connor
Hellen O’Connor is a geologist attached to Gloucestershire Geology Trust and to the Museum in the Park, Stroud.

Bronwyn Platten
Bronwyn Platten has exhibited internationally in numerous group and solo shows – most recently as part of the touring exhibition Figuring Landscapes launched at Tate Modern earlier this year. Platten has worked extensively with diverse community groups and, since 2003, with NHS trusts in Aberdeen and Manchester as both artist and curator. She is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Salford developing a collaborative arts-based approach to communicating experiences of embodiment.

Dominic Thomas
Dominic Thomas’ interdisciplinary practice focuses on critically and socially engaged solo and collaborative production through performance, video, site-specific installation, writing and project work. He has a particular interest in self-organisation and self-education within artist-led activity and has been initiating and co-ordinating artists’ projects in the UK and beyond since 1997.

Jem Southam
Jem Southam is Professor of Photography at the University of Plymouth. His series of photographic images have been exhibited widely and his texts published extensively. His most recent work is the result of a commission from the Lowry; a study of the Cumbrian coast called ‘Clouds Descending’.

Maxine Relton
Maxine Relton lives and works in the Stroud valleys and leads art workshops at home and abroad. She exhibits widely, has a permanent gallery of her own work and is an elected academician of the RWA. Her paintings and prints are held in private collections all over the world.

Philip Rush
Philip Rush is an English teacher and writer. His poems have appeared in reputable and disreputable magazines, both here and in the United States, and he is represented in the Carcanet anthology, New Poetries IV.
His recent books, a collection of poems called Big Purple Garden Paintings and a sequence called How to Listen to Classical Music, are both published by Yew Tree Press (available through Amazon). Yew Tree Press also put out a pamphlet of poems (Improvisation) and a recent exciting collaboration with illustrator Nadine James (I-Spy Stroud).

Simon Ryder
Initially trained as a zoologist, Simon Ryder studied sculpture at the RCA where he co-founded artNucleus (www.artnucleus.org), a collaborative agency set up to produce site-sensitive artworks for challenging locations. Over the past decade he has completed a wide range of residencies and commissions, most recently working with the interaction designer Anthony Rowe to produce the first in a series of ‘Tuned Landscapes’: enveloping spatialized aural environments based on ecologically sensitive landscapes through which the viewer can interact with the source landscape.

Walking the Land
Tom Keating
Tom Keating teaches digital media to individuals, communities and organizations. He currently works for Stroud College and is involved in projects with The English Folk and Dance Society, Remembering Rodborough and Walking the Land. Using various digital media to isolate and exaggerate his findings, Tom’s personal work explores environments where nature's design overlaps with human changes.

Richard Keating
Richard has worked within landscape design, urban fringe and countryside management and as director of one of the twelve Community Forests in England. As a free lance facilitator and consultant he has worked in the wider sustainability and cultural fields since the 1990's. Following an MA in Drawing as Process, Richard has spent more of his time working directly with communities on the sustainability agenda as an artist. Current work includes a mix of consultancy and arts projects such as Green Infrastructure project with Natural England, working with local artists to address concerns regards the Severn Barrage proposals, various projects about how people value their place and a thread of work concerning woodland and endangered tree species.He is a director of Stroud Nature and Capel Mill Development Company.

Kel Portman
Kel Portman is a mixed media artist whose work examines an interaction with landscape and place – often as the result of a personal or group journey, observation or event. It often involves a combination of media with multiple viewpoints and interwoven overlays that replicate the dynamic interaction with the land. Kel has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad and has extensive experience of teaching in Europe, Asia and America.
A former Senior Lecturer at the University of the Arts, London and Fulbright Exchange Professor, he now works with Walking the Land and is actively involved with Gloucestershire Digital Arts Forum, PhotoStroud and Stroud Valleys Artspace.