Social practice Creative Roaming #3: Gathering

About

The event is free but booking is essential as we will need contact details for participants so we can get in touch in case plans change due to weather etc.

Some of us seem to have an innate impulse to gather as we walk, as well as responding to sites by looking, surveying, measuring, documenting, and researching we also touch, handle, gather and display what we find.

In her latest invitation to join Creative Roaming artist Erika Cann invites you to join her in Dawlish Warren to explore and collect objects and observations of interest to our art practices. Whether your work is directly inspired by nature or not, there will be a variety of points of interest in this landscape, which is interspersed with colour, form, and texture.

We’ll look at the sustainable gathering of materials and discuss different forms of curating and housing these objects. By working with some simple materials out on the beach (air dry clay, wire, string) we’ll make vessels, bundles, recordings and impressions to question the relationship these objects have to our practice. We’ll also observe and investigate temporary or in-situ assemblages and find ways of recording them to highlight their significance in the landscape and our work.

We want to encourage conversations between people from different creative backgrounds working in/connected to the local area and ask that you are open and welcoming to everyone, using the event as an opportunity to chat to people you haven’t met before.

If the weather allows, there might be time for a quick dip in the sea at the end for those who wish to! By placing our bodies out in the sea, how are we connecting to those washed up on the shore, and how can we use outdoor practices of walking and swimming to gain an understanding of our position alongside others in a landscape?

If you plan on swimming, please make sure you bring enough warm layers!

We will be getting the train from Exeter Central to Dawlish Warren. Trains run approx. every half hour and an off peak return costs about £6. We encourage you to join us on the train if you’re coming from Exeter but understand if you need to make your own way.

We aim to meet at Dawlish Warren

About the facilitator:

Erika Cann is an artist whose home lies between the granite tors of Dartmoor National Park and the dynamic cliffs of the Jurassic Coast. Her work investigates place through accounts, both historical and contemporary, within the guides and maps of an area. She navigates the environment through climbing – pushing, pulling, jamming and squeezing her way up and through time, geologies and accumulated narratives. The work takes the form of photography, film, and printmaking, which is often imbued with language.

Erika is an advocate for public access to nature and has recently been awarded a New Perspectives bursary from Campaign for National Parks to use her practice to engage local communities with public transport access to Dartmoor National Park. She hopes to engage local communities with the landscape in a position of care and enjoyment through exploration, which is ecologically considered yet adventurous.