Wander_Land exhibition Podcast

For this surprise edition to the end of the podcast series, Barbara Beyer and Mark Richards interview Doug Burton about his work for the show and approaches to making and thinking. Themes of folklore, magic, mysticism, materiality, time and place are explored.

In this final episode of the Wander_Land Exhibition podcast, I talk with Barbara Beyer about her use of materials and the process of developing her ideas for the show. Barbara says of her work "As soon as we start moving, we encounter obstacles, sometimes almost unnotably small, often easily negotiable; where the obstacles grow, our imagination grows too. We overcome them with bridges, stairs, and ladders. Then there is another option – for routes we physically cannot take - we can send tokens: We stay and move at the same time. Where we cannot walk across the water, we skim stones, briefly touching the meniscus of the sealed water surface. Where we cannot walk the distance, the lengths, the time, we can write or draw. A traveller needs a skimming stone and adrawing tool."

I discuss with Jane Jobling the process of making and thinking that leads to the creation of her work. Jobling's morning routine is to walk around the field because walking, is connected with looking and thinking. Jobling finds something calming and meditative about this repetition, the same field, the same path, but different every day, she is combing the landscape for evidence of change. The change in creative practice happens unexpectedly, the intervention of wasps in the studio brings about wonderment and absorption into a new creative approach.

I discussed with Fiona Campbell her sculpture installation at Tremenheere, including 'Flags of the Forest', a series of eco-flag pieces inspired by woodlands. Campbell has used labour-intensive methods such as hand-stitching, weaving, and hand-made eco dyes to celebrate biodiversity, hopeful of nature being more cared for and thriving. Placed in the landscape near Tremenheere’s woodland and reflected in a water feature, the flags become way markers. The concept was inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s book titled ‘The Word for World is Forest’. Woods and forests provide vital ecosystems - crucial to our survival.Above and Below is made of reclaimed, discarded and found materials collected over the years on walks, each with a story, such as plant fibres, insects, bones, pondweed and scrap steel.  Some were gleaned at Tremenheere and from a recent ACE funded trip to my birthplace in Kenya. The work is a response to the entanglements of matter, rhizomatic systems and debris that make up the strata we walk on.

Michael Blow talks to me about his journey of exploration with making his sculpture, "Mycelium connections/Please take off your shoes." The sculpture considers our relationship to the natural world and the internal force that moves through our gut to our brain and back into a wider universal natural network.

In Solidarity is a video work created collaboratively between Emma Elliott and Susie Olczak which follows on from their previous video collaboration ‘Where The Jungle Meets The Sea…The World Is Split In Two’ which was shot in Armila, Panama where Elliott and Olczak spent time together researching and experiencing living in the Darien Gap. ‘In Solidarity’ was filmed in Cornwall, in the Spring of 2023 when the artists walked parts of the St Michael’s Way together, a coast-to-coast micro-pilgrimage in the Westernmost reaches of Cornwall and shot footage at Tremenheere amongst the sub-tropical planting. The work considers the significance of walking and migration throughout human existence and its connection to survival and place. We walk to save our lives, for spiritual enlightenment, for healing and for leisure. 

I discuss with William Lasdun his response to the Cornwall seascape and landscape. His work describes meandering paths and curving forms found in nature, not dissimilar to contour lines on OS maps but more tactile and three-dimensional. They’re comprised of linear elements which seek to capture the forces and cycles in the natural world and seek to resonate with features of the local physical and spiritual geography. –  the meandering path of the Pilgrims’ Way, the ancient tin and bronze furnaces where metals were returned to their primordial fluid state, the old Ley lines which pass under the sea at the heart of the mount at Marazion – reaching toward an articulation of the more universal cycles of human experience and the elemental energies of life itself.

An in-depth discussion with Ros Burgin on her work for Wander_Land, 'Another Country', Ros describes it as an exploration of psycho-geography as well as mapping a physical place. The cellular clustering of the pieces draws arbitrary routes across the landscape, bound together into a new kind of fabric with cable ties; words alluding to contemporary societies' reliance on global communications networks as well as a marine measurement of distance travelled.