Truly delighted to announce collaborative exhibition as Metafleur with specialist craft gallery Thrown Contemporary and garden and sustainable food education space OmVed Gardens taking place in their gardens and greenhouse in Highgate.
This is our third collaboration together for The Chelsea Fringe, with artworks assembled from around the world via an open Call from thrown.
Expanding the exhibition content and encouraging new ways of looking and participating in the exhibition there will be a host of activities including talks, supper clubs, poetry, dance and musical gathering. It is my pleasure to have been organising performances on the 25 / 26 / 27th May as part of the Events programme. Please find more information and a few lines about how each went beneath.
May 25th, G(Roe)
Choreographed by Andrew Sanger and in collaboration with the dancers.
This performance is a collaboration between Andrew Sanger, musician Josef Berk, and the first-year dance students at Roehampton University. Throughout the creative process the students grew calendula plants from seed and documented their growth patterns to devise movement material. The film ‘Minute Bodies: The Intimate World of F. Percy Smith’, and the poem ‘Wild Geese’ by Mary Oliver also contributed to the creative research undertaken by the students. The work will take audience members on a gentle stroll through the gardens of Omved.
A particular movement / moment that moved me was “Show me your sorrow and I’ll show you mine”as they pointed at each other before dropping into a rolling curtsey. Utter magic to see the dancers melding with the garden, with invitations to follow them individually first before returning to self-supporting growing group structures; an opportunity to let go / grow.
26th, Utopia Collective Dinner
Good Place: A series of interventions inspired by Thomas More’s dinner scene in Utopia and William Morris’s ‘How we live and how we might live.’
A joint Supper Club hosted by Thrown Contemporary and OmVed Gardens, with food by Gilvic.
Good Place (direct Latin translation Utopia) is envisaged and includes performances and objects by Amy and Ben Mcdonnell, Joshua Phillips, Eva Sajovic, Mónica Rivas Velásquez, Portia Winters and Alice McCabe.
Objects and performances were asking: “How do our relationships to each other, the land, food, pattern, governance, perpetual ripeness (one of Morris’ key visual cues) affect our perception of abundance or lack thereof?”
27th May, The Gathering; wild collective music making with Maggie Nicols
Respond to nature in our different rhythms together.
Vocalist Maggie Nicols has been an active participant in the European improvisational community since joining the Spontaneous Music Ensemble in the late ’60s. As a co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group, she has also worked to further women in improvised music, dancing and other creative arts not only by example but through workshops and extensive collaborating.
Maggie Nicols builds confidence to interact collectively inspired by the OmVed garden environment. Everyone is invited to listen or take part in the music making; responding in any medium. Maggie also invited us to find freedom in everyday moments and celebrate the Permaculture Zone 6; unmanaged land or minimal inpiut, an observed zone left wild. Felt like a fitting end via extension to the Wild Collective Exhibition.
More information available via the Wild Collective website: www.wild-collective.com
Invitation image by Vivian Ge - join in with sharing images at #wildcollectivechelseafringe