ART CITIES:London-Jerwood Open Forest
Jerwood Open Forest is an artist-centred initiative established by Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Forestry Commission England. The 2016 exhibition examines art in the environment and its potential to facilitate experimentation and engagement. The exhibition is a distillation of 5 selected projects, which have been explored throughout a 6-month period of research and development.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Jerwood Charitable Foundation Archive
For the 2nd edition of “Jerwood Open Forest”, Rebecca Beinart, Magz Hall, Keith Harrison, David Rickard and David Turley, were selected from almost 500 diverse and ambitious proposals in response to an open call to UK-based artists within 15 years of beginning their practice. The artists were invited to submit bold, broad-thinking proposals that explored the potential of forests as a site for art. Rebecca Beinart explores the relationship between care and loss through an ambitious piece of live work bringing together a collection of stories about lost trees, developed through research collected around specific forests. Sound and radio artist Magz Hall develops an interactive trail of radio transmissions through the forest, enabling trees to whisper to each other, and re-engaging with a sense of technological enchantment so intrinsic to the early radio experiments that make up much of her research interests. Keith Harrison proposes a multi-faceted performative sculpture bringing together industrial forces within the context of the forest, inspired by his upbringing in the heavily post-industrialized Black Country. Keith explores constructing a series of mud jumps through the forest, working with BMXers; from the same mud he created a prototype car to be launched from a monumental ramp as a public event. David Rickard’s proposal “Returnings”, is a vast forest installation built with timber collected from across the UK, exploring the cyclical journey of the forests’ trees. Each piece of ‘reclaimed’ wood is imprinted with details of its previous function and location, thereby recording a network of the past lives of timber elements within the depths of their original environment. David Turley’s proposal centres on a “Men of the Trees Forestry Diary” from 1947, unearthed at an auction in Australia, which documents the daily life of a man planting trees in Orlestone Forest outside Ashford, Kent. Turley engages with the social and cultural events described in the notebook’s pages, exploring the potential for site engagement through its specific historical narrative.
Info: Jerwood Space, 171 Union Street, London, Duration: 2/11-11/12/16, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-17:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-15:00, http://jerwoodopenforest.org
