Adar 2012

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Adar 2012

To coincide with BBC Springwatch return to Ynys Hîr RSPB Reserve, Capel y Graig will be hosting Adar 2012. The Exhibition brings together works by Denis Curry, Maria Hayes and Maura Hazelden that explore the relationship between birds and humans.

Adar will be opening with an evening of music and performance with Julie Murphy, Lou Laurens and Cangen at 7 pm on Friday 1st June 2012. The Exhibition continues 11am – 6pm Saturday 2nd of June – Friday 8th of June. (closed Sunday) Capel y Graig is situated in the village of Furnace on the A487, 12 miles north of Aberystwyth and 6 miles south of Machynlleth.

Denis Curry testing ‘The Human Powered Wing’, a variable- geometry ornithopter claimed to be the first such machine to initiate propulsion solely by means of the wing movements. 

My Slade School studies included Leonardo – I wondered how far he might have got using modern research gear, cameras etc.
My prototype derives from both birds, – chiefly the swan – and insects. The machine has accomplished the first stage – movement from rest in still air.
I am working on the second stage – acceleration.
Denis Curry

Maria Hayes’s recent work explores what happens when analogue observational drawing processes are integrated in a digitally assisted drawing environment.

In ‘Charlie Bird’ she videos and then draws a birds movement, revealing the drawing process.

In 2012 ‘The Big Draw’ recognises her participation work with a ‘Drawing Inspiration Award’.

Reconcile | Cysoni [3]
Blodeuwedd: made of flowers by a man for a man. Banished as an owl. Some say she wants to be flowers again, I say she needs to be flowers & owl. Soft feather float her, meadowsweet inside is brittle, winter flora, beyond spring.
I collect English & Brythonic plant names, naming her fully, making her whole
Maura Hazelden

Julie Murphy is a singer songwriter and member of Welsh folk innovators fernhill. She writes songs at the piano at home in the Welsh countryside and has just released a new solo album; “A Quiet House”, her first for 10 years.

“She possesses a voice of stark, spectral beauty that recalls Shirley Collins and Sandy Denny. Her singing is hypnotic and trance-like, a serene stream of sound finding majesty in minor-key melancholy.”
The Guardian

Cangen is a newly-formed vocal group based in north Pembrokeshire. Led by Lou Laurens, their repertoire ranges from Lou’s arrangements of traditional songs to contemporary composition, blues, world, and renaissance music. They made their debut at the Acapella Festival 2012 in Narberth. For Adar, they will play with birdsong motifs; presenting songs about birds, and bird-human interactions.

Lou Laurens on More than Raiment

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This experiment uses a recording process developed by Alvin Lucier. The process, through a sequence of recording, playing back the recording and re-recording the playback, layers the resonant frequencies of the space. In the final recording, the acoustics of the chapel have become a determining compositional factor, affecting all the sounds of the performed music, rendering some audible, some inaudible, and creating new, rich and varied sounds from those performed.

Unlike Lucier, in whose work I am sitting in a room only the first recording documents a performance, I set out to record a new voice part with each re-recording, making six recordings for the six-part arrangement. Musically, this was challenging, as the recorded voice and piano became increasingly hard to follow, a wash of sound.

As an artist/composer, I am interested to explore how chance operations, can become compositional devices, and function as ways to re-experience traditional compositional structures. In this work, attentional dynamics and acoustics are the chance operations which work upon the performance and recording of a harmony song accompanied by piano.

As a performer, I am interested in meditation and action and the attempt; in the particular qualities of attention generated by practising impossible tasks; and in the implications that these have for performance and how we understand performance. In untitled: Holy Hiatus, an annual 6 hour performance which also utilises Lucier’s process, I attempt to sing with the recording of my performance the previous year (this of course being an attempt to sing with the recording of the year before that): my rule is to sing only if can catch the very moment that I begin to sing on the recording, like a surfer catching a wave. Previously, I have performed a duet with a record of Mair Evans singing Mi Glywaf Dyner Lais while her voice was gradually lost in a wave of sound coming from many other looped records played simultaneously by Jacob Whittaker.

The music is based on Consider the Lilies by Robert Topliff. Topliff (1793 – 1868), a composer, arranger and editor, was also blind. He was a professional musician all his life, and organist of Holy Trinity, Southwark, London. I took phrases and fragments of his song for solo voice and piano and from them created a repetitive rhythmic song for six voices and a piano. The brief was to work with Consider the Lilies, the text relating to the theme of ‘skin’; and to create a work in six parts, so that one recording could be released each day.

More Than Raiment

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On Saturday Lou Laurens and I will be heading up to visit the Tannery in Machynlleth to explore the acoustics of the space, record a song or two and then bring ‘The Coat’ back to the chapel and record a process of ‘Consider the lilies’ there.
The idea is to record layers of sound in a Lucier style, activating the wonderful acoustics, creating an extraordinary sonic experience.  The recordings will then be released through the web building in complexity through the week of the 27th Feb – 3rd March.

I’ve Got You Under My Skin

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The Rhôd Artists Group are developing a collaborative work and research project at The Tannery, Machynlleth from Monday 13th February to Sunday 11th March.
The title of the exhibition is an ‘exquisite corpse’; the sum of each artist’s own title for the show (above) they would ideally have liked to curate within The Tannery if curation was not shared with 9 other people.
The process will be mostly undertaken behind the closed doors of the gallery where it will offer the artists an opportunity to work in a site-specific way, interacting with each others work and allowing the project to change and develop in situ.
You can follow the groups’ postings here as the show progresses and the artists curate the show and discuss their particular interpretations of the processes.

The exhibition will open with a closing event on the Friday 9th March when members of the public will be invited to the gallery to see the current position of the work. This will be followed by a walk and talk around the show on Saturday 10th March in the morning and in the afternoon a discussion with the artists using video projections.
There will be a skype event on February 29th when the group will discuss the show with each other and any who wish to join them.

The process is being documented through the web on the Rhôd Blog and through the Culture Colony platform.

My contribution will be a number of activities documented and presented through the web connecting artists, locations and resources.

  • In the Tannery I will be introducing a number of record sleeves (the by-product of Vinyl Flooring in Cardigan) to be used as a resource for processing by the group.
  • Records in the Corn Exchange Gallery, Cardigan will include live webcam and an interface to connect to the other locations.
  • Capel y Graig will connect through location recordings and webcasts – other artists are invited to contribute to this, more details to follow…

Capeli: Capel Y Graig

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Capel y Graig’s second event  – an installation and performance by arts group GWRANDO part of the Capeli: 2005-2010 exhibition for Ceredigion Museum.

Capeli 2005 — 2010, at Ceredigion Museum, showed work from GWRANDO’s five-year project Capeli. The exhibition ran alongside the Museum’s ‘Preachers and Pulpits’ exhibition, from 26th March until the 18th of June 2011.
There was a gallery talk/performance on the 1st of April at 1.30, offering an insight into the collaboration and the themes and aims of the project. There was also a choral performance at Ceredigion Museum on the 8th of June , and an associated site-specific installation/performance at Capel-y-Graig, Furnace, on the 12th of June.

Roedd Capeli 2005 — 2010, yn Amgueddfa Ceredigion, yn dangos gwaith o brosiect pum mlynedd GWRANDO, sef Capeli. Cynhelir yr arddangosfa ochr yn ochr ag arddangosfa ‘Pregethwyr a Phulpudau’ yr Amgueddfa, rhwng 26 Mawrth a 18 Mehefin 2011.
Roedd perfformiad/darlith yn yr oriel ar 1 Ebrill am 1.30 yn cynnig golwg cyffredinol ar y cydweithio a themâu a nodau’r prosiect. Roedd perfformiad corawl yn yr Arddangosfa ar 8 Mehefin ac hefyd gosodiad/perfformiad safle-benodol cysylltiedig yng Nghapel-y-graig, y Ffwrnais, ar y 12fed Mehefin.

The project brings together music and fine art, and the exhibition includes film, photography, and text; and will display ephemera from GWRANDO’s community events, performances, installations, interventions, and interviews. Also showing will be previously unseen work, including a multi-screen installation showing films of 21 chapels located in the Teifi valley. There are two performances associated with the exhibition, presenting some of the experimental choral music performed at previous Capeli events, and one work developed especially for this exhibition.

Mae’r prosiect yn cyfuno cerddoriaeth a chelfyddyd gain, ac mae’r arddangosfa’n cynnwys ffilm, ffotograffiaeth, a thestun: bydd yn arddangos effemera o ddigwyddiadau cymunedol, perfformiadau, gosodiadau, ymyriadau a chyfweliadau GWRANDO. Bydd gwaith cwbl newydd yn cael ei arddangos hefyd, gan gynnwys gosodiad aml-sgrin sy’n dangos ffilmiau o 21 o gapeli yn nyffryn Teifi. Mae dau berfformiad yn gysylltiedig â’r arddangosfa, yn cyflwyno rhywfaint o’r gerddoriaeth gorawl arbrofol a berfformiwyd mewn digwyddiadau Capeli blaenorol, ac un gwaith a ddatblygwyd yn arbennig i’r arddangosfa hon.

GWRANDO’s work has been described as ‘exciting’, ‘innovative’, and ‘very moving’ – with an approach that opens up ‘new dialogues between art, public performance/participation and community’. GWRANDO’s explorations of chapels and chapel culture are personal and critical evocations of encounters and meetings between people and places. Through the project, GWRANDO discovered tensions between Christian beliefs and the desire for familiarity and continuity; the problems of preservation strategies that privilege architectural authenticity over continuing use and function; and the importance of sound: the word, and the song, in the chapel tradition.

Ymhlith y geiriau sydd wedi’u defnyddio i ddisgrifio gwaith GWRANDO mae ‘cyffrous’, ‘arloesol’ a ‘teimladwy iawn’ — a dywedwyd ei fod yn agor ‘deialogau newydd rhwng celfyddyd, perfformiad/cyfranogiad cyhoeddus a chymuned’. Mae archwiliadau GWRANDO o gapeli a diwylliant y capel yn deffro barn ac atgofion personol am ddigwyddiadau a chyfarfodydd rhwng pobl a lleoedd. Drwy’r prosiect, darganfu GWRANDO densiynau rhwng credoau Cristnogol a’r dyhead am y cyfarwydd a pharhad; problemau strategaethau diogelu sy’n breintio dilysrwydd pensaernïol dros ddefnydd a swyddogaeth barhaus; a phwysigrwydd sain: y gair, a’r gân, yn nhraddodiad y capel.


Images from the GWRANDO event in Capel y Graig, 12/06/11.