Surrey Unearthed Connecting people and landscape creatively

The Surrey Hills landscape is intriguingly diverse, a result of its complex geology, geomorphology and pattern of human activity. Ten carefully selected artists will explore this rich and compact area that features the North Downs Chalk scarp, the Greensand and Clay of the Weald, river valleys, dense woodland and protected heathlands. One of the first areas to be designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1958, Surrey is valued for its national significance. Surrey Unearthed will celebrate the materials that form the landscape of the Surrey Hills AONB in its 60th year of designation. The selected artists are excited to explore the history and geology of Surrey’s materials – the Chalk, Clay, Grass, Stone, Wood, Flint and the distinct areas - sand pits, chalk streams and industrial landscapes and share new insights into how these materials have been used throughout history, and their relevance today. Ackroyd & Harvey, Jonathan Parsons, Mary Branson, Amanda Loomes, Jane Ponsford & Walter Bailey will be developing their own practices in new ways. For example, Walter Bailey is researching the process of forest glass & incorporating this into an oak structure, while Jonathan Parsons is developing his large scale alignments of texts and symbols referring these to the geology of chalk. These artists will support three emerging artists through their explorations and work alongside a phd research student focusing on the written descriptions of the landscape. The artists will meet regularly for sharing and group critique. The resulting artworks will range from permanent, to semi-permanent lasting up to 18 months, to transient. The impact of the project will reach far beyond its duration with a continuation of engagement and showcasing opportunities leading up to the first Surrey Hills Arts Festival at Leith Hill Place. Surrey Unearthed will present engaging, challenging and innovative new work raising the profile of art in the landscape locally and regionally.

Surrey Unearthed

Jane Ponsford

Mapping out potential sites with the participating artists

Ackroyd & Harvey

The Tree Ceremony, Paris – Ackroyd & Harvey

History Trees, Olympic Park – Ackroyd & Harvey

Ackroyd & Harvey will research and explore the area around Leith Hill, its history, community and geology. This will be the first commission these international artists have done on their home ground, an area they are connected with and, most recently active in the protection of. They will create a space to exhibit a ‘museum’ of Leith Hill, a space to engage local audiences with talks and workshops creating a dialogue into the history and issues surrounding the hill.

Their practice encompasses sculpture, photography, architecture and biology.They are acclaimed for their large-scale artistic interventions, highlighting the temporal nature of growth and decay in sites of architectural interest as well as in contemporary galleries, museums and found sites worldwide. Their pioneering work making organic photographs utilising chlorophyll in seedling grass, actualises themes of ephemerality, landscape and memory and has garnered widespread international recognition

Examples include their largest temporary living artwork FlyTower 2007, on the exterior of London's National Theatre in 2007; Cunningham 2013 a highly successful public artwork for Derry/Londonderry City of Culture and HistoryTrees 2012 at the ten main entrances to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. As part of their ongoing cycle of works, Beuys’ Acorns, they produced a ‘tree roadshow’ travelling to five locations in France and culminating in a major artwork in Paris to coincide with the COP21 climate talks and in 2016 completed a commission for the University of Cambridge integrating a slate artwork into the David Attenborough building. www.ackroydandharvey.com

Jonathan Parsons

Jonathan Parsons’ project ‘Horizons’ will consist of a series of site-

specific installations and sculptural interventions in the landscape along

a section of the northern ridge of the Surrey Hills. Each work will

incorporate brilliant white chalk as a key feature of its structure, enabling

a string of works to be simultaneously visible over a long distance. The

work will develop his practice of making architectural installations, text

pieces and alignments in the landscape, with letterforms and

cartographic assemblages composed of a matrix of bright discs.

Horizons will present engaging ideas related to the nature and

distribution of chalk deposits that form the hills themselves.

Jonathan Parsons is known for the diversity of his practice, which

includes installation, sculpture, found objects, drawing, painting and

fabrication. He was selected for the British Art Show 5 (2000) and one of

the youngest artists in the notorious Sensation exhibition at the RA

(1997), touring to Berlin and New York. He co-curated Seeing Round

Corners for Turner Contemporary, Margate (2016), attracting over

140,000 visitors. He was the artistic lead for the 2015 Flag Project for

the UK Parliament, which directly engaged 20,000 participants. His

landscape installation For John Constable, commissioned by Salisbury

Arts Centre for Harnham Water Meadows in Salisbury (2011), attracted

5130 visitors. Recent exhibitions include: Geographies, Museo Poldi

Pezzoli, Milan (2015), Imperfect Reverse and Camberwell Space

Projects, London (2016). His work is represented in public collections in

the UK and private collections around the world.

www.jonathanparsons.com

Time/Emit – Jonathan Parsons

2015 Flag Project,UK Parliament – Jonathan Parsons

Mary Branson

Mary Branson will work with local farmers to explore their relationship to the

land & address the wider community’s relationship with food production and

dependency on farmed land. The farming community often seems overlooked

in the debate about our countryside. In this project, she will work actively with

them to learn the processes of the harvest and perhaps highlight some of the

unseen work that goes on to shape the landscape that is often taken for

granted.

At harvest time, Mary will work with the farmers to create an installation of

hay bales in the fields below Newlands Corner, visible from here all along the

Shere bypass, enabling viewers to see the work from a distance of some

miles. Approximately one hundred bales would be illuminated by outlining the

edges with LED strip lighting, using red translucent tubes. These lines of light

will appear, forming three-dimensional structures that develop as darkness

falls. Hay Bales would be documented through film, photography and an

artist’s book.

The local community and targeted groups will be invited to engage with the

project through workshops, talks and over the two weeks of the installation,

evening picnics on site. The work will also be the focus of a large-scale

public celebration of the 60 year anniversary for AONB designation.

Mary Branson specialise in creating large scale installations, using sculpture,

light and sound. By experimenting with scale, light and multiplicity, she forms

new environments that question the existing polemics of art and the space it

inhabits. Mary worked with Metal Monkeys in 2012 to create Supernature, an

Arts Council funded multi-sensory landscape as part of the torch relay events.

In 2014, Mary became Artist in Residence at the Houses of Parliament,

researching archives of the Suffrage movement, and producing ‘New Dawn’

artwork for the Palace of Westminster was unveiled on June 7th, 2016.

www.marybranson.co.uk

New Dawn, Houses of Parliament

Red Tents, The Mount, Guildford

Supernature, Surrey 2012

Walter Bailey

Walter Bailey is a sculptor whose work focuses on our relationship with

nature. The woodland is his studio. In a new development, Walter

proposes combining an oak structure with glass made using local wood

ash, charcoal and sand, perhaps even minerals. In his recent research,

he discovered that Medieval stained glass was produced with charcoal

often from forest furnaces in Surrey and is keen to explore this further,

As part of his Surrey Unearthed residency in South West Surrey, Walter

will engage with Surrey’s Archaeology Unit and partner the University for

the Creative Arts MA Glass students, to explore this historical technique.

Walter will provide local community workshops sharing his embodied

knowledge of forest materials and environs. For example, working with

oak galls and small oak twigs, to create structures with this natural

material that can be used to produce ink for drawing, dyeing and for

writing text works.

Walter Bailey has works in private and corporate collections in the UK,

USA, Guernsey, Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Japan, and Australia.

He works predominantly in Oak and English Redwood, carving intricate

patterns using hand tools, chainsaws and fire. A lover of nature, Bailey

works in an outdoor studio with an abundance of nature around him.

www.walterbailey.co.uk

Jane Ponsford

Jane Ponsford’s practice is rooted in walking and finding materials to base

her bookworks, sculpture and installations upon. Her current preoccupation

is with materiality and process in response to particular settings and

landscapes, the chalk, natural dyes, clay and silt and the traces that they

leave. In Surrey Unearthed, she will collect, and catalogue the materials,

using making as a method for investigation, creating from traces of the

landscape. In addition to temporary works along the routes, Jane will create

an installation incorporating her collections and pieces she has made

independently and with others. Her walks and talks with individuals and

groups will be reciprocal allowing an exchange of ideas, stories and

anecdotes, including the history of landscape in terms of geology, human

history, industrial archaeology, local folk law, journeys and the idea of

tourism. She will also create an artist’s booklet recording and mapping the

project to distribute.

Jane Ponsford’s work uses repetitive processes, constructing sculptural

forms made up of hundreds of near identical fragments. Her most recent

work concentrates on working with handmade paper. Surrey Unearthed

would extend her practice in researching and incorporating landscape

pigments. Recent projects include ‘Passing Moment’ as part of 10 Days

Chalk at the Winchester City Museum and A Landscape in Ten Parts at

Newark Park, Gloucester and past work includes Paper Trails, a 12 month

residency on Elmbridge Commons funded by Arts Council England.

www.janeponsfordstudio.com

Passing Moment, Winchester City Museum

White Drawing

Story tree

Amanda Loomes

Amanda Loomes will make a short experimental documentary film

that references the historic legacy of material extractions,

considering the work that is being undertaken to make the sites into

wildlife habitats and the continued extraction of sand in East Surrey.

The film will focus on the historic and contemporary labour that

haunts these materials and sites. This will create an opportunity to

make a film to be seen at a large scale in an outdoor setting. It will

enable Amanda to experiment projection onto different surfaces,

developing the installation aspect of her practice. By working locally

she will be able to visit the sandpits regularly, developing

relationships with the people that work there and involve them in the

project. She will also create a website so the film could be watched

in situ at any time.

For the past ten years, Amanda Loomes has created experimental

documentary films preoccupied by people at work, focusing on the

effort of people whose work goes unnoticed, or work that becomes

erased or undone. Recent projects include Spiky Black, Chalkwell

Park Rose Garden, 2017. Shoreham Sculpture Trail and The Mesh,

Watermans Art Centre, 2017. Her project, Keepers, at the National

Trust property at Lyme in 2016 examined gamekeepers,

housekeepers, head keepers, timekeepers and their stories.

Amanda was selected for the Jerwood Open Forest, Jerwood

Space.

www.amandaloomes.net

Keepers – Lyme, National Trust

Emerging Artists

Alison Carlier

Surrey Unearthed will develop Alison Carlier’s audio visual practice specific to landscape. She will research the industrial and geological histories of specifically the Lime Works and areas of hazel coppice used for charcoal burning from Oxted to Dorking and create an audio drawing that functions as a walk along this section of The North Downs Way. Coming from a drawing background and fascinated by spoken language, Alison makes ‘audio drawings’; rich, textual spoken descriptions that create a drawing in the listener’s head. She was Artist-in-Residence at Aspex and the winner of the Jerwood Drawing Prize 2014.

Steven Edwards Studying an MA in Ceramics at the University for the Creative Arts, Steve Edwards is building on a new direction creating work in the landscape. His in-depth research of local clay extraction and production history will form the basis of his contemporary artwork and engage the community with its rich history. The focus of the work is the mark making qualities recorded by materials through the process of time.

Bryn Hallet Bryn is an early career architect, designer and maker interested in people, emotion and environment. He aims to develop his understanding of craft and fabrication through experimentation of various techniques. In Surrey Unearthed, Brynn will take a single material to experiment and test in development of a structure that responds to its specific location.

Explosive Drawing – Alison Carlier

Horizontal Sound – Steven Edwards

Bird Hide – Bryn Hallet

Engaging People with Culture and Landscape

Desire & Need - Past audiences and participants have identified a desire for

engaging, contemporary, site-specific arts projects in the Surrey landscape. It’s

a landscape rich with history, rare species, new local, rural industries but

despite close proximity most people do not have a connection or knowledge

about it. Surrey Unearthed seeks to address this.

Exposing children & young people to culture in the environment

Despite its wealthy image, Surrey has 10% of children living in poverty overall

with some areas such as Spelthorne and Redhill seeing figures as high as 37%.

These children demonstrate reading & writing levels far behind their peers,

and exposure to culture is extremely limited. In addition to this, Surrey’s 5 – 18

yr olds participate in significantly less exercise than the English average

contributing to childhood obesity. Surrey Unearthed seeks to introduce

children to their local environments, give them opportunities to create

outdoors, work alongside innovative artists, discover and connect.

Mental Health - According to MIND, 300 out of 1000 will experience mental

health problems each year. Socio-economic factors have a measurable impact

and this is more sharply felt in Surrey where there is extreme wealth next door

to poverty. Twelve wards in Surrey have higher rates of children with a mental

health disorder than the national average. Surrey Unearthed will bring those of

all ages into the outstanding landscape for creative health walks incorporating

four sections of the Wheel of Wellbeing.

Past Surrey Hills Arts / Surrey Arts engagement

Surrey Unearthed Events

Surrey Unearthed Exhibition – Leith Hill Place – July 2018

An archive displaying the artist’s research and development with initial

artworks and maquette with an artists’ talk and the project launch.

Surrey Hills Celebration – Newlands Corner – September 2018

Outdoor community celebration of the AONB 60 year anniversary

viewing Mary Branson’s Hay Bale illuminated installation, and featuring

the Surrey Unearthed poetry and sound.

Sandpits Film Showing – tbc

Film showing of the art documentary exploring Moorhouse and Sibelco

sandpits and quarrying.

Surrey Hills Arts Residencies and Festival - June 2019

One year on, a legacy event showcasing the Surrey Unearthed final

works with poetry readings, sound performances and showcasing some

of the work created by communities across Surrey. Local produce will

be served, and creative workshops will run throughout the day. This is

part of a development of residencies and festival working in partnership

with the National Trust. This project will form the foundation for our

aspirations for Leith Hill Place as an artistic hub for contemporary artists’

responses to the surrounding landscape, for debates, experimentation

and celebration.

Amanda Loomes – Spoil/Fill Projection

Jonathan Parsons – Seeing Round Corners

Mary Branson – Smell of the Moon