Walk with us ... this weekend

This Saturday July 12th you can walk & talk with us about our new project WHAT WILL THE HARVEST BE? We will be leading a walk from Abbey Gardens around some of Newham’s other green spaces:

3.00 pm Abbey Gardens (Bakers Row)
3.15 pm West Ham Park
4.15 pm St Mary’s Allotments
5.00 pm The Greenway
5.30 pm West Ham Allotments
6.00 pm Abbey Gardens - Picnic

Come & join us for the walk to hear more about our proposed projects for Abbey Gardens and meet some Newham residents with green fingers. Following the walk there will be an informal gathering for a picnic with the Friends of Abbey Gardens, which you are also very welcome to join. Feel free to bring along some food (especially home-grown!) Elderflower drinks will be available made with the flowers I gathered on the site.

To book a place on the walk please email us.

Click here for more information on the project.

Abbey Gardens is located at the end of Bakers Row, Stratford, East London E15 3NF

Posted Monday 7th July, 2008 at 8:11 pm by Nina

Tudor Screening

We had a great turn out from Kentwell last week, for our special screening of Living with the Tudors, so much so that the 'regular' audience members are virtually invisible! The manager of the cinema was very excited to see a mid week queue of Tudors stretching out down the block.

It felt great to finally show the film to a big group of participants from the re-creation, and a really interesting Q&A followed the screening. Questions touched on what our expectations had been, why we didn't show more 'non-gentry' characters and how we ultimately felt about the bad feeling the filming caused with some participants at the time.

Karen and I were too nervous to sit through the actual showing and went for the obligatory Somewhere regional curry. Fortunately we returned to the sound of much applause for the film as the credits rolled and there seemed to be a general good vibe to the evening. Of course some might argue that it's impossible to expect that everyone involved in making a film might like it - but of course it doesn't stop you hoping that this might be the case. I think the poor distribution manager from Soda pictures had certainly had enough of hearing about the Tudors by the time we let him back out of the car in Hackney.

Posted Monday 7th July, 2008 at 2:56 pm by Nina

In a cinema near you very soon!

Two exciting updates for Living with the Tudors - On July 1st at 7.30pm there will be a special screening at the Haverhill Arts Centre cinema to coincide with this years main event at Kentwell. All Kentwell staff & re-enactors will enjoy a discount ticket price of £3.00. Come along & see yourself on the big screen! Karen & I will be there for a Q&A and to catch up with everyone.

If you live in London sadly you will have to wait until August to see the film in the cinema ... if you can't wait for the big screen experience you can order the DVD, available from July 30th from Soda Pictures here in the UK.

Posted Wednesday 25th June, 2008 at 4:02 pm by Nina

Go Broadcast Yourself - the good old days of new media

Vintage Pope & Guthrie is currently on show at Cornerhouse in the show 'BROADCAST YOURSELF'.
The project 'TV swansong' (2002)- an insanely ambitious live, one-day webcast by artists - is part of this fascinating overview of artists' broadcasting interventions.
The artists we curated into the project were Walker & Bromwich, Chris Helson, Jessica Voorsanger, Jordan Baseman, Rory Hamilton & Jon Rogers, Georgio Sadotti and Graham Fagen.

It was a crazy project - administratively, financially, technically - in fact I found this page cached in my web browser which made me shudder to revisit the planning! But it was also a brave project that I am still very proud of. Despite horrific technical glitches on the live day, the project broke new ground artistically and technologically.

At the Cornerhouse preview last week I met with a number of nice folk from the good old days of new media. It was great to catch-up. For the first time in my career I felt how those ageing video artists must feel when looking back on their early oeuvre - a kind of affection and nostalgia for its clunkiness. We all laughed at the various technical hitches the show was suffering from - Alistair Gentry had a loose cable, I (still a very poor operator on a PC) couldn't bookmark the TV swansong website or make it the browser's 'home', though thankfully the piece's still work online some 6 years on...
It's the first time I've really recognised the 'historic-ness' of the new media work of the late 90's and early noughties, and its a credit to curators Kathy Rae Huffman and Sarah Cook that the show places this work in a continuum from the radical artists film and video of decades earlier.

I think the Youtube generation could love this show - only 3 or 4 years ago people would have found all this low-res on big screens pretty unwatchable (I remember long discussions with our more sceptical TV swansong artists about how webcasting compared formally with their more familiar single-screen gallery installations). But now we have films on mobile phones, iPlayer and a generally very wide tolerance for big pixels and wobbly shots.

'BROADCAST YOURSELF' is at Cornerhouse (I just noticed the address isn't on the preview card - pause to find it...) from 13th June till 10th August 2008

70 Oxford Street
Manchester
M1 5NH

T 0161 200 1500

Posted Tuesday 17th June, 2008 at 10:55 am by Karen

A Song for a Circus

Finally we've finished A Song for a Circus ...

Soon to be playing on the Agrifashionista site but those wanting a preview visit our MySpace page.

Posted Monday 16th June, 2008 at 11:26 am by Nina

Karen talks at the Storey in Lancaster, June 17th

I'll be giving a lavishly illustrated talk for the Storey Gallery, 7.30 pm on Tuesday 17th June.
The venue is the Dukes Theatre, Moor Lane, Lancaster, Lancashire LA1 1QE
Tel: 01524 598505

Posted Thursday 12th June, 2008 at 7:19 am by Karen

Royal specials and some paranormal

Trying to distribute your own film can at times be demoralising & last week actually hilarious ... I received the email below from a US channel who shall remain nameless ...

Hi Nina,

Thanks for keeping us in mind.

I don't know which I find more depressing the rejection or the 'upfront' assessment of their audience! Still if we decide to do a series on the Royals or paranormal I now know where to go.

Posted Wednesday 4th June, 2008 at 10:13 am by Nina

Somewhere & Seeds

Things are changing at Abbey Gardens with our project What Will The Harvest Be?

Last week, once the contractors had seeded the whole site with a mixture of wild flowers and 'regular' grass seed, Tim & I went down in the evening to reveal the soil for the 'seed shape' we've made. The idea is to see what grows from the 'original' soil on the site, rather than in the new topsoil now covering the whole area.

In the weeks since we covered the shape over, the plastic (protecting this soil from the 'new seeding') has obviously acted a bit like a cloche and there is already abundant seed growth in some areas! Later in the summer we hope to use the shape as a starting point for some community events.

This is just 'phase one' of a long-term project - our proposals for the garden cover 3 years of development and relate back to its Cistercian origins when the monks used the land as a site of great productivity. This year we have made this 'seed shape', which will be surrounded by wild flower mix already planned by the council - we plan to 'harvest' the wild flower seeds with an urban hay-making day in August. Next year, the whole site will be transformed into a flower and vegetable cutting garden (inspired by the Plaistow Landgrabbers) hopefully generating both community support & plants for the final design to be implemented in 2010.

Right now the site is surrounded by elderflowers - recipes this way please ...

Posted Tuesday 27th May, 2008 at 10:32 am by Nina

Ye Olde Maryport

Sam Allan recently found this magical postcard of one of my favourite places - Maryport.
The town is one of the starts of our film "Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future", and I don't think any 'Marras' would take it the wrong way if I said that you could scarcely buy a postcard of the town now, some 40 odd years after this postcard was editioned. It's just not that kind of a place.
Intriguingly, the postcard is addressed to someone in Northern Italy, it's postmarked too, but seems somehow to have found its way back to Cumbria.

Posted Friday 23rd May, 2008 at 10:34 am by Karen

Summer Seed Shape

We have recently been commissioned by Newham Council to work with the Friends of Abbey Gardens to re-vision the site opposite their houses on Bakers Row in Stratford. The scheme will take several years to complete and we are currently making proposals for a series of events and projects during this time.

Our current thinking is around the cosmopolitan social and commercial hub that medieval abbeys - such as that which once occupied the site - would have been. We plan to relate historic influences (including the more recent history of the site) to East London today and the needs of both the local and commuter communities. We are committed to using the site to produce food or other distributable products, and to raising community engagement in this endeavour via a long term scheme of events. These objectives will be also be embedded into the permanent design scheme by working with the Council's landscape architect on the planting and layout of the garden.

The Council are currently rolling out an interim scheme of sowing a wildflower seed mix onto imported topsoil, bringing colour and wildlife to the area over summer 2008.
To retain a small area of 'original' soil for observation, we have been constructing an area which mirrors the shape of the nearby archaelogical remains on the site. The soil in this section will be left uncultivated, and its natural seedbank allowed to germinate and grow. After three days of hard digging we finally achieved the modest aim of protecting the shape from the seeds about to go down!

You can see more photos of the area and a large version of this one on our new Flickr Group for Abbey Gardens/Bakers Row.

Posted Tuesday 29th April, 2008 at 1:28 pm by Nina