Our New Common Forest
Our New Common Forest SpudWorks, Feb - Aug 2022
Our New Common Forest - A Queer Almanac was a public art commission from SpudWORKS. Developed over three sesasons with artist Luke Pell and LGBTQ+ folx in the New Forest & across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, the project included a mixed media installation and various offerings for encounters with public.
Exploring the inherent queerness of nature; we drew on writings from different generations of LGBTQ+ artists (from Derek Jarman to Kae Tempest and Alok Vaid-Menon) to seed and sow what it means to be LGBTQ+ in Hampshire; old and new definitions of pride and how we might draw together constellations of shared queer family trees.
Between March and August we curated and led wanders in the forest, drawing on our choreographic and somatic practice; as well as workshops for creating found poetry and performance (with Breakout Youth groups) and in June we hosted a weekend of creative play at spudWORKS, alongside a public conversation about our work Quiet Queerings with A Space Arts at Gods House Tower, Southampton.
Between 30 July – Monday 1 August we were in residence in the spudWORKS gallery assembling our Queer Almanac: an installation that weaves together the words and worlds of folx we met through the project with images, audio and writing we created during the time of our residency.
Visitors were invited to make their own entry into the queer almanac as it accumulated each day.
Introduction to gallery show (Lucy & Luke)Our New Common Forest
- a queer almanac –
This exhibition comprises audio, images and text which have been made as part of a SPUDworks residency over spring-summer 2022 as well as a Love Token created by Hannah Buckingham (a paper object which you are encouraged to gently handle!)
During our residency we have hosted different gatherings – gallery visits, scored walks, weekend workshops and talks - for Breakout Youth and other Hampshire-based, LGBTQ+ folks, allies and friends - all of which have been informed by our choreographic practice of somatic tuning.
Taking the ways in which trees in forests are connected communities as our point of departure - how they share minerals, resources and messages through their root systems - we have been exploring what it is to seek out and share queer community and companionship here. Not just with our fellow human beings, but with the more-than-human world, found in the abundance of life and diversity woven throughout this unique landscape.
Informed by research, by labours of love, and by the words and worlds of the people and other living creatures we’ve met along the way - in person, as well as on the page – we’ve drawn on what we call ‘quietly queer’ poetics to create entries for the almanac, and a process of image-uncovering (rather than image ‘taking’) to create photographs that have been printed on sustainable Awagame paper made from hemp, and installed as a skin of scales or leaves.
Almanacs as kinds of calendar have been in use since antiquity for different purposes, and our queer almanac records the new and full moons and responds to the different scales, patterns, sensations and movements of flora and fauna and humans shaping the way that we look, move and inhabit the space around us. The months August to December are deliberately blank, inviting you to contribute your own entry.
As a companion to the almanac, the audio recording, Someone Once Said, is a memory score of the many, and varied conversations that have taken place as part of this project.
We are particularly grateful to two artists that we have met as part of this project: Hannah Buckingham for creating her Love Token and Bevis Fenner who created and performed a midsummer ritual, photographic traces of which are visible in the space.
extract from audio score
//
Someone once said the trees speak
they draw towards and away,
stay in touch;
pass what’s needed to one another
//
Someone once said it’s an invitation
to see the world in a different way -
upturned refracted
the small with the large
a gathering of bodies
touching
entwined
a blanket of moss
a carpet of bluebells
a community of
interweaving branches
above a scatter of leaves
becoming the soil of
our commons:
our forest
//
Someone once said, to be queer is to refuse to follow certain straight lines
so, we follow the forest: heath onto copse, onto bog, onto morass, with river, with brook, out to pasture, estuary, seashore, where -
someone once said I’d like to be a wave in the sea, just one, because I like the idea of being in the universe only such a very short time
//
