art at the festival
Informed Speculation Simon Read
COURTYARD GALLERY AT BALLROOM ARTS
We are pleased to be featuring Simon Read as our Artist-in-Residence.
Simon’s practice Is based on drawing, for him a portal to the imagination. It is a first step and essential precursor to a sense of ownership of an idea. The sensory experience of reinventing a subject in time and space as marks on paper is an act of becoming and creates a common ground for sharing with others.
When Simon first became involved in discussions over coastal processes and management, his instinct was to translate what was unfamiliar to him into a form that he was conversant with. The intention was not so much to communicate but to create a middle ground where ideas can meet.
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The map works exhibited in Informed Speculation are hybrids. Every effort was taken to ensure their accuracy and fidelity to the data used, but they are essentially speculative and take drawing as a means of becoming rather than informing. In drawing terms, he can take the liberty of raising a north easterly storm on an exposed coastline just to see what would happen.
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Simon Read - detail from Alkborough Flats Tidal Defence Scheme
The experience of drawing is both immediate and tangible, it must negotiate the waywardness of material and the skill to contain it, in microcosm it is a salutary lesson in control and letting go.
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Simon will be talking about the purpose and intention of his map works in the Courtyard Gallery at 10.00am on Friday 8 November and will participate in the panel discussion ‘To the River’ on Sunday 10 November at noon. He will also be occupying the South Lookout Tower on Aldeburgh Beach on Saturday 9 November, which will be an opportunity for people to drop in to speak to him about his process and ideas, his drawing practice, his poetry and his environmental activism.
Confluence II Simon Carter and Jevan Watkins Jones
UPSTAIRS GALLERY AT BALLROOM ARTS
Confluence II brings together a group of large-scale collaborative charcoal drawings and smaller collaborative collages by artists Simon Carter and Jevan Watkins Jones , based on the respective headlands of Walton-on-the-Naze and Landguard Point, Felixstowe.
Confluence refers not only to where the river Stour and Orwell converge at the mouth of the North Sea but also the two artists working on the same surface.
This studio-based work developed out of hundreds of drawings made over a period of two years. Carter and Watkins Jones met on the same day, at the same time, at their headlands; drawing a shared landscape across the water from one another.
www.simoncarterpaintings.co.uk
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Detail of Shorelines installation, Firstsite
Photo: Anna Lukala