Beneath Clouded Hills: Una Hamilton Helle & Verity Birt
Beneath Clouded Hills began over two years ago as a Harsh Light conversation that explored a more critical and inclusive ‘Englishness’ through landscape, the occult and more-than-human connections. Since then, artists Una Hamilton Helle and Verity Birt have been co-developing this work closely with the support of Bloc Projects, with a mid-point research period at Creswell Crags, Nottinghamshire. The hope was to spend time listening to and collaborating with the ancient site as a living body, in the company of fellow practitioners in art, ritual, folklore and paleontology.
Working through materials like moss, rocks and bones as well as writings, Beneath Clouded Hills presents an earthy ‘England’ that removes itself from more idyllic tropes of green, rolling hills bathed in eternal summer. How do such mytho-pastoral images resonate today? Is there scope to reimagine our landscapes, turn them into more inclusive and radically open possibilities? Una’s and Verity’s response can be found in this project, which includes turning the gallery into a dim, nether space filled with (un)familiar sonic and visual textures. By rooting one’s senses otherwise, Beneath Clouded Hills re-embodies the feel of England in all its leaky, porous potentials.
As part of the expansive project, we hosted a Day of Events on Sat 20 May with invited presentations from guest speakers, special performances and a film screening. The artists have since compiled their research into a special series of episodes for Ploughing Old Patterns, Raising New Ground, which you can listen to using the link below.
Documentation images and video by Jules Lister.
Verity Birt is a funded, practice-based PhD researcher at Northumbria University and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (BxNu) in Newcastle. She has an MA from the Royal College of Art (2015) and BA from Goldsmiths University of London (2011). Situated in intersectional Feminism, Verity’s practice of writing, performance, sculpture, sound and film-making seeks to materialise enchanted encounters and meaningful intimacies between each-other and the more-than-human world.
Una Hamilton Helle is an artist and art worker. Her long term project Becoming the Forest looks at questions around ecology, black metal, belonging and plant sentience through exhibitions, events and a publication series. She has also worked with LARP and worldbuilding as experiments in empathy, embodiment and collaboration with human and non-human entities. As a curator with Legion Projects she curated Waking the Witch, an exhibition which toured Britain in 2018-19. Her most recent artistic projects include an exhibition and LARP for Kim? (Riga), a site-specific sound installation for Waltham Forest Borough of Culture (London), a video essay for New Art Gallery Walsall and a text-based adventure game for Celsius Project Space (Malmö).
Supported by:
This exhibition project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 863944 THINK DEEP).