Deep England Microresidency: Verity Birt & Una Hamilton Helle
11 - 18 May
Creswell Crags
Deep England unpacks the complexities of a ‘true’ England, a rhetoric co-opted by far-right ideology. The project began as an invitation Bloc Projects extended to Verity Birt and Una Hamilton Helle to speak about their shared interest of re-examining ‘Englishness’ with a more-than-human feminist lens.
Through critical engagement with archaeology, history and myths, the one-week residency at Creswell Crags feels out the geographies from England’s near, prehistoric and enchanted pasts. Specifically, the artists will be using Creswell’s caves as a site for listening, voicing and conjuring via choral, movement and other embodied practices.
Supported by palaeontologist Angharad Jones, the artists will convene a series of in situ workshops, making public their findings at the visitor centre as well as on Bloc Projects’ and Creswell Crag’s social media. The week’s work will be supplemented with interviews and made into sound pieces / podcasts made available online.
The new knowledges, interdisciplinary exchange and partnerships will directly feed into an exhibition at Bloc Projects in 2023.
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, Birt’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. Her PhD is currently titled: 'Re-enchanting the World; a Feminist Sympoiesis' and experiments with collaborative processes of making-with, in search of a recuperative and reparative aesthetics.
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).