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posted: 27/03/23 12:46

In-tuition at the Plough, Great Torrington

Please join us for the preview of Still Moving's ‘In-tuition’, an exhibition of new work inspired by the Commons around Great Torrington.

The exhibition features sculptures, films, works on paper and found objects brought together to embrace magic as a space of intuition, connection and possibility. The title, ‘In-tuition’, describes the artists’ desire to learn, using sensitivity to nature and openness to the way that it might speak through us.

Preview: Tue 04 Apr 2023, 6:00pm

Exhibition: Tue 04 Apr 2023 - Sat 06 May 2023

The Plough Arts Center, Great Torrington, EX38 8HQ

Still Moving is an artists’ collective set up by Laura Hopes, Léonie Hampton and Martin Hampton


About the Exhibition

England is a land that has been subject to ‘capitalist sorcery’ for over 500 years; a psychic and bodily rift between people and the land resulting from the history of the Enclosures, the destruction of the Commons and the persecution of the Witches.

Great Torrington’s own history of the Commons dramatically inverts this story. An ‘area of waste called the Common’, was given to the people of Torrington in 1194. This was formalised in 1889, when the Common’s Act was presented in Parliament in ‘An Act for vesting Great Torrington in a body of Conservators’. These 365 acres of common land remain vehemently defended and remain central to the traditions and defiant identity of the town and community. The free access to the land they represent is vital to nurturing dignity, sovereignty and a magical, intuitive connection to nature.

Still Moving’s practice aims to explore these psychic and manmade boundaries, unearthing ancient and modern ways of being in the world, mysterious, open and interconnected. By paying attention to the material and spiritual aspects of land, we stand to learn from the reciprocal relationship between people, nature and commons.

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Film Screening and Preview event

4th April 2023

To coincide with the opening of In-tuition, the Plough Cinema will present a free series of films made by the artists collective Still Moving. Running on loop throughout the evening of Tuesday 4th April, the cinema will be open for ‘drop in’ viewings. The preview will involve a Q and A at 7pm-7.30pm where Still Moving will be joined by some of their recent collaborators. This includes Dance Lab Collective (represented by Kerry Chappell and Pam Woods, both of University of Exeter) who will offer a short movement insight into the Kinasphere film-making process to open discussion.

The films

Kinasphere - Three dancers move between three choreographed worlds, scientific, urban and rural. There, changing environmental vernaculars entangle with the human body reminding us that we are in relation to the worlds around us and together become active agents of movement and change. Made in Collaboration with Kerry Chapell, Lizzie Swinford and Pam Woods. Funded by The Eramus+programme of the European Union (3min)

Continuous and all around us - A filmic collage of sound and image questions the ecological and sonic impact of housing developments in Pinhoe on the fridges of expanding Exeter. Made in Response to the practice of Sound artist Emma Welton. Filmed as part of Clyst Valley Regional Park's Routes for Roots project funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.(6.54min)

Zenae - The film takes its cue from ancient literature on matriarchal migration into Britain, reflects upon our ecological inheritance, and draws out a series of clues found in Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, including a late medieval poem about Syrian sisters’ flight to the then unoccupied islands of Britain. The film contemplates the stories of suppressed female worlds, and asks us to consider what their presence might offer our future. Made by Islands of Women Collective (Rose Gibbs, Alice Albinia and Léonie Hampton) Music by Full of Noises. Funded by Arts Council England (16min)

Our Body is a Planet - A short film that challenges the way we think of ourselves as individual genetically prescribed entities, independent from our surroundings. Without fungi and bacteria our bodies and biosphere would not exist; we are in partnership with the microbial world. Music by Meredith Monk, made in collaboration with the MRC centre for Medical Mycology. Funded by Arts and Culture University of Exeter and Wellcome Trust. (11.09min)

Worlding - The film explores how we might enter into a different relationship with land, nature and place in order to address the climate crisis that confronts us all. Funded by Take A Part, National Lottery Heritage Fund (10.38min)

Lacuna - The Colour of Distance - The orb travels a landscape, distancing its occupant by insulating them from sound, heat, wind, while at the same time utterly controlling them. Commissioned by OSR Projects for The Weather Station II (4.55min)

Traum - The camera enters the derelict landscape of the Lee Valley, London, UK, the site of the 2012 Olympics. Cut to a complex score by Isambard Khroustaliov the film proposes a way of looking through the surface of banal things to find new and surprising territories (16min)

(Total screen time 70 min)

At other times these films are available through our website www.stillmoving.org/projects

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Still Moving live research space

4th April- 21st April 2023

Still Moving will create a live research space connected to the exhibition In-tuition which will reflect our conversations and encounters in and around Torrington. Please feel welcome to interact with the objects and let us know if you have suggestions or additional offerings.


Matter at Hand MG 7952
posted: 17/01/23 14:20

Matter at Hand at Foto Forum Gallery, Bolzano, Italy

Léonie Hampton of Still Moving's exhibition Matter at Hand opened in Foto Forum, Bolzano, Italy on 31 May 2022

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posted: 17/01/23 14:20

Language of Seeds at Thelma Hulbert Gallery, Honiton

Léonie Hampton, A Language of Seeds,

14 January 2023 to 4 March 2023
A Language of Seeds is a series of photographs celebrating the artist Léonie Hampton's vegetable garden, family and friends responding to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery (RAMM)’s botany collection.

https://www.thelmahulbert.com/...

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posted: 17/01/23 14:18

ZENAE premieres at Tate St Ives

Zenae is a film made by in collaboration between Rose Gibbs, Alice Albinia and Léonie Hampton as the Islands of Women collective.
With Music by Full of Noises.

It takes its cue from ancient literature on matriarchal migration into Britain, reflects upon our ecological inheritance, and draws out the relationship between the work women traditionally do, caring for others, and the work of caring for the earth. It is inspired by a series of clues found in Greek, Roman, and medieval texts, including a late medieval poem about some Syrian sisters’ flight to the then unoccupied islands of Britain. The film contemplates the losses that rising sea-levels will bring, and through a focus on the natural world, seeks to find a ways of looking that promotes and protects a more nurturing approach to the land and our bodies.

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posted: 17/01/23 14:15

Pharmakon

Pharmakon, a new bronze sculpture for the MRC Centre for Medical Mycology by Still Moving at the University of Exeter was unveiled on 4th June 2022

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posted: 27/09/21 14:37

NO NEW WORLDS @ COP26

We are crowdfunding to take the NO NEW WORLDS sculpture to COP26 in Glasgow in November and need your help to make it happen

https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/...

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posted: 20/05/21 16:52

New Solo Exhibition by Léonie Hampton opens at RAMM Museum 18th May- 5th September 2021

Commissioned to complement the touring exhibition Seedscapes: Future Proofing Nature, Léonie Hampton’s body of work engages directly with the ecological emergency through a series of photographs that celebrate her vegetable garden, her family and friends, and the seeds in the collections at RAMM, Exeter. The exhibition is runs from 18 May to 5 September 2021. See here for more information.

Melinda and steph
posted: 24/11/20 10:15

Event: Indigenous Artists Panel

Still/Moving and Survival International in partnership with Dr Stephanie Pratt and Melinda Schwakhofer, invite the artists Cannupa Hanska Luger, Candessa Tehee, Ian Kuali’i and Jules Koostachin to discuss the complexities of the 400 year Mayflower history and their individual artist practices, in a panel chaired by art historian Dr Stephanie Pratt.

When: Tuesday 1 December 2020 At: 16:30 – 18.00GMT

Free Eventbrite link: CLICK HERE

During the month of November we have created multiple spaces for indigenous voices to be AMPLIFIED. Please submit a short quote responding to: ‘Tell us what the history of the Mayflower means to you.’ By following the links below or emailing us directly on amplify@stillmoving.org these will be added to the NO NEW WORLDS tags which are written and tied to the sculpture in Plymouth UK, and posted through social media: /StillMovingCIC & @StillMovingCIC

Through the Survival International Map: https://www.survivalinternational.org/campaigns/mayflowerskill

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posted: 11/11/20 17:43

Still Moving IN CONVERSATION: Dr Stephanie Pratt and Survival International this FRIDAY

Marial Quezada from Survival International, Sam Maltais, (Aquinnah Wampanoag), Dr Stephanie Pratt (Dakota) and Still/Moving will discuss the current campaign, #Mayflowers Kill. This conversation will introduce November’s Native American Heritage Month, and reflect on the place of NO NEW WORLDS and other artworks within commemorative programmes such as Plymouth UK’s Mayflower 400 Commemorations.

When: Friday 13 November 2020 At: 16:30 – 17:30 GMT

Free Eventbrite link:https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/stillmoving-in-conversation-dr-stephanie-pratt-survival-international-tickets-125853911437


Speedwell Still Moving 6586
posted: 12/10/20 11:33

Speedwell 'Starter Tower' Talks Program

Throughout the duration of Speedwell's installation on Mount Batten Breakwater a series of 'in conversations' will be held between Still/Moving and invited speakers to discuss some of the themes raised by the project. The talks will be live-streamed online. Click here for a full list

Next up: Still/Moving IN CONVERSATION: 'Connections' with Marianne Brown 16.10.2020 @ 13.00

HOLD ME BESIDE YOU DUTTONS workded MG 9915
posted: 25/09/20 11:28

' hold me beside you ' A Site Specific Installation at Plymouth Art Weekender, 24 -27 September 2020

hold me beside you is a unique installation by Still/Moving for this year's Plymouth Art Weekender: 24 -27 September 2020.

The 2-metre distanced illuminated words respond to the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic. The site-specific installation explores the tension of proximity and risk in the physical structure of the Plymouth Citadel’s former gunpowder store. Originally created for The Box's 'State of Emergency' micro commission the words have been reconfigured to magnify our state of isolation and our dependence: our need to keep distanced, coupled with our longing for interconnectedness, revealing a shared vulnerability in the face of the unknown workings of the virus.


The work hangs on the north wall of Duttons Cafe, located above Elphinstone carpark which is one of the best places to see Still/Moving's other project Speedwell, on the Mount Batten Breakwater.

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posted: 07/09/20 15:38

Speedwell is Live!

Speedwell is exploring the idea of 'no new worlds'.

For the settlers on the Mayflower who felt they were sailing to a new world, it was a world that had been inhabited for many thousands of years by indigenous peoples who were greatly impacted by the arrival of the Mayflower and subsequent ships that followed.

We wanted to challenge that idea and to uncover previously overlooked stories of the Mayflower sailing but also to remind people that we only have this world and we need to look after it.

Come and add your voice to the structure either by filling in a tag with one of our volunteers or by adding your voice on our text and audio link

Speedwell's Poignant Message - Plymouth Herald

Re-Informed on the Mayflower 400 website.

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posted: 29/08/20 08:30

Speedwell, A Mayflower 400 Commission to Open on 4th September 2020

Speedwell, a large scale light installation funded by Plymouth Culture and the Arts Council, will open on Plymouth's Mount Batten Breakwater at dusk on 4th September 2020. Currently under construction it can be clearly seen growing on the horizon from the Hoe and the Barbican. See Speedwell Project page for more info.

Still Moving Rogers Wholesale 0200
posted: 19/08/20 11:30

'touch' by Still Moving, "A State of Emergency Commission" by The Box, Plymouth's new Museum

Still Moving have been awarded a State of Emergency Commission by The Box, Plymouth's new museum, art gallery and cultural centre. The project titled 'touch' explores the two metre distance of safety forced under the pandemic regulations, a distance which paradoxically shows care through remoteness while enforcing isolation, yet in cases of coercion, hides from view those subject to a cruelty of touch.

The work explores these spaces, navigating from the distance of the horizon to the proximity of the home; the local. Moving through levels of intimacy and forms of touch from the caress of a lover, the lifting of a child to sharing a companionable proximity, the phrases ‘HOLD ME’, ‘TOUCH ME’, ‘BESIDE ME’ will be created using a low voltage LED technology.

The Box will open to the general public on Tuesday 29 September


https://www.theboxplymouth.com/state-of-emergency-micro-commissions/still-moving

Leonie and Kestor cropped
posted: 19/08/20 00:21

Léonie Hampton commissioned to create new work in response to seeds in Exeter Museum, RAMM’s collection

Still/Moving's co-founder Leonie Hampton new commission from RAMM, will explore the Exeter museum’s collection of seeds and herbarium sheets in dialogue with her own photographs of seed experiments, the garden and family. Creating a ‘story about love, growth, family and the archaic wisdom of plants’ the new artwork will place Hampton’s photographs of living and growing plants alongside that of the collected, dried seeds in the museum.

See: RAMM Museum for more info

Text

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Ursula K. Le Guin

It is the story that makes the difference.

In the temperate and tropical regions where it appears that hominids evolved into human beings, the principal food of the species was vegetable. Sixty-five to eighty percent of what human beings ate in those regions in Paleolithic, Neolithic, and prehistoric times was gathered; only in the extreme Arctic was meat the staple food. The mammoth hunters spectacularly occupy the cave wall and the mind, but what we actually did to stay alive and fat was gather seeds, roots, sprouts, shoots, leaves, nuts, berries, fruits, and grains, adding bugs and mollusks and netting or snaring birds, fish, rats, rabbits, and other tuskless small fry to up the protein. And we didn't even work hard at it-- much less hard than peasants slaving in somebody else's field after agriculture was invented, much less hard than paid workers since civilization was invented. The average prehistoric person could make a nice living in about a fifteen-hour work week.

Fifteen hours a week for subsistence leaves a lot of time for other things. So much time that maybe the restless ones who didn't have a baby around to enliven their life, or skill in making or cooking or singing, or very interesting thoughts to think, decided to slope off and hunt mammoths. The skillful hunters then would come staggering back with a load of meat, a lot of ivory, and a story. It wasn't the meat that made the difference. It was the story.

It is hard to tell a really gripping tale of how I wrested a wild-oat seed from its husk, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then another, and then I scratched my gnat bites, and Ool said something funny, and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while, and then I found another patch of oats.... No, it does not compare, it cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank white Oob, impaled on one huge sweeping tusk, writhed screaming, and blood spouted everywhere in crimson torrents, and Boob was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him as I shot my unerring arrow straight through eye to brain.

That story not only has Action, it has a Hero. Heroes are powerful. Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero. But it isn't their story. It's his. When she was planning the book that ended up as Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf wrote a heading in her notebook, "Glossary"; she had thought of reinventing English according to a new plan, in order to tell a different story. One of the entries in this glossary is heroism, defined as "botulism." And hero, in Woolf's dictionary, is "bottle." The hero as bottle, a stringent reevaluation. I now propose the bottle as hero.

Not just the bottle of gin or wine, but bottle in its older sense of container in general, a thing that holds something else.

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you--even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient .... Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier.

So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don't know. I don't even care.

I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news.

And yet old. Before-once you think about it, surely long before-the weapon, a late, luxurious, superfluous tool; long before the useful knife and ax; right along with the indispensable whacker, grinder, and digger- for what's the use of digging up a lot of potatoes if you have nothing to lug ones you can't eat home in-with or before the tool that forces energy outward, we made the tool that brings energy home. It makes sense to me. I am an adherent of what Fisher calls the Carrier Bag Theory of human evolution.

This theory not only explains large areas of theoretical obscurity and avoids large areas of theoretical nonsense (inhabited largely by tigers, foxes, other highly territorial mammals); it also grounds me, personally, in human culture in a way I never felt grounded before. So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had, or wanted, any particular share in it. ("What Freud mistook for her lack of civilization is woman's lack of loyalty to civilization," Lillian Smith observed.) The society, the civilization they were talking about, these theoreticians, was evidently theirs; they owned it, they liked it; they were human, fully human, bashing, sticking, thrusting, killing. Wanting to be human too, I sought for evidence that I was; but if that's what it took, to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human being, or not human at all.

That's right, they said. What you are is a woman. Possibly not human at all, certainly defective. Now be quiet while we go on telling the Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero.

Go on, say I, wandering off towards the wild oats, with Oo Oo in the sling and little Oom carrying the basket. You just go on telling how the mammoth fell on Boob and how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man.

If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it's useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again--if to do that is human, if that's what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely, gladly, for the first time.

Not, let it be said at once, an unaggressive or uncombative human being. I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don't, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It's just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories.

It is the story that makes the difference. It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero. The wonderful, poisonous story of Botulism. The killer story.

It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

It's unfamiliar, it doesn't come easily, thoughtlessly to the lips as the killer story does; but still, "untold" was an exaggeration. People have been telling the life story for ages, in all sorts of words and ways. Myths of creation and transformation, trickster stories, folktales, jokes, novels...

The novel is a fundamentally unheroic kind of story. Of course the Hero has frequently taken it over, that being his imperial nature and uncontrollable impulse, to take everything over and run it while making stern decrees and laws to control his uncontrollable impulse to kill it. So the Hero has decreed through his mouthpieces the Lawgivers, first, that the proper shape of the narrative is that of the arrow or spear, starting here and going straight there and THOK! hitting its mark (which drops dead); second, that the central concern of narrative, including the novel, is conflict; and third, that the story isn't any good if he isn't in it.

I differ with all of this. I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterized either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.

Finally, it's clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.

That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them.

So, when I came to write science-fiction novels, I came lugging this great heavy sack of stuff, my carrier bag full of wimps and klutzes, and tiny grains of things smaller than a mustard seed, and intricately woven nets which when laboriously unknotted are seen to contain one blue pebble, an imperturbably functioning chronometer telling the time on another world, and a mouse's skull; full of beginnings without ends, of initiations, of losses, of transformations and translations, and far more tricks than conflicts, far fewer triumphs than snares and delusions; full of space ships that get stuck, missions that fail, and people who don't understand. I said it was hard to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn't say it was impossible. Who ever said writing a novel was easy?

If science fiction is the mythology of modern technology, then its myth is tragic. "Technology," or "modern science" (using the words as they are usually used, in an unexamined shorthand standing for the "hard" sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now).

If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's- (killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool's joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn't over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Atlantic Press, 1989)