Trail Mix[ED] began as a break from my PhD and went on to become an integral part of my research and practice as an artist and a human in the world.
The most recent commissions were made by Arts & Culture Exeter surrounding my ongoing project with Trelowarren.
Composed upon the foundation of a solitary dawn walk taken as Bram’s daily exercise allowance during the current Covid-19 lockdown, with this recording functioning as the structural framework for an exploration of the research towards Transecting the Lizard: Field Station. Each walk will also generate new photographic imagery which will accompany the audio podcasts on Arts & Culture website. Each show will be produced between dawn and dusk of a given day. The unique production style of Trail Mix[ED] including found sound, field recording, ambient music, archive footage, spoken word and multilayered worlds will be employed throughout the series.
Field Station is a proposal being developed by Dr. Bram Arnold with the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter. It aims to be a mobile field laboratory developing a new space for transdisciplinary research between and amongst the arts and sciences live in the field. A mobile field vehicle equipped with the necessary equipment to undertake baseline eco-logical surveys using both arts and scientific modes of thinking, over time blending and creating new forms of understanding that blur the disciplinary lines between ecology, art and place. This trilogy of shows operate as part of the research and development stage of the proposal.
- Following Professor Caitlin Desilvey’s presentation of the film Drop City at CAST studios in Helston in February 2020 Caitlin and I discussed a book we had both seen in a second hand shop in Falmouth. The book is an exhibition catalogue from an exhibition called Hippie Modernism that took place at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis in 2016. The exhibition catalogued the particular cultural moment that Drop City emerged out of, the late 60’s early 70’s period of experimentalism, exploring alternative ways of being and doing acts of civilization. This book and the ideas of Ant Farm, an arts collective exploring mobile forms of creative production will be examined here as a critical reference point for the development of Field Station.
- Dr Bram Arnold has recently been commissioned by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk to develop a way of creatively enabling the attribution of non-instrumental value to the biodiversity of our ecosystems. He has also recently stood in a field with the community action group Wildlife Groundswell on the Lizard with whom he completed a Hedgerow Importance Test. This iteration of Trail Mix[ED] will examine the basis of the rustle in the hedgerow, and see what can be found there, underneath the serpentine and the Dog Mercury, the enclosures act, the encroachment of three cornered leek and a foraged spring vinegar, amidst asking: Just what is the value of a hedgerow and how can citizen science lead us there?; Just what is the value of biodiversity and how can we hold onto that in these ecologically fragmenting times?
- The third episode in the series will take as its root the questions posited by Professor Jem Bendell’s virally distributed paper Deep Adaptation and use them to examine the development of forms of citizen art practice that Dr Arnold will be developing with a core team of arts practitioners and scientists from the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter. Bendell’s paper asks us to consider what we can relinquish, what we can restore and what can we make resilient in these times of ecological collapse. One of the aims of Field Station is to create a mobile educational tool from which people can learn to teach others about methods from the arts and sciences in any given field, a mobile, self-sufficient form of community practice, an ecological art form, an ecological community, an ecological examination of all things re-: re-wilding, re-linquished, re-stored, re-silient, re-purposed, re-learned, re-visited.