Cooler mornings gives everything some relief.

kate

The Notice Board – Sera Waters

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EXHIBITION 25                                                           15 Aug – 15 Sept 2021
Sera Waters
Lives: Beulah Park. South Australia
Title: Familiar Activism: Truth-Telling

The Notice Board is proud to share Australian artist Sera Waters’ work. In the mid 1800s Sera’s ancestors migrated from Lincolnshire to South Australia where they spread across Kaurna, Bunganditj, Nukunu, Adnyamathanha and Ngarrindjeri Country. Along with welcoming her and her work back to Lincolnshire the Notice Board wanted to invite consideration on the question about what or who is free?
Sera says: My ancestors propogated roots in waterholes, down mine shafts, upon woolly backed sheep, in the crevices between stacked bricks from which they made homes, and in the bitumen of highways. They flourished and my art reckons with the knots from these inherited settler colonial pasts and the resulting ecological damage. But now it’s time to reckon with and redirect intergenerational colonial mindsets which have normalised colonising acts – family traditions like gardening, mining, farming, imported to a land where they do not always fit.
These artworks are acts of truth-telling; a flag exposing the land grab of unceded Aboriginal country and a set of artifacts revealing the dry that comes from draining for pastoralism. Today in Australia towering cabbage palms indicate some of the earliest colonial homesteads. They were planted to send out a visual signal of claiming land, declaring far and wide “this is MINE”.
Water exits the drought stricken land of Australia at a quickening pace. Once, before rocks and trees were removed en masse and drains were cut to make land suitable for pastoralism, chains of ponds and thin creeks allowed water to slowly trickle toward the sea. Now trickles have become streams, rivers, a mass exodus, a road across dry land.
These artworks are part of a larger project where I’m grappling with how to navigate a future of growing ecological disasters. I am asking what art can pragmatically contribute to going forward care-fully?
Going forward, for me, equates to looking back to past ancestral traditions from slower pre-industrial eras. I am scouring archives and artifacts and locating intergenerational knowledge in domestic textile traditions: evidence of how to repurpose, repair and preserve; traditions of comforting with soft furnishings and warm protective clothing; of how knowledge-filled stories and narratives of hope have been displayed to propel us on or enable us to learn from the past; how we remember and tell-truths to serve justice and social equality and shift trajectories; how we slow down bodily to fall in rhythm with the ancient roots and seasonal pulses around us to live more mindfully and calmly.
This project does not deny advancing technologies, we live in different circumstances to our ancestors and not all traditions are beneficial to reinstate, yet examining traditions critical to sustaining humans humbly for thousands of years (until disrupted in the last few hundred) revives knowledge worth preserving.

Sera Waters embroideries and hand-crafted sculptures dwell within the gaps of history to examine Australian settler-colonial home-making patterns, especially ‘genealogical ghostscapes’. More recently Waters has been exploring how textile traditions can be restored to navigate a threatened future. www.serawaters.com.au 

Instagram: @serawaters

The Notice Board is a contemporary art project showcasing the work of international artists. Featuring month-long exhibitions curated to the theme: The Lands of the Free? The project connects audiences to artists work, whilst offering artists unusual exhibition spaces in the form of a Notice Board and Flagpole.   

The Notice Board – Madhu Manipatruni

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This months exhibition [July 15- Aug 15th] is titled: Hands of Otherness and features Madhu Manipatruni work. She is showing a scaled photo of a quilted panel and a hand painted flag.

Madhu says: Kantha is embroidery quilting usually made to reuse, repurpose cloth. Kantha is rooted in India and created by women as a communal activity. Sheesha work, the embedding of mirrors, is traditional in Indian embroidery too. In this instance, the cloth [of both the flag and stitched piece], unbleached handloom cotton arrived from India. This also signifies my journey. Having lost my father recently, I started to sew, to self soothe and recover from the loss. This handloom cloth is of significance within our family and traditions.

The handprint relates to creating a home and positive new beginnings. It also references the tribal art made by women in India; they handprint on houses, temples and objects to ensure well-being of family and their belongings. Here the hand prints signify, being here and now, making a new home in England. The patterned embroidery on the hands alludes to henna patterns. Henna/Mehandi is a ceremonial design made on hands of brides in South Asian cultures. On the quilt these depict the stories of women, how they or their mothers arrived in the UK as partners of the economic migrants. They stand for the shared experiences of loss, pain, loneliness and invisibility. These experiences are inherited, passed down the generations through storytelling. Here they are lines, colours and stitches.

The Notice Board curates its exhibitions to a theme: The Lands of the Free? For this show we may wonder if this relates to Madhu’s act of stitching to cope or the ambitions of South Asian citizens during the act of migration? It may also reference the spaces created when women gather to share and support one another or maybe it’s quilt itself that enables us to imagine cultures and geographies different to our own? Maybe it’s all of them and now The Notice Board invites you to decide for yourself.        

The Notice Board – OSR Projects/Tim Mills

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Alone with Everybody [15 June- 15 July]. This month’s collaboration is with OSR Projects. Who, like The Notice Board, have a specific mission to support artists and communities using arts based activities. Their recent 3 day ‘Od Art Festival’ brought exhibitions, performances, film and workshops by local and international artists to not-so-sleepy Somerset. The Notice Board extends this happily, acting as an outpost, showcasing an Od Arts Festival inspired flag and art work by Tim
Mills who was part of the larger festival.

The Od Art Festival took ‘Alone with Everybody’ as a guiding theme and explored loneliness – what it is, how we experience it, where it comes from, and how it might be addressed. The Notice Board presents one image from Tim Mills series of portraits, Terminal. A series of these were presented across 12 locations during Od Arts Festival. The portraits were produced using the website Chat Roulette, a social network connecting strangers around the world through their webcams. Lone figures were captured on camera just before leaving the chat.
Tim Mills is a visual artist and curator who uses photography and re-appropriated archive material
as a means of intervention www.timothymills.co.uk
OSR Projects connects people through artist-led activity, exploring new ways to see, hear, feel and think – from their base in rural Somerset. www.osrprojects.co.uk

The Notice Board – Kevin Boardman and Kate Genever

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Kevin Boardman, a Manchester based artist, and I are showing a collaborative work at The Notice Board between May 15 and June 15th. Over the last year we have taken it in turns to work on a single sheet of A1 white paper – posting it, back and forth, in the same brown envelope 12 times. The exhibition temporarily halts the process and reveals the works current combined and woven state. When the show ends we will continue. We have never met or spoken and are in many ways strangers, yet our pen-pal like friendship has brought us into a conversation, which has become richer over time. The flag features work by both of us sewn together.

The Notice Board – Mark Richards and Kate Genever

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Mark Richards and Kate Genever
Title: The Land of the Free

The Notice Board believes that art is not just useful as a way of coping but as a place to speak our truths. However, some of these truths have been and often still are controlled by historians, curators, politicians, leaving us with normative narratives and prohibitive policies that reflect the so called ‘mainstream’ and their values. But The Notice Board was, in part, imagined as a challenge to them and this. It’s a place where people and ideas previously excluded, marginalised or overlooked are given voice. The Notice Board opens a window onto a world that has always existed – a world we’ve been led to believe wasn’t there or true. One that’s been written out and supressed, sometimes glimpsed, but mostly kept at the edges or in the shadows. But Mark and Kate’s work tells of this free land – an open, fluid and accepting place which The Notice Board is proud to pull back the curtain on and celebrate.

Mark and Kate said: It started last summer between lockdown 1 and 2. We decided to send postcards to one another. But not any postcards- rather ones that featured portraits or figures and that we had adapted. We decided to use collage, giving ourselves permission to play without worry and to make without expectation. Collage allows you to work quickly, be inventive and invite in chance. Ideas bubble up – it lets your brain wander and gives your subconscious room to reveal the things that matter and as a direct response to the imagery already presented.

When we started we didn’t know where we’d end up or what might emerge. But given everything – our lives, histories, experiences – we maybe could have guessed. Working on postcards featuring historic artworks, our adaptions have invariably challenged the traditional narratives of figurative representation and art history.

Identity, Gaze, Shame, Muse, Androgyny, Commonality, Queer, Drag, Transgression, Fluidity, Defiance, Resistance, Joy, Love, Duality, Disclosure, Conversation, History, Masks, Disguises, Performance, Power, Seeing, Seen, Equality, Now, Forever, Us – seem important words as we invite you into the conversation to see what you see.

The Notice Board – Ralph McGaul.

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Ralph McGaul.
Title: Land of the Free

The Notice Board is very happy to be sharing these print and flag works by Ralph McGaul. His exhibition features two sets of work – changed half way through. Ralph, like The Notice Board, believes in feeling, making and letting the work do the talking. So when invited to write something to accompany his work his said:
Leave the phone, don the overalls, step into the painting shed and sail off to the land of the free…..
Ralph’s work includes painting and printmaking, mosaics, collages and woodwork. His approach to making art is intuitive and visceral with the goal of producing something that is immediate and visually engaging, without the need for wordy explanations. Adopting various different media helps him maintain interest and inventiveness which is key to the work’s vitality.                                                

 ralphmcgaul.co.uk

The Notice Board – SA Artists for Climate Action.

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SA Artists for Climate Action. Based: Kaurna Country, South Australia
Title:#climatebadges

The Notice Board is a piece of activism both practically and conceptually. Forming around the ideas of reciprocity and mutual aid, which are mirrored in this month’s work by an artist collective from Australia. SA Artists for Climate Action each have their own artistic careers and trajectories, but act together in response to the inaction shown by leaders who refuse to embrace renewable energy and put the care of our ecologies foremost. One of their actions is #climatebadges, which aims to bypass the seeming inability to communicate with leaders bent on economic growth and instead offer encouragement to those fighting for our planet to keep going in the knowledge they have continued support. It’s an interesting approach that The Notice Board is proud to platform while also reinforcing ‘positive reinforcement’ as a change agent.
SA Artists for Climate Action say:
This is a call to action.
As artists we declare a climate emergency. Let’s act as individuals together into the future. It has been shown that contacting our leaders, our decision makers, in a targeted way, directly, personally, and individually, is the most effective strategy to create and continue change. This project is about encouraging those that are part of this change.
We invite you to make a climate badge that addresses your climate emergency concerns. Send this to your politician/leader/local member/decision maker/researcher/board member/influential person of choice with an explanatory note (there’s a template at #climatebadges). Do this to propel their good work further, to give encouragement to keep going, or to spur someone into action who can do more.
Work individually or gather your friends, run a badge-making session in your home, studio or your place of work, take this project wherever you can. Share this call to action far and wide. Your art voice is valuable.
Post your badge and note to your leader of choice. Share your badge and note on Instagram using #climatebadges and tag your selected badge recipient where possible. Follow this hashtag to see other contributions. And thank you for taking action. Collective action has power. 

SincerelySA Artists for Climate Action