Notice Board

Of the photograph of ‘Hercules and Antaeus’ Jeremy Rye says: Our power lies in our connection to the land. It’s a universal truth that we have ignored. This universal truth is held within the stories and the legends of the land. These oracle traditions are the gifts of previous generations, born of wisdom and our relationship to the land. I propose if we know these stories better we might do better. One such story is the myth of Hercules and Antaeus. Which teaches us the importance of a strong and loving connection to the land and all who dwell on, beneath or above it.
The legend of Hercules and Antaeus features heavily in landscapes design with many famous sculptors embracing its symbolism. Antaeus was the son of Gaia (mother earth), who empowered him with all the positive power that the landscape has so he was invincible and the epitome of conscious connection to the land. He chose however to use this gifted power for destruction, conflict and warfare. He used the power for self-glory and for his own needs without regard to others.
Hercules, as part of his twelve labours, had to collect the golden apple of Hesperides. To get to the garden where the apples dwelt he had to get past Antaeus who needed to show his prowess against such a powerful hero. He would have over powered Hercules but for the fact that Hercules did not use his power and might but his heart. In moving to his heart he understood where the source of Antaeus power was. Instead of trying to meet power with power and force with force, Hercules recognised that Antaeus power lay in his connection to the earth. Once removed from this he would became powerless. By lifting him off the earth and holding him aloft he was weak and showed he could be defeated.
My image is of a sculpture which was created for Rousham landscape garden near Bicester. Presently it sits within a temple at the final stages of the landscape walk, just before you head into the area known as Paradise – a place where our connection to the divine is intended to be the most pronounced. The sculpture in its current state, taken back by the elements, invokes the current environmental crisis and the way we emulate Antaeus. We have been gifted this huge power, yet we have chosen to wield it for destruction, for selfish means rather than creation.

Jeremy is a multidisciplinary designer who focuses on historic, sustainable and wilding landscapes. He has 16 years of professional experience working with a variety of private and commercial clients in UK and Europe. His schemes have won awards including, the London Planning Award 2016, Best New Public Space. He was shortlisted for the World Architecture Festival 2021 award. Throughout his career Jeremy has spoken at events with an aim to increase people’s understanding of the importance landscapes play in our lives. He has worked for Low Carbon Design Institute, London Landscape, Gatekeeper Trust, St. Ethelburga’s Peace and Reconciliation Centre and Rudolf Steiner House. IG: @jeremy_rye

James Aldridge for his exhibition shares a new flag called Still a Badger Boy and fills the board with Alphabet.

Still a Badger Boy blends a photograph of James’s face with a drawing of a badger. The drawing developed out of a residency at the Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking in Gloucestershire, where James explored his family’s links to the Cotswold hills. The title references stories James’s Dad told him of his childhood, when badgers would visit their garden from the woods behind, to knock over the dustbin and lick out James’s baby food jars.
Alphabet stitches together drawings and photographs of animal tracks, found by James on walks in Wiltshire, and during a residency with Spud in the New Forest, a written language left behind, to be discovered in the mud.

James Aldridge is a visual artist, based in Wiltshire, UK. James graduated in 1996 in Fine Art (Sculpture) from UCA. His practice uses walking, collecting and making, to research the value of embodied experiences of places, and the overlapping experiences of humans and other animals. He has a particular interest in Queer and Neurodivergent perspectives on ecosystems, and the opportunities these provide us to see beyond division and categorisation.

www.jamesadlridge-artist.co.uk and www.queerriver.com @JamesAldridgeArt

‘The Screen Edges’ show by www.virtualecologies.com /Virtual Ecologies will change five times over the coming month. Each display offeresa selection of work this Arts Council England funded intergenerational learning project, which aims to unlock memories of nature, and local ecological knowledge through creative response workshops, hands-on outdoor gatherings, skills development opportunities, mini-festivals, guided walks and more with artist-educators and natural scientists, for people of all ages across East Yorkshire.  www.virtualecologies.com

Virtual Ecologies say: “Almost – nearly relationships between living beings and an environment. The project is working towards a digital archive of responses – we are in a sense working towards a screen. We thought about The Notice Board as a screen. The idea of a screen allows us to show an ecology of outcomes. Many of these are fragments – notes from a conversation – quick drawings from descriptions – memories that are fuzzy around the edges. The process of fragmentation allows more edges to connect with. We set up spaces for memories to be shared – allowing things to re-emerge and strengthen in re-telling to someone else. They are unfinished thoughts that gently step towards a stronger connection with the ground beneath our feet.”

Freeing the world beneath our feet is a by farmer and scientist Liz Genever.
Liz says: There is a complex food web that thrives below the soil. These items [used in workshops] represent some of the micro-organisms present – bacteria, nematodes and protozoa.
This food web is responsible for recycling nutrients by breaking down dead plants and animals, and by eating other micro-organisms. They also managing water levels in soils by storing it in their bodies and helping to improve soil structure so water can move down the profile. They also help to lock carbon down deep into the soil, which would reduce the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. They feed insects and other invertebrates that feed the birds and drive biodiversity.
The challenge is that we are not allowing them to do their jobs as we are disrupting their network, and using chemical fertilisers and sprays within farming that supresses their populations. We need to make sure that we are feeding them a variety of feeds – lots of healthy, diverse plants – and making sure that over the winter there is green cover. Some of them have special nutritional requirements, so we also need to make sure that they are well fed and happy.
If we allow them to do their job, we need to add fewer inputs into farming and we have more nutrient dense food as they help the plants pull in more nutrients. This means healthy soil leads to healthier food and people.

Thanks to Nicole Masters (Integrity Soils) for the inspiration

Liz Genever is a mixed farmer from south Lincolnshire and a consultant for other farmers. She works with farmers who want to challenge their current practices, particularly on grass and forage utilisation. She is one of the founders of Carbon Calling CIC, which has the aim of building a community of farmers who support and learn from one another to make their farm and themselves healthier and happier. She has an Australian Cattle Dog called Scout, who accompanies her most places. @lizgenever

Exhibition 66 is Marek Tobolewski with Sym out of Balance – a new collage. Marek says: “Deconstructed and fragile reconstruction of an original German 1980’s (84x59cm) film promo poster of Koyaanisqatsi. My red Sym structure is purposely ‘out of symmetry’ – imperfect, as we are. Utilising the distinctive red letter font of the film title KOYAANISQATSI as building components for the linear ‘Sym’ structure was a struggle. The bold angular text has no curves, complete opposite to the parameters of my interconnected arcs that I would usually work in to produce flowing organic lines in symmetry, to create a balance in the movement. Part of the collage process is inspired by the German typography collagist Thomas Schneider.  The area proportions of the original poster was only 10% larger than the given area of the noticeboard. So there was rigour in the process with very little room for error, limited ‘waste’ in the reconstruction, I had to recycle well over 90% of its surface. A constructed ‘seed’ hovering over a graphic equaliser, city skyline … not quite … an 80’s computer game avatar in a matrix landscape, no … it has no given meaning, it exists not to be understood but to be experienced, it is a form out of balance. It reflects notions and the context of the themes in the film and its poster.“

Koyaanisqatsi. Life Out of Balance. 1982. A collaged non-narrative seminal film, directed by Godfrey Reggio with music by Phillip Glass. My first experience of this film was as a young art student at Brighton Poly, this extraordinary film has stayed with me for over 40 years. It became an instant favourite that I have seen dozens of times. A haunting prophecy of what was / is happening back then, today and tomorrow. Seven years in the making, the stunning imagery spliced together echoes a human life out of balance, with nature and technology taking over. The musical score composed by Phillip Glass is at times sparse, reflecting beautiful slow motion capture imagery and frenzied during time lapse sections of humans as machines in cogs. If you have not yet seen this film, it’s an experience, I recommend a big screen and good sound system. 

Godfrey Reggio film NOTES: Ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language), n.
1. Crazy life. 
2. Life in turmoil. 
3. Life disintegrating. 
4. Life out of balance. 
5. A state of life that calls for another way of living.
The title is a Hopi Indian word meaning “life out of balance.” The film is an apocalyptic vision of the collision of two different worlds — urban life and technology versus the environment. 
Koyaanisqatsi attempts to reveal the beauty of the beast! We usually perceive our world, our way of living, as beautiful because there is nothing else to perceive. If one lives in this world, the globalized world of high technology, all one can see is one layer of commodity piled upon another. In our world the “original” is the proliferation of the standardized. Copies are copies of copies. 
There seems to be no ability to see beyond, to see that we have encased ourselves in an artificial environment that has remarkably replaced the original, nature itself. We do not live with nature any longer; we live above it, off of it as it were. Nature has become the resource to keep this artificial or new nature alive.
Koyaanisqatsi is not so much about something, nor does it have a specific meaning or value. Koyaanisqatsi is, after all, an animated object, an object in moving time, the meaning of which is up to the viewer. Art has no intrinsic meaning. This is its power, its mystery, and hence, its attraction. Art is free. It stimulates the viewer to insert their own meaning, their own value. 
The film’s role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter. The encounter is my interest, not the meaning. If meaning is the point, then propaganda and advertising is the form. So in the sense of art, the meaning of Koyaanisqatsi is whatever you wish to make of it. This is its power.

Marek Tobolewski was born Hertfordshire UK in 1964 and now lives and works in Nottingham. He is a resident artist at Primary studios. He holds a BA (Hons) in Painting from Brighton Polytechnic. He was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Award and has exhibited widely. His work is held in private, corporate and permanent public collections in UK & USA. @marektob

Low Points by Martha Cattell features drawing and handsewn flag.

Martha is an artist, researcher and film programmer, whose work largely explores ecologically haunted places.
“You can probably answer the question, what is the highest point in Britain? Probably a number of the highest points in fact. But a question you probably are unable to answer, is what is the lowest point in Britain? Answer: Holme, Cambridgeshire (pronounced home) a small Fenland village where I grew up, just down the road from this exhibition.
The lowest point specifically is believed to be marked by two iron posts (The Holme Fen Posts) which stand just outside the village. These posts came about to mark shrinkage, after a group of male landowners drained Whittlesea Mere in 1848, for agricultural land. The posts not only mark the lowest point in Britain, but highlight a landscape that has been altered and contained for hundreds of years.
This work is part of a continued exploration of what it means to live in/visit the lowest point in Britain, mentally and physically and a landscape haunted by alterations for profit and revertion as water levels rise. The drawings are taken from an upcoming zine and the flag specifically is responding to the flag that was flown after the drainage of Whittlesea Mere which stated: ‘See proudly floats our flag on high, O’er wastes by history renowned. All Hail! The Mere at length is dry. Success had perseverance crowned.”

Kate says: This poster is inspired by Vaclav Havel – the Czechoslovakian dissident who became Czechs first prime minster after the fall of the Communist regime – and writings by American historian Timothy Synder.

Havel proposed in his 1985 essay ‘The Power of the Powerless’ that the oppressed always contain “within themselves the power to remedy their own powerlessness…”  He argued that by an individual “living in truth” in their daily life they automatically differentiated themselves from the officially mandated culture; since power is only effective inasmuch as citizens are willing to submit to it.
It seems timely to revisit Havel’s desire for an “existential revolution – new experience of being, a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility, a newfound inner relationship to other people and to the human community”.
Synder, in more recent times, supports Havel by stating “Too many of us look at freedom as the absence of state power: we think we’re free if we can do and say as we please. But true freedom isn’t so much freedom from, as freedom to – the freedom to thrive, to take risks for futures we choose by working together. Freedom is the value that makes all other values possible”.

Kate set up the notice board in 2017 in the wake of Brexit with the only skills she has – art and ideas.

The Notice Board is showing Caitlin’s textile pieces: We for a time must part. 2024, in support of her “grief – as an expression of love” investigation. Caitlin’s work explores how making and materials compliment and support loss. The Notice Board is interested in how the space of making, at difficult times, can become a Land of the free.
Caitlin says: I am interested in interrogating relationships to grief within a complex consumerist society. Influenced by funerary art and tradition from the Victorian era I reference a period when death and grief were expressed through lavishly decorated objects and fashion. My quilted objects use materials and making methods that are associated with comfort to explore these darker aspects of the human condition.
Caitlin Bowe is an early career artist based in Kaurna Country, Adelaide, South Australia. Working with sculpture, Caitlin uses casting and textile techniques to explore ancestral mythology, the gothic Victorian, and funerary arts. Since graduating from Adelaide Central School of Art with First Class Honours in 2017, Caitlin has continued to exhibit regularly receiving awards including the CARCLEW Fellowship. She has also undertaken residencies including Studio Kura (Japan), Scottish Sculpture Workshop, and the Adelaide Festival Centre’s Children’s Art Space Residency. @caitlin.bowe

For this month Nick, an artist from Nottingham and Leicester based, artist-run and community-owned, gallery and studio Two Queens explore The Notice Boards theme – The Land of the Free? – through a deliberate collaboration. Partly because both ask what a free land might be and partly because they’re trying to manifest them for themselves and others. Their exhibition is called Wild Spaces.

Nick: My recent practice explores our relationship with the ‘wild’: spaces we cannot rationalise and assimilate. This work is one of a series that look at the edges of woods, thresholds to the untamed spaces within, and invite us to enter… The word wild originally meant ‘not under the control of man’. I think spending time in wild spaces allows us to escape the rational and the ordered.
Two Queens: Artist-run projects are a type of land of the free, because they allow people to make and support the culture they want to see in the world, without needing someone else to say ‘Yes’. We are D.I.Y, grassroots, bottom-up and can-do. We are Jack of all trades and always a work in progress. 
Nick: I’ve been a member of Two Queens for 5 years now – they are an amazing gallery, studios and community, supporting art and artists in Leicester and beyond. It’s why I’m offering an edition of this print for sale to help.
Two Queens: This year we are fundraising to stay open past March 2025 when our lease ends. We want, as a community, to buy our building so we can make it a better public space for everyone. Meaning the freedom and independence it offers will be protected. 

To find out more and support Two Queens visit: www.2queens.com

Nick studied Fine Art Printmaking at Loughborough University and then the Royal College of Art. He lives in Nottingham and teaches at De Montfort University in Leicester. His practice combines photography, digital media and printmaking. www.nickmobbs.co.uk

For this 61st exhibition Paul R Jones, from North Wales offers us Baner Llecynnau.
Paul says: For Lands of the Free, I am presenting the flag Baner Llecynnau and a digital print that explores concepts of territoriality. The Baner Llecynnau employs the colours of the Welsh National Flag whilst also using structural elements from the flags of the Czech Republic, Palestine, and the Brunei Republican Rebellion. The digital print is part of a series I’ve made that explores the imagery associated with frontiers.
Frontiers serve as incubators for a volatile mix of expanding territorial ambitions and clashing identities. At these edges, flags are often raised, forcefully communicating ownership – both of the land and the future. They declare that this is where your reality ends, and our domain begins. The frontier, while often evoking picturesque tropes of promised lands, also harbors terror. It becomes a battleground where the colonial conquest poses a threat to all that is surveyed. The terror of the frontier lies in its power to completely erase native histories, entitlements, and deities. It transforms into a place where the indigenous people’s histories are wholly erased, becoming a haunting ‘site of terror.’
In essence, territoriality serves as an apparatus for establishing spatial systems of control. The symbiotic interplay of flags, frontiers, and territoriality reveals a complex narrative, where symbols of ownership and spatial dominance not only delineate borders but also highlight the delicate relationship between power, nationhood, and the ongoing struggle for control.