Notice Board

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.

OUT of the BLUE by MEOW. Curated by Soraya Smithson

OUT of the BLUE – my letter arrives with an invitation to you, my friends and relations who are scattered around the world: please send me a picture postcard of your place with a message on the theme of ‘The lands of the Free?’ 
OUT of the BLUE – your cards arrive in UFFINGTON and Kate Genever sends them on to me.
OUT of the BLUE – your cards are higgledy-piggledy on the Noticeboard, showing your dreams of sea and sky and spires, and your messages are flying from the flagpole, glinting and shimmering in the wind and the sun, celebrating the freedom through the air of your trickster words.
LONG LIVE the POSTAL SERVICES! 

One of those people I invited to send a postcard would not be contained, as well as her card she wrote me this letter.
“ . . . . . Sometimes you see something so miraculous you want to tell everyone . . . . . I was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka which was for much of my life ravaged by civil war . . . . {one of the towns} is Batticaloa on the north east coast, surrounded by beaches, a lagoon, it is a magical place, home to mermaids and singing fish.
Every morning at 9am in Batticaloa a group of women walk the same route through the city centre. The walk begins at the Catholic Church, winds through the main roads of the town and ends at the Gandhi Memorial Park. The women walk single file, in silence, with signs around their necks.
The walk began on 12th of May 2022, following the brutal crackdown on protests that happened when the previous prime minister was ousted. . . . . A state of emergency was declared and a curfew imposed. The women walked in silence with signs protesting the new government and the oppressive policies.
I joined the walk, known locally as the Justice Walk, in February. By then it had been running for over 650 days. Every morning for a week I walked the route, many days with the sign about Palestine around my neck . . . .When you asked me about “The lands of the Free?”, I thought about the Justice Walk. How protest is both a vigil mourning the state of the world but also a distant billboard on which we paint our hopes for a better one. And that even in the most unfree of lands, every morning at 9am, a group of women walk silently through a magical town, not quite destroyed by war.”

Elspeth Owen works as a potter near Cambridge and under the name material woman she makes long distance journeys to deliver special messages and significant objects. www.imaginedcorners.net
This installation is their combined work – MaterialElspethOwenWoman – MEOW. They are currently involved in the Defend Our Juries campaign www.defendourjuries.org

Curated by Soraya Smithson Exhibition 59 is by Naomi Frears. Naomi says: “It has been fun wondering what to put or say on a flag. I love making work in new ways and have asked lots of people what kind of flag they would make. It really makes people think.
When I explain that someone lives near the flagpole, the idea of being quite rude about right wing politics – a natural urge – has had to make way for something that won’t encourage eggs to be thrown. I don’t have flag making skills, so talked to a local flag company. All parts of their business are as sustainable and ethical as possible, so I have tried to overlook the fact that the flag is made of some kind of spooky recycled fabric. 
The words on the flag are from one of my text works. They relate to the theme The Lands of the Free in that, in our society we are able ask politely for a person, people, or a state to stop doing things we don’t like or find irritating. It may not transform behaviour, but we can let someone know something we’d like them to think about changing. A conversation might start. Sometimes the request might be impossible, but we can still ask. Here on the noticeboard is a tiny part of a very long list of what those undesirable things might be. What would you ask a person, people, or a state politely not to do?“

Naomi Frears is based in the Porthmeor Studios in St Ives, Cornwall. Her practice includes work with film and video, as well as printmaking, painting, and collaborative curatorial projects. Recent solo shows and film commissions include Men Falling (Artist Moving Image Commission, Exeter Phoenix) and In Other Words, a film commission for RAMM (Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter), Red River, a film commission in collaboration with poet John Wedgwood Clarke shown at COP 26, Looking for Ray, for Kestle Barton, and Somebody Loves Us All, a film commission and collaboration with poet Ella Frears, Bold Tendencies, Peckham. She undertook a large painting commission for Hospital Rooms at Bethlam Royal Hospital, London and her work appears regularly on the cover of the London Review of Books. Frears’ work is held in public and private collections including The Government Art Collection and in 2023 she was nominated for the Film London Jarman Award for artists moving image. Frears teaches art students at Falmouth University and among other projects, she is currently making new work as a guest of Britten Pears Arts in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.

hbition 58: Esther Wilson – Quilt flag
Quilts are connected to Women’s work. A quilt speaks of domestic labour, of clothing and comforting and providing and nourishing children. They are a creative output with a practical application. A pieced quilt can be a record of a family’s life and a woman’s emotions. Quilts hold history and track lives. They are a family record held in your hands; a connection passed down through cloth. 
Making this piece I thought of the children wrapped in white shrouds, cradled by their mothers during the genocide in Gaza. I thought of the loss of stitched history, the devastation of domestic textiles. Children’s bedding destroyed, soft toys disfigured and curtains turned ashen grey.
Red is a colour used extensively in Palestinian Tatreez. Red is a colour of danger, bravery and passion. Pink is a colour of sensitivity, of femininty, of childhood. 
The land of the free? Are our mothers free? Are we free within a world that allows genocide? 

Esther is a London based artist and dressmaker. She trained in Embroidery at the Royal School of Needlework (2017) She makes work, both wearable and unwearable, looking at grief, motherhood and domesticity. 

Exhbition 57: Anna Reading. The Lands of the Free?

Anna’s work deals with issues around anthropocentric perspectives and the subsequent impacts upon environments, bodies, and human psyches. Her work looks to more-than-human life forms for lessons in survival within hostile settings.
When invited to create a work for the specificity of a flagpole, I wanted to situate the work within the landscape for which it would be shown. The work is based on a walk along the flood plain of the river Welland, running South of Uffington. The walk was an attempt to explore a landscape where the notion of free-ness(?) could be explored through flow, flux and entropy. During the walk, I encountered multiple examples of entanglements; sheeps wool wrapped around fences, grasses caught in seed heads, creepers entwined around branches, sedges matted in mud clumps. All of this material stuck-ness was activated by sunlight and a healthy breeze. My sculptural intervention explores what it is to be entangled, both as a restriction to movement while also a support system.
I am drawn to the contradictions inherent within the notion of the ‘Free?’ and what that means in terms of a ‘Land’. In an attempt to physically deconstruct the official fixedness of a flag, the work features materials which playfully interact with the weather, a sun-reflective rigid aluminium flag shape, and protective roofing felt tendrils to be activated by the wind. The notice board features a woven roofing felt and metal textile, entwined with loose materials collected along the River Welland’s flood plain.

Anna Reading is a Newcastle-born artist, now living and working in London. She holds an MfA in Sculpture from the Slade School of Fine Art (2017) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Central St Martins (2010). Reading is the winner of the Mark Tanner Sculpture Award 2018-19. www.annareading.co.uk