Lean at Od Arts Festival - 'The Art of Rivalry'

Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Lean (An Invitation) | 2018

Just back from the Od Arts Festival with Megan Calver, where we presented a new work Lean. This series of objects and actions prompted thought and conversation around ideas of rivalry and cooperation, two themes played out across the wider festival.

Inspired by a wonky shed in the East Coker woods, we invited residents and festival visitors, as well as an online audience, to lean on bars, lamp-posts, walls, trees and each other, and to notice the incidental leaning of objects and bodies.

Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Lean (An Invitation) | 2018

For Lean (An Invitation) we travelled between the two villages of East Coker and West Coker offering props, prizes and printed scores to initiate both competitive and collaborative leaning actions. Encounters ranged from a gentle conversation about straightening wonky pictures with a man waiting for his motorbike to complete its MOT, to a raucous improvised skittles competition in a West Coker pub.

Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Lean (Tools for Rivals)
with painting by Janet Sainsbury | 2018

Lean (Tools for Rivals) was a series of everyday leaning objects such as brooms, door wedges, branches and walking sticks that were inserted into displays across the festival. They were identifiable only by subtle markings in fluorescent paint or tape and were used to distract from and disrupt our artistic rivals’ work.

Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad | Lean (Wonky Shed - East Coker) | 2018

Finally, Lean (Wonky Shed – East Coker) was a digital print of the leaning shed that inspired it all, installed in a pub's skittle alley, between and behind a series of plumb lines to highlight its list.

'The Art of Rivalry', Od Arts Festival was curated by Simon Lee Dicker and Bob Gelsthorpe, and featured work by Sadie Hennessy, Tom Smith, Tim Bromage, Phil Owen, Zoe Walker & Neil Bromwich, Janet Sainsbury, Peter Chesbrough & Laura Hopes, Nicola Bealing, Melville Mitchell, Megan Calver & Gabrielle Hoad, Isobel Adderley, Andy Parker, Rachael Allain and Wassail Theatre

#lean_at_odfest
www.odartsfestival.co.uk
11-13 May 2018
East Coker and West Coker, Somerset