(be)wilder

Gabrielle Hoad & Megan Calver | (be)wilder - work in progress | September 2020

Last Saturday Megan Calver and I delivered a workshop for the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton relating to the touring Artist Rooms exhibition: Richard Long’s ‘Being in the Moment’. Commissioned earlier this year, pre-Covid-19, the workshop has been postponed and reshaped several times. Eventually we all agreed we could go ahead with a shortened two-hour session for a small group, accepting we would be constrained by the need to maintain safe distances and keep each participant's tools and materials entirely separate.

Six people joined us in the gallery garden on 19 September to think about landscape, language and movement. Using random processes, we extracted phrases from a range of natural history books. We reordered them both through paper edits and by speaking them out together while moving round the gallery gardens. We wanted to skirt the generalisation and categorisation that necessarily characterises natural history books and instead honour the complexity and specificity of the land and its inhabitants. In short, we hoped to subdue habitual responses and bewilder ourselves into making new connections with the wild.

High winds added to the giddy feeling of being physically reunited with other people in a creative endeavour. Gusts ripped papers from our hands and carried our voices away. At the end we secured everything on the ground with rows of stones: one giant collaborative text for/in/on the wild.

Richard Long ‘Being in the Moment', Thelma Hulbert Gallery - 11 July 2020 to 31 October 2020

(be)wilder workshop 19 September 2020