COP26: Arts and Culture in the Climate Crisis
Culture — from arts to heritage — can help catalyse a step-change in the global ambition for climate resilience. Rooting resilience measures in existing community action, culture, heritage and knowledge …. helps assure more effective and durable outcomes.
Instal image from Water/Land, open at Fen Ditton Gallery until 28th November
These words, taken from the official website for UN Climate Change Conference UK 2021, feel very resonant for all of us here at Fen Ditton Gallery as COP26 launches in Glasgow this weekend. All of us have a part to play and the gallery’s annual climate resilience support pledge (now in Year 4) is to create an exhibition that forges new dialogue between local knowledge and creative thinking whilst in the process, with your help! raising funds that supports both. Water/Land and the Great Fen Project’s Waterworks is our 2021 focus. Come and see us this weekend and we will show you how to help this year….
Three of our Water/Land artists, for example, Mary Butcher, Lizzie Farey and Joe Hogan have, through their work restored habitats; found new uses for natural materials and disseminated knowledge about traditional willow weaving techniques and forms. Another Water/Land artist, glass engraver Katharine Coleman has upcycled discarded clear glass paperweights by engraving vivid images of fen insects in their habitats. Artists can make us look more closely at what we too often overlook. And the climate crisis is showing us the danger of not looking closely at what is around us.
As Joni Mitchell said all those years ago… Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got till it's gone
Pictured above: Katharine Coleman, upcycled discarded clear glass paperweights; Joe Hogan, Reclining Pod
Meantime, there are two places left on our Nature printing workshop with Water/Land artist Rebecca Jewell on 4th November. Find out more and book your place here. Her fascinating studies of Cornish seaweed show the beauty and importance of marine life to our living world; and the sensory mud world of river life is captured in the Richard Long print created in collaboration with Cambridge printmaker Kip Gresham. You can read more about all artists and the project here.
We look forward to welcoming you to the exhibition.
Opening times:
Saturdays and Sundays 10am - 5pm
Other times available by appointment, email info@fendittongallery.com to book
Featured works
All works are for sale and a percentage of sales will be donated to the Great Fen's Water Works Project. To enquire about the works, email info@fendittongallery.com.
Rain on a Stone
Richard Long
Printed on Sandersons Waterford hotpress, 10 colour process at the Print Studio, Cambridge
Richard Long is a sculptor and one of the UK’s most widely regarded land artists. He makes sculptures, photographs and works on paper documenting his journeys around the world, from long walks across Dartmoor in England to the peaks of Antarctica. He achieved prominence in 1967 with his seminal work A Line Made by Walking, conceived when he was still a student at St. Martin's School of Art, London.
Horsetails
Katharine Coleman
Green glass overlaid on clear crystal vase, blown by Potter Morgan Glass. Polished, wheel and drill engraved, 2021
Katharine Coleman studied drill, point and copper wheel-engraving on glass with the late Peter Dreiser at Morley College in the 1980s. She has become an acknowledged master glass engraver working on double layer lead crystal forms usually blown to her specification which make full use of the reflective and refractive qualities of the medium.
Bannock Bowl
Lizzie Farey
Galloway willow, 32 x 20cm
Lizzie Farey originally studied fine art and stained glass at Cardiff College of Art but since 1991 willow has been both the material, and the means through which she explores her interest in land and environment. Based in rural Galloway, South West Scotland, Farey has developed a direct and responsive way of working with woven structures, drawing on traditions of basketmaking but extending those traditions into striking wall drawings and sculptures that embody the energy of the natural world.