Work on show at The Tetley in Leeds

Installing film at the The Tetley in Leeds.

Fragments From an Interspecies Opera: Acis and Galatea Rewilded,
or, a Serenata; or Pastoral Entertainment in the Age of Extinction


The moths that appear in this film were gifted by the renowned entomologist Dr Roger Key to Will Evans who is a current PhD researcher on the BioDar project at The University of Leeds. The moths were contained in four boxes acquired by Key nearly twenty years ago when the Leeds City Museum restructured its collections. Although the moths were in an undamaged condition, they did not have enough data attached to them to warrant keeping. Dr. Key’s own collection, that he made as a child, was donated to Scunthorpe Museum during the 1970s. When Dr. Key visited the museum there he found that his boyhood collection had been reduced to powder by museum beetles, booklice, clothes moths and mites. Will Evans was taught his insect identification skills by Dr. Key.


Will Evans collaborated with Redell Olsen in the making of this film by scanning the moths on the project’s newly acquired Artec 3D scanner. Filming took place under lockdown. Evans set up the insects in the lab and they were then filmed by Olsen through a digital online platform as Olsen directed Evans to move the view of the insects by moving the cursor on his screen. That the cursor remains visible in the final film offers a trace of the process and production involved, a Brechtian reminder of agency and control rather than a Hollywoodization and reification of insects long dead.


The audio that accompanies the film reimagines George Frideric Handel’s pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea with the new lyrics of an imagined inter-species opera, extracts of which are performed in collaboration with the Chorus of Opera North and bass-baritone Matthew Stiff, as a response to the current climate crisis and environmental degradation.


The new text of Handel’s air to be sung to the music of Acis and Galatea –  O Ruddier Than The Cherry holds particular contemporary relevance in relation to the meetings by international leaders at Cop26 in November 2021.

Opera North
Oliver Rundell and the Chorus at Opera North:
Sarah Blood, Sarah Estill, Rachel J Mosley, Victoria Sharp, Anna Barry, Cordelia Fish, Katie Walker, Warren Gillespie, David Llewellyn, Arwel Price, Graham Russell, Ivan Sharpe, Paul Gibson, Ross McInroy, Richard Mosley-Evans, Jeremy Peaker, Gordon Shaw  with Martin Pickard – piano ‘radar watchers’.
Matthew Stiff – ‘bass-baritone’, David Cowan – piano

Open Studio

Redell Olsen, Diapause, Collage, Mixed Media, 2020.

Residencies & Projects

Redell Olsen, Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants

3 November – 7 November 2021

10:00 – 17:00

Free, No Booking Required

The DARE Art Prize presents Redell Olsen‘s new body of work, Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants at The Tetley. Join us to view Olsen’s visual, text-based and audio-visual work in her open studio.

Weather, Whether Radar: Plume of the Volants engages with the work of BioDAR researchers at the University of Leeds. These scientists are using weather radar to monitor insect biodiversity. With its origins in World War Two, radar is often used to determine information about the weather. The plumes of insects that sometimes show up in this data, most famously on days such as flying ant day, have often been dismissed as just being ‘noise’.

Through a consideration of objects from the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and related archives, this body of work tracks and imagines a range of poetic, narrative, historical and cultural noises at the fragile intersections of radar, insects, weather, objects, people, music and film.

The works have involved dialogue with the BioDAR scientists and incorporate materials from their research, alongside additional sources from vintage natural history and fashion magazines. Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘The Death of The Moth’ and George Frederic Handel’s pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea inform the lyrics of an imagined inter-species opera, extracts of which are performed in collaboration with the Chorus of Opera North and bass-baritone Matthew Stiff, as a response to the current climate crisis and environmental degradation.

In Conversation with Redell Olsen and Dominic Gray, Projects Director, Opera North Saturday 6 November, 14:00, City Workshop (Book in advance).

https://www.thetetley.org/whats-on/open-studio-redell-olsen-weather-whether-radar-plume-of-the-volants

Contemporary Poetry: Thinking and Feeling, University of Plymouth, 2Oth -22nd May 2016

Abstract Keynote: Redell Olsen

‘Proposals For Landscapes: and other mutual antipathies’
This talk will offer a series of proposals For landscapes, a recalibration of the optics for a poetics of the conceptual. This reading will explore these possibilities across multiple registers of the material and linguistic possibilities of felt-thought. It will assert a space for itself between the symptomatic dismissal by the visual arts of poetry as ‘literary costume’ and the more recent neglectful mis-readings of conceptual art by writing at the expense of the conceptual histories of the lyric genre.

Programme Here

17.12.14 Print Screen Writing and the Image

17.12. 14

10-5 pm.

The Photographers Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW

Performance / reading as part of Print Screen Writing and the Image: This in-depth symposium in collaboration with University of Westminster addresses current thinking on the relationship between writing and the image, with particular emphasis on connections across the fields of experimental literature, photography, and film.

Presenters / Speakers include:  Laura Mulvey, Patrick Keiller, Jonathan Long, Redell Olsen, Daniel Kane and Leigh Wilson. Organised by Dr. Georgina Colby and Professor John Beck in conjunction with The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/print-screen-writing-and-the-image#-INFO