Summer 2024 workshops in collaboration with Surrey Hills Arts. Student placements and planned publications / exhibition in Autumn 2024. Writing and art in response to site, art and environment.
(view from Radius Sculpture by James Tunnard).
A creative workshop at BCA with Lewi Mondal. Participants were encouraged to write or draw in response to a series of cubes desgined for the workshop by me. The cubes used images from the current exhibition at BCA on living rooms by Tony Fairwearther. I hope to use the cubes in other contexts and workshops and to develop further projects with BCA and other museum collections and archives. The cubes feature prompts for making, drawing, writing, remembering and imagining connections between personal and public archives that were suggested through play with the cubes themselves…
Out of Practice Seminar (Oops)
This talk considers the contexts and motivations of two recent works: a poem and performance. Each explores relationships to music, visual art and the noise of cultural and critical dissent. E.P. Thompson’s survey of the long standing European traditions of ‘Rough Music’ reveals the uncomfortable tensions between community-based rituals and the local enforcement of law. This talk will demonstrate how Thompson’s archival survey of folk traditions is highly generative for the formation of a contemporary poetics alive to its own fragility, even complicity with its apparent objects of subversion. Olsen’s recent performance, Frownlands, 1969 both celebrates and resists aspects of the commonality and energy of 60’s counterculture. At Bury Art Gallery she presented a feminist inflected performance-text, a nominy delivered karaoke style in a non-site plywood replica of the original scene of production: the Californian Woodland Hills house where the infamous album, Trout Mask Replica was recorded. The talk will explore the overlaps and gaps between imagined and empirical audiences. What happens when the reality of performance and poetic language come up against wider conflicts of interest and power relations at large in the speculative imaginaries and curatorial fantasies of public engagement and participation?
Bedford Room, G37, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speakers Redell Olsen (Royal Holloway, University of London), Christopher Ohge (Institute of English Studies, SAS) 19 March 2024, 5:00PM – 7:00PM
Contact IESEvents@sas.ac.uk
https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/shifting-audiences-reconfiguring-pasts
New performance work Saturday January 27th at Bury Museum and Art Gallery as part of an exhibition by Derek Tyman and Andy Webster.
Art-writing performance that builds on instrumental outakes from Beefheart’s, Trout Mask Replica. Olsen plays through and counters the often punishing methods of production endured by the original band members with an homage that is also a rewriting of the master’s voice. She offers a provocative chorus of speculative fragmentary imaginings from a variety of sources and eras to recast the legendary narratives of the making of the original album alongside interruptions drawn from the erased history of female drummers, nostalgic imaginings for futures that never were and cacophonies of protest relevant for our present day Frownlands.
This exhibition is curated by my Phd students: Briony Hughes, Caroline Harris and Gareth Hughes in collaboration with the Culture Team at Royal Holloway. It features work from artists and writers working with text and image in relation to ecological and environmental issues. It reflects the cultural environment and work of the practice-based students that I teach at MA and Phd level on the Poetic Practice pathway and some of the work by contemporaries that we admire, including: Susan Johanknecht and Kate Meynell and JR Carpenter. Really delighted to be showing some of my work from the Plume of the Volants series in this company.
This exhibition is open from 17 January 2024 – 24 March 2024 in the Davison Building Exhibition Space at Royal Holloway.
Work in the exhibition
https://www.tea-assembly.com/issues/8/moonflower-2021-or-a-scarlet-transfer
Details of the full issue and introduction from Felix Driver and Caroline Cornish below:
3 November – 7 November 2021
10:00 – 17:00
Talk on Saturday at 2 pm (booking required)
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
