‘Triparks’, is the latest project of Aune Head Arts (AHA) in partnership with Somerset Art Week (SAW) and Allenheads Contemporary Arts (ACA). We have just launched a project blogsite, but there's not much on it yet. However some of the artists have been posting to their own blogs (links below). You can also find more information about Karen Bridgford's Exmoor project here.

Rural communities are re-making and re-defining themselves in ways that challenge many fundamentals about life in the countryside.  Traditional agriculture is under threat of extinction, while small specialist food producers thrive and take back the means of distributing their produce.  This is a period of destruction and re-building that leaves many voices unheard and villages and communities feeling vulnerable and uncertain about their futures. 

Six artists were selected from a national call (220+ applications were received from across England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales) and have now begun work exploring and making  art within the
boundaries of three National Parks.

They are:
Dartmoor: Hugh Nankivell (composer, writer) and Volkhardt Müller (sculptor, digital media artist)
Exmoor: Harald Smykla (fine artist) and Karen Guthrie (digital media artist)
Northumberland: Bridget Kennedy (installation) and Paul Grimmer (video, performance, photography)

The three pairs of artists will spend 20 days in residence on their respective National Parks to explore ‘people, place and time' and to make work that ‘provokes, relates and reveals’.  AHA thought that the best way to get to the heart of the matter was for the artists to shadow the people that live, work and breathe the National Parks on a daily basis and with the very kind help of the National Parks  AHA, SAW and ACA able to organise shadowing activities to help the artists learn as much as they can about the Parks before they begin making their artworks.

The artists met together in Northumberland on 20-21 May 2008 to share their experiences of the project so far.  The artists talked about the generosity of the park workers, farmers and guides that they’d met to date, experiences of witnessing cattle auctions on Exmoor, the silence and isolation of Northumberland in contrast to signs of frequent MOD activity, ‘speculative reconstruction’ of historic buildings on Dartmoor,  visiting protected WWI practice trenches on Northumberland and protected graffiti, learning about plans for Dartmoor woodland, finding one’s way around Exmoor on the public transport system.

It is important for AHA that the artists across the three parks do not work in isolation from each other, so the artists will be encouraged to communicate about their experiences and what they're making via a project blog, e-mail, post and by text.  We hope this regular communication will be reflected in  their artwork through explorations of  the similarities and differences between Dartmoor, Exmoor and Northumberland National Parks.  Blogs on the Northumberland and Exmoor arms of the the project are open to all and can be seen here: http://northumberlandtriparks.blogspot.com/ http://www.somewhere.org.uk/exmoorblog

Final artworks will be exhibited within all the three Parks. The exhibition should be challenging, contemporary, tactile and contain sonic, visual, and interactive elements.  A core aim is that this project and the exhibitions involve and engage those who experience it –– both residents and visitors alike.

Here's what they say about themselves and the proejct (so far... more to come)

Paul Grimmer (website) (blog) My name is Paul Grimmer and I'm going to be working on Triparks up North. I currently live in Newcastle upon Tyne and was born and raised there. I make work about the body and interaction using video, performance, installation and manipulated photographic images. I tend to have very specific ideas about what I want to do, and how I want to do it and am particularly excited about this project because I have none of this in place. I want to allow the work to be completely influenced by my interactions with the park.

I am currently working on 2 collaborative performance projects, the first with a group of 5 artists from the North East, the result of which will be performed during a 5-day festival of live art in Istanbul next week. The second, working with artist Francesca Steele, is in an initial phase of process based research based around caring, convalescence and meditation.

Karen Guthrie (website) (blog) I'm Karen Guthrie and am very pleased to be one of the Exmoor National Park artists. 
I live in a rural spot in the Lake District and work wherever I find an interesting project. Over the last decade I have worked predominantly in collaboration with Nina Pope, starting out in new media art and latterly making two left-field films loosely described as documentaries -  'Bata-ville: We are not afraid of the future', and 'Living with the Tudors'. Other commissions we have on the go include the the revisioning of the historic Abbey Gardens near the Olympic site in London. I am also involved with an ongoing international 'Honesty Table' project which offers home produce to the public "without guarantee" for a voluntary payment. These stalls have been situated in many diverse locations including in my recent show in the Northern Art Prize at Leeds City Art Gallery, where an Anglo-Japanese stall 'sold' produce from Japan and England, an extension of a residency in rural Japan called the 'Seven Samurai'.

My work is guided by a fascination with people and what sustains their communities and networks, as opposed to an exploration of any particular media. 

I have also worked as a Fine Art lecturer, an art consultant, and last year on leading the 'Creative Egremont' public art programme in West Cumbria which included an FM community radio station, a mobile museum in a milk float, and the reinstatement of the town's 'Greasy Pole' by Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane. I currently free-lance as the Web Project Director for Grizedale Arts, which amongst other things includes creating an online archive of the organisation's working Collection of historic British design and craft objects, and generally enriching their websites for their online audiences. 

Bridget Kennedy (blog) is a compulsive organiser. She uses systemisation as a survival tactic, as a means of creating a little quietness amidst the clamor of modern life. She lives on the outskirts of a small village in the North of England. Whilst seeking out wildness and wilderness through interaction with nature she succumbs to the ever present desire to tame and control. She sees herself as a librarian of the landscape, constantly cataloguing. A fascination with maps brings together her two main interests: landscape and the translation of information. Looking is an activity that is under constant scrutiny in Kennedy's practice, with regard to cartography she is intrigued by the leap of imagination that a map-reader undergoes in order to understand a three dimensional environment when looking at a set of symbols on a piece of paper. She expects her viewers to work together with her on their relationship with her pieces, giving clues in titles such as "Trying to understand the creation of the universe with beads and wire" and "Every letter is a number, every number is a colour (creation myths one and two)". There are two main strands to her practice, one is studio based and one is work made in response to place. She uses drawing, sculpture, photography and moving image in conjunction with the study of historical, critical and literary texts to aid her research and sustain her practice. In recent studio based work she has been re-coding texts and images that relate to landscape then meticulously hand replicating this information to create complex drawings and sculptures. Cool and impersonal at first glance these works expose a very human fragility on closer inspection. Imperfections resulting from the hand-made, homespun and irrational character of the romantic subtly compete with the rigid framework.

I am Volkhardt Müller, the other Triparks artist on Dartmoor. I am also a German Citizen resident who has made their home in Exeter with a family in 2002.  Ever since I have been working on various projectsthroughout the UK and Germany.

I tend to describe myself as a sculptor and media artist. Over the last 5 years I have grown my portfolio with video based performance interventions, collaborative practice in devised theatre, performance and dance as well as documentary film making. I have taught at Dartington College
of Arts and I have worked in and with Devon's rural communities through a project called VANLAND(www.vanland.org) which has reconnected me with my political instincts.

Broadly spoken I am interested in the politics of the urban and rural landscapes that constitute this country and the ways they are interconnected. Strangely enough, I don't have my own website yet, but just like with Harald things will pop up if you google me (You might need an Umlaut though)

Hugh Nankivell Hello, I'm Hugh and glad to be a triparks Dartmoor explorer.
I live in Torquay and before that Huddersfield, Leeds, Gateshead, London, Birmingham, Milton Keynes, Telford and Stafford.
 
I play the melodica and harmonium and viola and guitar amongst others. I write songs and recently wrote a piece with poet Jackie Kay for the National Theatre of Scotland launch piece Home:Shetland. With director Wils Wilson we created the piece on the Lerwick to Aberdeen ferry the Hjaltland. I recorded birds, collected songs and made up new ones. I found tunes and discovered the difference between fiddles and violins. The audience wore headsets for most of their voyage around the ship.
Wils and I are creating a new piano-based piece for Torquay for next year called Keys To The Sea – see www.keystothesea.co.uk for our fledgling site.
 
At the moment I am exploring 3 year-olds playing the piano; playing with a geographically incontinent band called Natural Causes; writing tunes using an alphabet coding system and creating new pieces with a Japanese composer called Makoto Nomura. We have recently published Whaletone Opera – a collaboration between communities, theatres and professional artists in West Yorkshire and North Japan.
 
I am very excited about Triparks because;
I have no idea what will come out, and love that exploratory starting, researching, finding, discovering…
I’m looking forward to meeting new artists and seeing/feeling how they/you work and respond…
I’m interested in the sounds and stories I’ll find.
 
Two things I have noticed since moving to Devon from Yorkshire are the darkness at night and the amount of reversing (when in a car) that I have to do.
 
Today and yesterday my 14 year old son was on Dartmoor, and had no more than 20 metres visibility in 36 hours and learned that his sleeping bag wouldn’t zip up. I’m hoping for some more visibility than that some of the time, and will check my sleeping bag zip before setting out.

Harald Smykla I am Harald Smykla, the other Triparks artist who will be working on Exmoor on I-don't-know-what-yet, and look forward to finding out. I hope you don't mind if, by way of introduction, I'll just copy and paste information about me from somewhere else:
  
"Harald Smykla is a German artist based in London since 1988. After studying painting/printmaking at the Karlsruhe Academy of Fine Art (1981-86), his work has gradually shifted towards a largely ephemeral, cross-disciplinary and intermittently collaborative practice. His recent work tends to merge live art with often unorthodox approaches to drawing.
 
In the public realm, he creates site- and context-specific interventions that investigate, respond to and transform given physical and social environments, address and actively engage incidental audiences and generally infuse the mundane with its inherent extra-ordinariness and the memory thereof. This may happen through street market trading and chess; eccentric notions of portraiture such as 're-facing' (and ideally circulating) current banknotes with contemporary features ["Face Value"] or sculpting through eating ['dental portraits']; furthermore through process-based collaborations with non-human life forms; marking time with cardio-graphics; cathartic research into emotional hygiene through art; mapping and travelling representational journey routes; introducing psycho-historic constructs; joining the circus ['"Psychological Art Circus" 2004-06]; re-inventing the overhead projector for "Reprojections" of reality being drawn onto itself with light [http://www.hullartlab.org/haraldsmykla.php] et al.
 
Harald has performed and exhibited across the UK and internationally. Last year, he was one of the six UK artists to present work in Israel and Crotia during the MAP Live 2007 Performance Art Exchange programme. Most recently, he performed as part of 'East Wing Collection VIII' at London's Courtauld Institute."

Key Project Dates

November 2007 • Call for artists (view/download pdf)
January 23, 2008 • DEADLINE for artist proposals
February 11, 2008 • Interviews (site(s) tbc)
end March, 2008 • Project Launch (meeting)
April - July • Artist Residencies take place
August - September • Completion of artwork
October 2008 • First exhibition (exhibitions continue until Summer 2009)

PROJECT GROUPSITE HERE (participants only, for now)

Other info