In The Green Hill, Sophie Pierce writes about the sudden death of her son Felix with an aching and gentle honesty. This is a book that will be a great comfort to those who need it.” Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent and Melmoth.

Continuing our series of conversation with writers, artists and thinkers, Richard Povall is in conversation with writer Sophie Pierce in this fourth in the series. This event is also part of of the art.earth First Friday series, which includes a sharing from the Throes of Grief artist collective.

This event is free and open to all (no registration is required)

You will find the Zoom link below (from three hours before the session starts)

Sophie Pierce is a writer and broadcaster who worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC for over twenty years. In 2017 her 20 year old son Felix died suddenly and unexpectedly. Her memoir The Green Hill: letters to a son explores how she responded to this devastating loss, navigating the weather and tides of grief. In the surroundings of Dartmoor and the South Devon coast she finds ways to continue the bond with Felix, both in her mind and with physical activity; actively mourning, rather than grieving. The book celebrates the natural landscape and the role it plays in our lives and relationships, as well as looking at how we think about our own mortality. The Green Hill, Felix’s burial place by the River Dart, comes to symbolise the issues that become important in the journey of grief: nature, beauty, a sense of place, and the passing of the seasons.  The book shows how Sophie finds ways to continue the bond and recreate her relationship with Felix, both in her mind and with physical activity: pen on paper, needle on the fabric of the clothes he wore, and swimming and walking. She learns to focus on the landscape around her, the plants and trees, the rivers of Dartmoor and the sea off the South Devon coast, to somehow ‘be’ with him again.

[image (above) Frankie Mills]

Annabel Pettigrew / Throes of Grief

Throes of Grief is an artist led collective research initiative exploring both the presence and themes of Grief in Contemporary art practice.

Founded by Annabel Pettigrew in 2020, following an Open Call and a round of initial in-depth conversations with applicants, a group of eight artists were selected to take part as participants.

More details can be found on our Instagram @throesofgrief and participating artists here.

September 5-9, 2021

These are the times to let our knowings die, to devour our certainties and to surrender our identities as a generative act. Vulture Wakes are opportunities to observe, gather around and get intimate with the practices of modernity that have been causing the trouble.  

This lab is a call to artists, researchers, community leaders and facilitators to gather, an invitation to turn and face the inescapable themes of breakdown and demise that now confront us, and to listen for what might be wanting to emerge. Embodied and experimental, Vulture is an ongoing research project from The Emergence Network that takes the movements and participation of these great birds as metaphor, score and research modality.

Vulture offers a different shape of hope: hope not in solutions or saviours but in the smell of soil, the movements of insects, and the intense beauty of seeing each other dance at the edge of things.

Toni Spencer is an artist and facilitator, and a Curator with The Emergence Network. She is founder of ‘the pause’, a Deep Adaptation practitioner and has worked regularly with organisations such as Schumacher College, St Ethelburga’s, Encounters Arts.

LEARN MORE

[Vulture image is courtesy Sean Briggs seanbriggs.co.uk]

Title and details coming soon.

A fugitive to the manicured the disciplinarity of the academe, public intellectual, lecturer, author, father of Alethea and Kyah, grateful husband/life-partner to Ijeoma, speaker, and proud diaper-changer, Bayo Akomolafe (PhD) leads an earth-wide organization-movement (The Emergence Network) as its Chief Curator and Director. The organization is set up around what Bayo calls “postactivism”, which concerns itself with an exploration of the materiality of responsibility and responsivity in critical times. Postactivism, as well as The Emergence Network, is a project framed within a posthumanist ethos and inspired by indigenous cosmologies. Bayo asks: what if the ways we respond to the problem is part of the problem? He considers this vocation to slow down, to touch the textures of urgency, to see through the eyes of the fugitive, as a shared art – an exploring of the edges of the intelligible, a dancing with posthumanist ideas, a dabbling in the mysteries of quantum mechanics and the liberating sermon of an ecofeminism text. 

Bayo hosts a course (We Will Dance with Mountains) among other offerings, teaches and speaks around the world. He is passionate about nurturing a posthumanist emancipatory movement and fugitive network that opens up other sites of power. 

Bayo is visiting professor at Middlebury College, Vermont, and has taught in universities around the world (including Sonoma State University California, Simon Frasier University Vancouver, Schumacher College Devon, Harvard University, and Covenant University Nigeria – among others). He is a consultant with UNESCO.  

Bayo has authored two books, ‘We Will Tell Our Own Story!’ and ‘These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home’, and has penned forewords for many others. 

www.bayoakomolafe.net

www.emergencenetwork.org

No booking is required. You must be registered as a Borrowed Time delegate to attend this event.

Paul Michael Henry is a Scottish performance artist, dancer and musician. His work is informed by Butoh dance, punk rock and ritual, and is performed all over the world. Recent projects include SHRIMP DANCE (a multimedia dance work exploring the links between anti-depressants, ecological crisis and late capitalism), a tour of the United States with Laughter at Being Crushed, touring as a Butoh dancer in France and Japan, the premiere of new performance Mammy at CCA Glasgow, and a new film exploring high rates of male suicide in Scotland and globally called SMITE ME NOW. He is currently working towards a PhD at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, researching techniques for shifting our sense of self from Individual-Consumer to Interdependent- Ecological.

Michael’s themes are political, social & spiritual, dealing with love, neglect of the body, destruction of the environment and atrophy of the soul in consumerist society. www.paulmichaelhenry.com

He is also Artistic Director and creator of UNFIX, an evolving and experimental festival platforming ecologically committed performance, dance, music, film and discussion. UNFIX is intended as a contribution to the waking up of the human species to our predicament in an age of climate change, massive inequality and crazy consumerism. It is based in Glasgow and is ongoing there and in New York City and Tokyo. www.unfixfestival.com

Others say:

Utterly compelling… the astonishingly talented Henry has much to say. 
– Glasgow Theatre Blog

A singular talent of grace and power 
– Lorna Irvine (reviewer for the List and Exuent)

A disciplined, creative and unique performer to Scotland and I have not seen his like in Europe in fact. His movement has a beauty and intensity which has its roots in Japanese Butoh.
– Morag Deyes (Artistic Director, Dance Base Edinburgh)

Title and details coming soon.

Caroline Hickman is a psychotherapist who teaches at the University of Bath and is a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance (CPA) for whom she is creating a series of podcasts on Climate Psychology & Eco-Anxiety/Grief – ‘Climate Crisis Conversations – Catastrophe or Transformation’. She is currently researching children & young people’s feelings including eco-anxiety/grief about the climate and biodiversity crisis using a psychosocial free association methodology to uncover and explore different stories, narratives and images around our defences against the ‘difficult truth’ of the climate and bio-diversity crisis, and explore hidden and ‘less conscious’ feelings. She is passionate about getting ‘under the surface’ metaphorically and literally. 

No booking is required. You must be registered as a Borrowed Time delegate to attend this event.