Click here to find out more <<<<<

Hospital Rooms - MESKLA | Rag Porth/For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow)

My new work for Cove Ward at Longreach House, Redruth, as part of Hospital Rooms Cornwall Project, is directly informed by the MESKLA workshops that took place last summer with Fletcher Ward at Bodmin Community Hospital and IntoBodmin, and in connection with Flamm.

During these sessions, we made rocks using recycled paper and cardboard and painted them in colours that reflected our identities and how we feel about Kernow/Cornwall and its rocks, moors and coast. We thought about names for the colours we had chosen, and we looked for the Kernewek/Cornish translation. If none existed, we created our own.

Photos © Hospital Rooms (Oliver Udy)

I've brought all of the conversations from those workshops into the making of this work. The energy, movement, imagination and experiences shared by participants; the favourites of the colours - deep blues and greens, warm yellows, pinks, reds and purples; and the shapes of the rocks we made are reflected in cut-out panels, some of which are gilded in copper leaf to remind us of the minerals beneath our soil.

It has been a fascinating process to work with the Hospital Rooms team and both Cove and Fletcher wards. To consider the importance and sensitivity of the hospital setting, and all those who live and work on the wards. I hope the installation will bring some of the wonder and joy of art making, and of our land and sea to Cove.

A book of the Hospital Rooms’ Cornwall Project will be available to purchase from the Exchange Gallery bookshop alongside an exhibition of all the commissions which runs until 28th September 2024. Please find excerpts from the book below.

‘Emotions may involuntarily experience a lift as colour and composition overwhelm the confinement of the architecture, releasing a range of associations – not least with the precious materials indigenous to the local landscape that has been worked by Cornish families for centuries. Almost in the Baroque fashion that animates seventeenth-century interiors around Europe, the restraining walls seem to dissolve into the visual interplay of perceptions – terrestrial, aquatic or celestial.’ - Martin Holman on MESKLA | Rag Porth/For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow) in his essay about the Hospital Rooms Cornwall Project.

‘MESKLA | Rag Porth / For Cove (Liwyow a Gernow) is a mixed media mural that travels along a windowless corridor on Cove Ward. Its organic forms in deep blues, greens and yellows take the eye on a journey through cascading drifts of colour, while ‘rocks’ rendered in plywood and coated with shimmering copper and magenta act like jewels and provide a tactile surface for passers-by to interact with. For some, it reminds them of the aquamarine waters along the coast of Cornwall; for others, a glorious summer sky. The colours and forms are closely linked to creations made during workshops that Sovay ran with patients and members of the public with lived experience of mental health services.‘ - Anna Testar, Senior Curator, Hospital Rooms.

Photos © Hospital Rooms (Oliver Udy)

Other news

Read Sovay’s feature for VASW commissioned to mark the ten year anniversary of UK government recognising Cornish as a national minority. Please find an excerpt below, and click on the image to link to the VASW website and read the full piece.

‘Celebrating Cornish Minority Status and Cultural identity is empowering and joyful, it is also a way to name responsibility. A request to England and the wider UK to hear, recognise and respect our story in the way that we tell it. And to Kernow, to own its relationship with the world not only as a colonised culture, but acknowledging that our heritage of invention and influence supported exploitation and violence.
It is essential that Kernow is outward facing, looking to make reparation and reconnection beyond our coastline, as peers with shared and vastly different experiences. By doing so we model another way to lead, be, create and care.’

Sovay has now concluded the Clore fellowship and submitted their provocation paper (excerpt below).

‘At a time of well recognised climate crisis and limited resources, a time of acknowledgment of societal inequality, when practices of care are being called for, we need a rebalancing of power, and access to power, that is supple, responsive, reflective and in-tune with the natural cycles of our lives. Using a methodology that comes from the land we walk and live on, even eat from, feels congruent with the change we need to make.’

Sovay’s research asks how the policy, governance and strategic layer of the arts and cultural sector can more intersect with the behaviours and practices of creative production. Referencing re-wilding, Doughnut Economics, and systems of creative practices to develop a concept with a working title of ReWilding Arts Leadership.

Photo © Liz Howell

MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh

(Mussel gathering | Precious Fragments)
A multi-platform expanded sculpture project exploring contemporary Cornish Cultural identity.

ButCH/* text for MESKLA

Sefryn Penrose and Angela Piccini of Butch/*'s text Gathering Precious Fragments: Reassembling Heritage through MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh responds to the first year of MESKLA. Placing the project within a broader historical and contemporary context. The text was submitted to the Cornish Language Service at Cornwall Council for translation and as hoped has led to new language.

'Can a Cornish deep map of place and vista that includes moorlands, farmlands, granite towns, coastal villages also include nightclubs, clootie trees, roads, bus stops, toxic remnants, seashell kitsch, the granite carpark bollards that Berriman and Sibungu laugh over? Can the messiness of being in this place present a more progressive set of possibilities? It is this Cornish speculative futurism that Sovay Berriman’s work with reclaimed plumber’s copper and collective “rubbish” sculptures occupies. New-not-new, not from nothing. Reused. Extraction never really moves on: it leaves its fissures and fractures and waste. How might we bind together precious fragments to craft culture and identity, meaning and belonging, traction, from the leftovers?'
Penrose, Piccini, 2023

Catching Copper

A short story by Sovay Berriman, Catching Copper, 2023, is part of the wider MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh body of work, and speaks to some of the origins of the project. It is about loss, change, and power. It considers how people, place and experience form who we are; it wonders about relationships to land, labour, and what we leave behind; and it pays attention to the impact of small moments.

An audio version of the story is available to listen to via YouTube below.

A limited edition riso print, edition of 50, of the Catching Copper drawing has also been made to accompany the publication. To purchase your copy of print and publication please visit my shop.