ReWilding Arts Leadership

ReWilding Arts Leadership is a practical enquiry, a testing ground, and a new project that has grown from Sovay’s Clore Fellowship experience.

The project proposes that we use principles of rewilding to bring the behaviours and strategies of art and art making, into arts leadership as a method to enable greater parity in agency, income, influence.

‘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 Berriman

To read Sovay’s provocation paper, find out more and get involved please visit the project page ReWilding Arts Leadership.

Sovay presenting ReWilding Arts Leadership at Royal Cornwall Museum, 2024
Photo © Liz Howell

MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh - Rubbish Sculpture & Conversation sessions coming up >>>

Coming up in Jan & Feb
Kresen Kernow
Maker Heights, Rame Conservation Trust
Saltash & Newquay

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

During Lowender Festival Sovay hosted a panel conversation for the Yeth ha Tir project with Kernewek, Scottish Gaelic and Livonian language musicians, singers and writers Laurie Hugget, Mischa McPhearson and Julgï Stalte.

You can listen in to their conversation via YouTube below.

Julgï, Laurie and Mischa played a concert together in the evening of Sat 26th Oct joined by Tricia Salt and Annie Bayliss. You can read more about that here.

I was so happy to be invited to join Ayan Cilmi & Fozia Ishmail of Dhaqan Collective, artist Kaajal Modi and environmental humanities academic, Jim Scown to record a conversation with Jelena Sofronijevic of EMPIRE LINES. The conversation was facilitated by Counterpoints Arts for Eden's Interweaving Threads of Migration and Climate Justice weekend. Dhaqan Collective and Kaajal Modi hosted workshops in the afternoon with under and over water listening.

Conversations from the event are available to listen to again via EMPIRE LINES podcast - episode link below.

Many thanks to Hannah Hooks and Anna Dermitzaki and the team at Eden for hosting such a valuable event.

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

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