Our New Page on the Local Giving Website

We have been offered a fantastic opportunity!  Northamptonshire Community Foundation has invited Beanfield Artists to to be a part of Localgiving.com, a new website allowing charities and community groups to receive donations online for a three month trial period.

Working with UK Community Foundations, Localgiving.com was started to help communities engage with supporters online, letting them know about their volunteer and funding needs as well as the great work they are doing in the face of government cuts and increased need in the community.

We have a wealth of wonderful ideas and a proven track record delivering innovative, engaging projects. As we are a not for profit arts organisation which raises funds on a project by project basis we are keen to see if this new initiative can help us make our ideas a reality. We have two projects on our pages that we hope to find funding for.

The Art Of Growing

Beanfield Artists propose to become Artists in Residence at The Green Patch allotments in Kettering for 2 weeks in August 2012 and volunteers at Green Patch are keen to stage the project there. Art works will be made in a variety of ways, including the use of recycled and upcycled materials and the use of natural materials such as wood and stone. The project will identify and explore themes inspired by the allotments themselves.

Ticket Exchange Banners

During 2011 the artists staged The Ticket Exchange on trains in Derbyshire, inviting people to send a comment by postcard, about their journey. The artists wish to produce a creative response to the postcards with textiles, print, stitch and digital imagery in the first instance, to the postcards received. These will become the textile masters for a series of permanent artworks to be sited on Stations in Derbyshire and shared with the community. It is hoped that the artworks will encourage travellers and the local community to get involved with the Adopt A Station initiative.

If you would like to help us make a difference please follow the link below to make a donation any amount, large or small will be greatly appreciated.

http://localgiving.com/charity/beanfieldartists

Questions about Localgiving.com?

You can ring Northamptonshire Community Foundation on 01604 230033,

contact the Localgiving.com Help Desk on 0300 111 2340

or email help@localgiving.com

A Greenway and Blue Ribbons

Our March walk for our Light Walks project took us to Finedon.

Half the group were late arriving, so meanwhile we wandered around the church. There are a number of rabbit holes in the green next to the church, we watched a while to spot them! Someone noticed birds flying in and out of a broken air vent making a nest.

Some of the headstones are fascinating and beautiful. To think people had been there for nearly 300 years!

Ornamental hedges spied over the Churchyard wall

Strange holes, like small explosions in the ironstone

Once the whole group had arrived we set off up the road from the church, carrying our bags of seed bombs.

We soon came across a likely place - a patch of land next to the road where a building had stood and had been torn down, leaving bricks, debris and weeds. 

We launched our seed bombs here - made from wildflower seeds, clay and compost, we hoped there would be enough rain to get them rooting here over the next few weeks.

The strange round tower, now attached to a house. We all speculated on what it could have been. A flour storage tower? Part of a castle? No, an ice house!

Walking along the road towards an enticing woodland. The shadows already getting long.

We met this lovely walker who had been exploring these paths and fields since childhood, remembering the ice tower when it was just part of the field and not incorporated in a house on an estate. 

She was delighted that we were coming to discover a place so dear and so familiar to her and her faithful companion. She told us about the wild flowers and the former profusion of snowdrops, bluebells and violas "There aren't so many now as when I was a girl."

 

Following desire lines by the edge of the field...

  

... then suddenly descending down steps into a deep greenway - a line, previously a rail line, now a long straight walk dug deep into the earth, cool with steep slopes either side, now reclaimed by the trees. As water gathers in greenways, it etches them still deeper into the ground over time.

Under an ivy-clad branch - natural or man-made archway we wondered?

March blossom illuminated by the spring sunlight.

Sleepers, hinting at the greenway's previous function.

The greenway gradually rose again until we were walking level with the fields once again. Across a small bridge, and back into dense woodland.

We came to a clearing, a single, slim tree standing in the middle on its own, naked and not yet awakening for spring.

We suggested tree dressing to celebrate this tree, an old pagan tradition to celebrate trees. 

Jo had a bag of bright blue ribbon, and so we began...

 

John's ingenious use of feathers as stakes to hold the ribbons in place.

We enjoyed lying down, looking up

We lay underneath our creation and looked up at the sky. Branches and ribbons mingled.

We enjoyed being inside, looking out

John looked so at home there we thought he might stay all night!

We would have liked to have left our tree dressed

It was intriguing to catch sight of the bright blue flashes through a multitude of branches. But we had seen a sign on an information board - no structures could be left in the woods - would it be wrong to leave it for others to find?

Would the ribbons cause damage to the tree?

We decided it would be far more appropriate to unpeg the ribbons

and unwrap the tree

rewind the beautiful blue strands.

Tempting as it was to leave one streamer

or a clue that we had been there

 we decided to leave no trace other than these pictures.

INTENZ at Corby Open

 

During March we took part in the first Corby Open Exhibition in the Old Library. Artist Phiona Richards has written a lively, comprehensive post describing how the exhibition came about which you can read here.  The Old Library is a wonderful space and there are many artists working towards making it a more permanent Gallery and Studio Spaces. We decided to enter a variation of our installation INTENZ called Conurbation which utilised the big triangles and three sets of smaller triangles.

INTENZ was originally created as part of our project Fingerprints on the Pew and in response to the architecture of St Peter and St Andrews Church in Beanfield Avenue, near our studios. It is a portable sculpture which can be moved and changed, creating many different permutations. INTENZ has already appeared at a number of sites in a variety of configurations.

Parents and children making sculptures

at the Boating Lake in Corby

During the Festival of Christmas trees 

at St Peter and St Andrews Church

 

At York Minster

Now we had a new venue, at the Corby Open, to arrange our adaptable sculpture. Setting up was quite eventful as we had been allocated a space to be shared with artists with films to project. It was a tight squeeze and took several hours to install but we were helped and encouraged by one of the exhibition volunteers, Nick, a landscape designer who completely understood and enjoyed the flexible nature of the sculpture and its exploration of space. Nick spent several hours with us, playing with the permutations of the sculpture's structural possibilities, and relating it to his own thoughts about garden structures.

We were just about to tackle the lighting when it was all change! The space was also going to be used for a poetry reading during the Private View and the other artists felt the installation would block the flow of people through the room. We were left in a bit of a quandary as we had been allocated the space and couldn't immediately see where we could move to.

After investigating other spaces and making a flurry of phone calls, we set about dismantling the installation, moving furniture and reassembling everything in a completely different configuration in another room! Again the space was quite tight, there was no room for people to interact with the sculpture as we had originally intended and there was definitely no flow through.

In many ways the space was challenging to use and the results not completely to our satisfaction, but we wanted to add our support to this new venture in the heart of Corby. We rose to the challenge, this being another opportunity to reconfigure the installation once more to fit yet another space!

We were able to set up some of our small lights 

and darken down the room to create some dramatic effects.

Ann Leonard, who originally saw INTENZ at St Peter and St Andrews, and came to Corby Open, said "Loved Miles & Dacombe's installation, it gains new dimensions whenever I see it."

Here are a pair of visitors who decided to turn on the main lights to see what was in the room! Carole was at the gallery that day and invited them to make their own sculptures with the smaller triangles.

Although it had proved challenging to install INTENZ at the Corby Open, we once more had some great interactions with people who saw the work and had a chance to interact with the structural shapes. All the elements of INTENZ are made in the same proportions, an irregular tetrahedron, in a variety of sizes, from the very tiny to the huge! It is constantly fascinating just how many structural inventions can be made from the same elements and it was great fun to give the installation another outing!

Miles & Dacombe plus INTENZ can be hired to help your
school, gallery or group explore space, light and sculpture.
Further details available upon request.