Creatively connecting people with place along the Norfolk/Suffolk border
Black Dog Arts aims to develop art and craft in the Bungay area. We are a volunteer run organisation, formed in August 2007.
Membership is open to anyone who supports our aim. The 100 or so members range from professional artists, art teachers and students, to amateurs and enthusiasts.
We hold workshops, talks and exhibitions in response to members’ interests and requests. We also offer mutual support and networking to people living in this rural area through our programme of activities
I am a self taught 3D artist using found materials – wood, metal, plastic – to create both figurative and abstract pieces mainly for outdoor/garden locations but also small pieces for indoor display. I refer to myself as a “creative bodger” and am more interested in the original idea and process rather than the ‘finish’ of a piece. I have been making ‘objéts’ since the late 60s, having been fired up by an Antony Caro exhibition of painted steel works at the Hayward Gallery, London. I collect discarded objects from skips and such like, and it may take several years before seeing something stimulates me to begin the creative process.
My 2D work is largely a continuation of following an impulse or idea and seeing where it takes me. Having developed a bold body of work in oils, I began several years ago to use pure watercolour, keen to find out how far I can take it into abstraction while still communicating something about what this landscape means to me. The latter seems to be something about honouring the grace of the ordinary, a phrase I picked up from H A Williams, theologian. My working class childhood in Yorkshire feeds this passion, having formed an emotional landscape in which simple hard work and duty were the manner of expressing attachment…
I use images of the many places I have visited and lived, Suffolk being recent and current.
The fascination of this landscape of marshes, muddy estuaries and beaches of pebble,
grasses and shingle, provides an endless source of inspiration.
With the right atmospherics, anything and everything can reflect a powerful beauty – from a sunset or a mountain, coastlines, fields and islands, to a moody thunderstorm at sea.
My recent paintings are very much about a sense of place and weather, and painterly
concerns such as texture, colour, shape and surface. I have not attempted accurately to
record or recreate, but to evoke the landscape of the real, remembered and imagined.
While the experiences are autobiographical, the images I make are carefully mediated
memories of the many and varied landscapes through which my life has passed.
These paintings of unpopulated places have an emotional charge. As an artist I choose and
edit the scenes, setting the stage for viewers to bring their imagination and private meaning
to these places, and wanting the painting to evolve its own life and meaning. Different
places in the landscape trigger memories of a shared past: the paintings are also enquiries
into unfamiliar spaces and attempt to create something unpredictable, beyond the subject.
Ivor has been writing poetry now for about fifty years. Some of his poetry appears in webzines such as ‘Ink, Sweat and Tears’ and ‘Snakeskin’. He also posts and reads some of his poems on his website, www.versifier.co.uk.
Suffolk Artlink are a participatory arts charity. We develop and deliver inclusive arts programmes in communities that bring skills, support networks, confidence and joy to people in the East.
Our creative projects aim to help people transform their lives through the arts, and are delivered in places including community centres, hospitals and hospices, residential homes, refuges and schools.
Our work is led by experienced arts practitioners, encompassing a rich variety of art forms, and is delivered in close partnership with care, education, voluntary and community organisations.
How does the landscape influence and inspire us? This is the core of my work – researching landscape history and culture, and crafting both prose and poetry to explore creative connections to nature and place. From a career in landscape management and environmental policy, my focus is now designed to encourage community writing in response to nature, and to connect people with their landscape memories.
I am available to commission as a writer or to run writing workshops. I am also interested in collaborative ventures which explore and celebrate landscapes and raise awareness of the need to take action to protect them.
I have been published in a number of landscape essay anthologies. Details of publications and some examples of my work on my website.
Find me at www.melindaappleby.co.uk
Seraphim is a talented ensemble of nine female singers, handpicked by director Vetta Wise and all experienced performers as soloists or as members of leading choirs and eminent groups throughout East Anglia.
Dedicated to exploring the glorious acoustics and visual inspiration of historic churches and buildings in Suffolk and beyond, Seraphim has established a remarkable reputation for the range, quality and commitment of every performance ever since its first concert in 2014. They have accepted invitations to perform abroad and in this country; and their innovative all-day “musical pilgrimages” of mini-concerts combined with enlightening talks from a knowledgeable speaker are enabling smaller, delightful spaces to become known to a wider audience. Whether singing a cappella or joining forces with outstanding local, national and international musicians – piano, harp, flute, organ and baroque ensemble have featured on their programmes to date – Seraphim’s original aspiration remains constant: to deliver “beautiful sounds in beautiful spaces”. Contact hello@seraphimvoices.uk.
Informed by the Suffolk countryside around me, and the Hampshire landscape of my childhood, my work is about my experience of landscape and the feelings evoked.
Daily walks provide material; usually collected and/or recorded in drawings. Studio process and memory play a large part in the paintings, often resulting in a degree of abstraction. I am always searching for a duality of surprise and recognition, hoping to find that ‘something’ I didn’t quite know I was looking for.
Always drawn to the tangled complexities of nature, a specific hedge near my home has been the focus recently for detailed watercolours. I enjoy the close scrutiny of botanical detail that these require. Some of these works take the form of the Leporello. I feel that the unfolding nature of the
book mirrors the pace and rhythm of walking.
RoughCast is an East Anglian theatre company. We produce classic works of theatre for the love of it and tour them throughout Suffolk and Norfolk. We are based loosely around the Harleston area.
