Greening Chiddingly at ARTWAVE 2024

Artworks, soundscapes and poetry created in parallel with our various projects to Restore Nature across Chiddingly Parish feature as part of a special exhibition at the Gun Brewery in September. The exhibition is part of the ARTWAVE FESTIVAL, one of the largest visual arts festivals in the South East.

The main highlight will be output from the FARMSCAPE project, alongside work by local artists Riga Forbes, Barbie Harrison and Callista Giles. The exhibition is open from noon to 5pm over the weekends of 7/8, 14/15 and 21/22 September. For full details visit artwavefestival.org – the Gun Brewery is venue 140. The exhibition is supported by the Lund Trust and High Weald National Landscape Partnership.

FARMSCAPE EXHIBITION

Poem from a Greening Chiddingly Farmers dada poetry workshop

The FARMSCAPE exhibition is a collective of artworks by local artists that celebrate ecological stories and restoration projects in Chiddingly. FARMSCAPE hopes to renew a sense of awe and care for Chiddingly’s rural landscape by giving a voice to the connoisseurship of farmers and the biodiversity they are restoring.

At its heart is the creative community arts project by Greening Chiddingly Farmers that combines dada collaged poetry they and their families have created and farming soundscapes recorded over the farming year on their farms. Through this work, farmers from across Chiddingly share important stories about their hopes and fears for farming and their own nature restoration initiatives that will enrich the biodiversity of the local Sussex landscape that we see today in Chiddingly.

OTHER FEATURED ARTISTS

Riga Forbes

Riga Forbes exhibits her rich and detailed landscape paintings that are her response to the fragility and temporality of the natural world she immerses herself within. The tiny silhouettes of endangered species, the jewelled beetle and the large blue butterfly, that Riga includes in her paintings highlight this fragility and her concern with the loss of habitat and species biodiversity in the local farmed landscape.

Riga Forbes - Birches Beckon the Jewelled Beetle

Barbie Harrison

Barbie Harrison exhibits a new series of Icons, small but beautifully detailed works that capture fleeting moments of time in the life of plants, birds and animals, painted onto reclaimed wood. Barbie has painted, swifts, swallows, hares, lapwings, butterflies, marsh marigolds and nightingales, both celebrating these creatures and mourning their loss from the Chiddingly fields, meadows and woods; these species are amongst those that Greening Chiddingly Farmers have highlighted in their habitat restoration initiatives.

Barbie Harrison - A Scarcity of Swallows

Callista Giles

Callista Giles exhibits Meadow Mandalas and a video art piece, Flora, based on hand painted botanical illustrations, she has reinterpreted these into bold playful contemporary graphic artwork. The wild flower species depicted in Callista’s work are important for our gut health and support the ecosystem, both as a food source for bees and other insects, and in enabling wild flower meadows to alleviate flooding.

Callista Giles - Meadow Mandalas