Fourthland with Rosalind Fowler: BREADROCK
8 September - 3 November 2018
“BREADROCK is a message of mystic law summoned collectively between people and soil when given a place to dream.” Fourthland & Rosalind Fowler
BREADROCK, a critically acclaimed exhibition made by Fourthland and Rosalind Fowler, and first shown at PEER (Feb-April 2018) is a visceral homage to cultural history, memory and universal myth produced in collaboration with the diverse communities of Wenlock Barn Estate in East London.The process of working in collaboration with fifty residents from eleven cultures produced a series of sculptural works, rituals and performances for film that particularly explore the social power of myth. The project was an outstanding success, championing social change through art and enabling diverse participation through performative methods.
The 16mm film produced for BREADROCK, I feel like doing this, melds experimental and ethnographic filmmaking in a series of staged vignettes drawing on the rituals and artefacts of the estate’s Bangladeshi, European, Kurdish, Serbian, Turkish, Ugandan and West Indian communities, to create new kinships and myths.
I feel like doing this manifests the inner worlds of Wenlock’s inhabitants: a Bangladeshi woman wearing her wedding dress buries a symbolic ‘umbilical cord’ in front of forty guests to mark her son’s birth; a West Indian man channels his deceased grandmother through an old-fashioned telephone and a cosmic donkey; another man surrounded by sheet music conducts an invisible orchestra and symbolic ancient rock, inspired by his love of geology; and others slowly process and gesture, holding bowls and plates aloft. The soundtrack is a composition of raw sounds improvised from domestic household objects found in a resident’s flat.
“The artists record the performers in a series of actions and tableaux with dignity and beauty. They are consummate image-makers.” (Caroline Douglas, Director of Contemporary Art Society).
I feel like doing this will be screened at Kestle Barton alongside new filmic work made in Cornwall with immigrant communities, I Carry You in My Eyes, and new sculptural work during BREADROCK (8 September – 3 November).
