In the Open

The exhibition 'In the Open' took place at Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield Hallam University, Cantor Building and Bank Street Arts, 32-40 Bank Street, Sheffield, S1 2DS from September 6th - 29th 2017. The exhibition featured my collaborative digital film ‘Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough’ made with American poet Laura-Gray Street (Associate Professor of English at Randolph College, Virginia, USA). This work was made in response to an invitation to work collaboratively to make a new artwork for the 'In the Open', Sheffield, an exhibition of collaborative artworks around place, landscape and environment. The exhibition complemented the conference: 'Cross, Multi, Inter,Trans: Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, U.K. and Ireland Biennial Conference 2017' (UK and Ireland) 6-8 September 2017, in association with LAND2: a landscape, place and visual arts research network. Overall, the exhibition 'In the Open' reflected artists’ preoccupation with and experimentation with space on the wall and within the book-space in relation to landscape. Works include artists’ books, texts, images, videos, paintings and objects. The exhibition will incorporate poetry and text on the windows and walls to be read in relation to the visual works hung on the wall. The digital film Street and Creamer made for 'In the Open', '‘Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough’, is a 11 minute film made in situ in the Longdendale valley in the Peak District, near to the city of Sheffield in the UK. Creamer filmed, recorded the visual elements of a work that is edited around a performative and adapted reading of a new long-form poem Street wrote on the occasion of their collaboration, taking the valley and its haunted history as a subject for thought about the complex entanglement of place, memory and landscape. 'In the Open' was reviewed in Plumwood Mountain, which featured '‘Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough’', an Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. It is the focus of a forthcoming special edition of peer reviewed journal Green Letters, published by Taylor and Francis. The work featured in this exhibition, 'Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough', also features on the following UAL Research Online web-pages: • The First Biennial Sino-British Contemporary Art Exhibition - book: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/13678/ • Conference paper: 'Longdendale Lights: Perspectives (I) and Longdendale Lights: Perspectives (II)., presented at 'Cross, Multi, Intra, Trans conference at Sheffield Arts Institute, Sheffield Hallam University, as part of the Land2 research and Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, U.K. and Ireland research networks. https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/13675/ • The art work itself, ‘Longdendale Lights to Shining Clough’ https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/13902/