SolasArts Whats On

SEA FEVER 2
Four surfers, (three visual artists and a writer) join together at Porthmeor studios, overlooking the beach to co-curate a reflective and speculative exhibition/event. The project gathers and entangles rich and strange flotsam and jetsam of visual forms, salvaged poetry, and sound. The creative thinking of the project has risen through the sharing of surfing sensoria and ecocriticism (environmental concerns) and flows through the exhibition to conjure future visions of the ocean.

Sea Fever was originally a surf art exhibition event at Tate St Ives for its launch programme in 1993 with the participation of Surfers Against Sewage who were founded that year. Our project reflects back to that time of heightened consciousness and environmental activism but brings a current spirit of the abyssal fantastic to this site on Porthmeor Beach.

In conversation with surfing superhero Captain BanPlastic, Mandy Bloomfield, Andy Hughes and Ben Cook contribute drawings, photographs, video and sound work. We are delighted that Captain Ban Plastic has agreed to collaborate, loaning a series of their large-scale drawings which capture their heroic moves through a toxic ocean to save the Planet!

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21st - 28th October 2023
Captain Banplastic, Mandy Bloomfield, Andy Hughes, Ben Cook, Lizzie Perrotte.
At Borlase Smart Rooms, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall

During this event there will be talks and other events TBC.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-sam-bleakly-mindfulness-and-surfing-tickets

Sky Egg
Large format inkjet print | Hahnemühle German Etching.
100 cms x 150 cms
Work from Gapado AiR artist residency 2022.
Andy Hughes

From the Origin Story
The origin story zine comprises a series of ink drawings chronicling Captain Banplastic's meteoric journey from humble surfer to superhero fighting the plastic pollution and toxic waste destroying the marine environment and poisoning our waves.
Captain Banplastic

RED CREEK
4th - 7th November 2021
Peggy Atherton & Andy Hughes
At Borlase Smart Rooms, Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, Cornwall

A collaborative exhibition of photographic and sculptural installation in response to the material entanglements at Frenchman's Creek, Lizard, Cornwall.

Red Creek is a ‘pop-up’ show of work engaged with environmental politics and poetics. Haunting photographic work by artist/environmentalist, Andy Hughes, comes together with a mysterious sculptural installation by Peggy Atherton in response to the site of Frenchman’s Creek, Cornwall; its complex entanglements: ecologies, histories and fantasies. Both artists explore the poetics of waste matter, themes of ruin and entropy, weaving together fairy-tale elements with contemporary critique and wry humour.

‘Red is the most joyful and dreadful thing in the physical universe; it is the fiercest note. It is the highest light. It is the place where the walls of this world of ours wear the thinnest and something beyond burns through.’
(G.K.Chesterton, 1910)

Forthcoming Events
Pilgrimages
SolasArts organise a unique form of creative walking tours or ‘pilgrimages’. These are not designed to be religious or spiritual but draw from a wide range of recent critical thinking about pilgrimage as forms of transformative experience. Pilgrimages are a global phenomenon from ancient to modern times. Whilst predominantly related to sacred/spiritual beliefs they have also developed secular formations We are interested in the idea of pilgrimage as a creative ritual (chosen state of liminality) related to movements through an environment with heightened attentiveness to its natural topography, materialities, histories and stories.

Our pilgrimages are guided by artists in collaboration with other practitioners from different specialisms seeking ways to respond to historic traces and material relics of a route. Through performance, conversation, creative art processes, the hope is that participants will be able to leave everyday mind-sets to come together to think creatively outside boundaries. Each pilgrimage attends to non-human participants encountered during the journey, the dynamics of weather, plants, material objects and animals. Within the ritual of pilgrimage, ideas of separation between self and ‘other’ can be suspended to experience an environment through forms of connectivity and mutual interaction. When returning from pilgrimage participants can bring back relics that they have created en route. We also produce a pilgrimage publication as a record of each group’s unique journey.