Sandwich Le Weekend

Ruth and I went over to Sandwich for their Le Weekend event.    The small station is one of those places where the platforms and surroundings have flower beds and the ticket office has books to read, just lovely.  Walking up what I think would have been the ramparts I was struck by the amount of yew trees and a lovely sense of ancient place.

 Sandwich is a picturesque town and apparently is one of the best preserved medieval  towns in England. The centre is a maze of streets with lovely buildings everywhere you look.  Sandwich was also a main Cinque Port until the river Stour silted up. Boats are still moored along the river though. Sandwich website here

It's a bit confusing though at first finding your way around, but as the town is quite small you can walk around easily. We went into St Peters Church for a brocante just as a thunder storm opened up.

Fortunately the sun came out not too long after and the stall holders were able to fix their stalls.
Down by the river Stour were vintage cars and bikes, a medieval camp and food tents.

The Barbican anf Tollbridge are well preserved buildings  and people had to pay tolls to cross the bridge till 1977.  The toll charges are still listed inside the Barbican. It's a bit of a competition with cars around there and single file along the bridge. The streets are pretty narrow of course but there is a square in front of the ancient Guildhall, where on this weekend there was a French Market, the best place for baguettes and croissant.

 

Open Garden Squares Weekend.

I visited a few urban gardens that were open as part of the annual Open Garden Squares Weekend. I went over to Kings Cross, for the Skip garden a mobile garden on the
re -development sites around Kings Cross.

  I hadn't been over there for a long time, and the changes around St Pancras and Kings Cross Station are enormous. Still lots of building sites, but clearance around the canal and new buildings too.Apparantly is the second biggest building site after the Olympic park.

I loved the idea of using skips as gardens and on their site there are skips growing a variety of vegetables and a recently planted herb garden in a skip. There are also polytunnels and an office/workspace.

The site is managed by Global Generation, with local volunteers, many of which have no access to a garden themselves. Info abou The Skip garden here

I then went to the Fann Street garden, which is on the Barbican estate and open to the residents. It's a project of the Barbican Wildlife Group. Info here

It's such a delight to turn off the busy road and find that there is a beautiful wildflower meadow in the centre of the garden, looking all the more unusual surrounded by the iconic, tall Barbican buildings.

There is also a cottage garden and pond and natural species attract birds and insects. The boundaries are planted with native trees including holly, beech, blackthorn and hazel.

The last garden I visited was The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, which is on the site of the old railway line opposite the new Dalston Junction station. info here

I loved the mixture of street art and garden on the site. There are pieces by Stik more of his work here
And childrens pieces including scarcrows decorate the space and walls.

 The new tall blocks of flats overlook the garden and residents with out gardens have been regular visitors.. There are spaces for holding workshops and meetings and cooking is one activity that's proved very popular. A team of volunteers keeps the garden running and developing.

Zebra finches at the Barbican Curve.

I had thought the exhibition finished but was really pleased to find that Celeste Boursier- Mouge's installation at the Curve in the Barbican was still there. ( on till 23rd May) It has a flock of Zebra finches loose in the large space with a number of electric guitars that pick up the sounds made by the birds perching and walking on the strings.

Absolutely fascinating, the finches are apparently getting tamer and some settle on people and especially check out things that look like nesting material including shoe laces.
They have been nesting in the boxes put up on the walls and staff have been finding eggs they told me, they are taken back to the centre where the birds come from for hatching.


Barbican website for details of the exhibition here The sounds that are made by the finches are played through speakers, and we hear them along with the chirps the birds are making.
It is a privilege to be with the finches flying free, squabbling and nesting and feeding, going about their everyday business I suppose not at all knowing they are part of a very popular art work.

Cloud Gate Theatre Wind Shadow

Last week I went to see the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan, their website here at the Barbican. I had heard their director speak at the conference of Buddhist Arts at the V&A and he had shown clips of their performances.Im was impressed by their work and looked to see if they were coming to Britain.

This performance,Wind Shadow was a rather darker production than those he had showed us, but impressive. The choreography was by Lin Hwai-Min, good article about him here with dancers as light and shadows in monochrome colours.

At first their was one kite hanging and blowing in the wind, then dancers appeared some with shadow dancers seemingly attached to their ankles some waving large flags and some dancers appeared to have wings.
Slowly it seemed as though there were more and more of the rather ominous shadow dancers taking over the stage and the artist Cai Guo-Qiang's, (visual director for the Beijing Olympics) gunpowder drawings were projected behind and captured on fabric by the dancers.
There were some deafening explosions and lasers near the finale as the dancers were caught in smoke, as were we near the front of the stage, it was as if we were caught up in a battle ground with torrents of black pieces of paper, like ash also showered down on the dancers and blew across the audience at the front. The dancers moved into a huddle seemingly caught up in a final catastrophe a tunnel of smoke and ash lit up by erie green lasers. Good review of the performance here

So we left rather somberly after the performance and it's vision of a type of hell. Really great dancing and staging and I think perhaps the first overtly political work from Cloud Gate.
Another good review here

Radical Nature and the monks from Tashi Llumpo Monastery

I have been lucky to see the monks from the Tashi Llumpo monastery at St Ethelbergha's and at Asia House where we had a day to study and have a chance to practice some of the spiritual offerings they make,including torma and butter sculpture, sand mandalas and block printing.
The monks made a small peace sand mandala during the day and it was great to see that practise again, with the ritual prayers and music.

There is something very moving about their work and it's a tragedy to think that it would be easier for me to go to Tibet now than any of the monks.

I also went along to the Barbicans Radical Nature exhibition, I am pleased that there seems to be more artists engaging with issues of ecology and the natural world, but the exhibition was a little bit of a disappointment. Perhaps because the exhibition had more in the way of video and installation, but it seemed rather bare.

I was struck by Mark Dions work, the little piece of travelling wilderness,"Wolf 2006" which was a stuffed wolf on a trailer. There was something powerful about the wolf even in it's preseved death. I watched most of CLUI's video of stills from photographing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline 2008" They are incredible images with some text charting the technical and engineering difficulties the construction of this longest oil pipeline in the US entailed.

The problem with video art is that you need to spend a long time watching them and when there are more than a couple in an exhibition it is hard to see much of them. A12 had a great idea, something I've thought about for some years myself, that of providing "zones of respite and contemplation within the built environment". They had built a small wooden structure that was mirrored on the inside, it was planted with grass and had a piece of topary and an urn full of ivy and maybe box. You could step inside and see the minature garden reflected around you.

Perhaps the pathos in the whole exhibition was that most of the plant life inside was not doing well, the Barbican is a really dark building in general and plants need light. Maybe that was an intentional part of the exhibition.