Gather at the River Cole
Artist-printmaker Haseebah Ali will collaborate with Concord Youth Group to make geometric prints inspired by water. These will be crafted into tiles using sustainable materials to create a seating area, mural or walk way.
Installation artist Mary Partridge will create an intervention inspired by the history and architecture of the River Cole.
Artist and poet Lee Mackenzie will encourage participants to discover and connect with the Burbury Brickworks Nature Reserve and his workshops will result in the creation of poetry interventions shared along the tow path.
Textile artist Mahawa Keita will uses her textiles practice to connect with people and their stories in different communities and create a colourful sculptural intervention.
Artist & herbalist Chloë Lund plans an interactive, durational piece that involves inviting people to appreciate the Cole’s beauty through a series of creative invitations, and using these, as well as found materials to build an installation.
Artist & singer-songwriter Kate Thompson will collaborate with Stirchley Singing Group (SSG) and a children’s group from The Springfield Project to create and perform a song along the river. Listen to SSG singing Ide Were Were, a song about the goddess Oshun (of love and fertility), a traditional folk song from Yoruban & Santeria traditions
Juneau Projects, often inspired by nature and the natural world will collaborate with a community group and the RSPB to create an intervention for the arts trail crafted out of wood or ceramics.
Indian singer-songwriter and a contemporary Rabindra Sangeet vocalist in Bengali, Sahana Bajpaie will collaborate with a women’s group to create a song and serenade to the River, performed along the tow path.
Public Programme
Workshops, guided foraging walks, songs & cultural activities along the water will draw people to unknown areas, animate disused spaces & encourage residents to reflect on our use of waterways & what this reveals about attitudes to the environment, locally & beyond. National & international artists who have made work centered around waterways will be invited to share their work at the celebration event.
Click through the gallery to see examples of activities, workshops and events.
Playful creative workshops will take place outdoors & along the River Cole. Land in Curiosity © Chloe Lund
Example of previous experience curating exhibitions & gatherings in public spaces. Becky Sexton with artist Corinne Noordenbos at Black Country Lungs exhibition, co-curated together in Lightwoods House & Park, Smethwick © Multistory
Installation by Artist Gio Tirotto of buoys with solar panelled lights in Rimini, Italy. When we serenade the river in winter, we will also include participatory activities that entertain audiences with a visual spectacle.
Becky Sexton collaborating on a workshop with artist Amak Mahmoodian at Brushstrokes community Centre. The Gather at the River Cole workshop programme will include community groups such as Concord Youth Centre, Knowle Road Allotments & Hope Inspired CIC
Playful creative workshops will take place outdoors & along the River Cole. Land in Curiosity © Chloe Lund
An exhibition launch and celebration event at Bearwood Community Hub. We will share food together at the 'Summer Serenade' led by singer-songwriter Kate Thompson with added activities blackberry and hazelnut foraging & story time.
Becky Sexton's previous work producing programmes for High Streets & parks has inspired the design of the Gather at the River Cole programme. Installing art work on West Bromwich High Street with Sandwell College students © Becky Sexton
Becky Sexton has previously facilitated urban nature walks and this experience has influenced the design of the wildlife walks programme in Gather at the River Cole. Guided walk along West Bromwich High Street © Kelly Hadley
Becky Sexton has previously facilitated artist walks in collaboration with youth groups. This experience has influenced the design of the wildlife walks programme in Gather at the River Cole.
Becky Sexton has previously facilitated guided accessible walks with community groups such as Sandwell Visually Impaired. artist walks in collaboration with youth groups. Walks, workshops and the arts trail in the Gather at the River Cole programme will be open to blind and visually impaired people.
Becky Sexton has past experience organising artist talks in person and online. This will inform the Celebration event that includes inviting a number of artists to speak about their work.
Outdoor events and activities in the Gather at the River Cole programme will cater to all ages.
Artist Bios
Carolina Caycedo is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist living in Los Angeles. Her immense geographic multi media works are not merely art objects but gateways into larger discussions about how we treat each other and the world around us. Through her studio practice and fieldwork with communities impacted by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, she invites viewers to consider the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we might embrace resistance and solidarity. Process and participation are central to Caycedo’s practice, and she contributes to the reconstruction of environmental and historical memory as a fundamental space for climate and social justice. Informed by Indigenous and feminist epistemologies, she confronts the role of the colonial gaze in the privatisation and dispossession of land and water.
Chloë Lund is a community-based creative practitioner living in Birmingham. Chloë was a leading member of Land In Curiosity, a project that supported people to deepen their connection with the land by walking and wild-camping for periods from 10 days – 6 months in the UK. Since then, she has worked in mental health contexts including leading creative enhancement activities in a Forensic Mental Health unit, facilitating wellbeing walks in nature for people referred by the NHS, and as an artist support worker. Her project Digbeth Lambs was a creative response to the abattoir near her home in inner-city Birmingham through creative actions and installations. Her artistic practise is inspired by a mixture of animist, Taoist and anti-capitalist principles and takes the view that the process is at least as important as the outcome. Chloë has a foundational certificate in Herbal Medicine and is an experienced forager, with an interest in making things with natural and found materials.
Haseebah Ali’s s an artist and arts educator based in Birmingham. Her work is centred around storytelling and conveying that through a visual language. As a printmaker, mainly working with relief print and intaglio, Ali enjoys weaving themes of her own Pakistani culture within her artwork, as well as highlighting humanitarian topics that need to be spoken about more. Her artistic aim is to create artwork that not only educates her but the audience to which it is viewed.
Jo Gane is an experienced artist and educator, working within both the museum and gallery sector and in education. She produces photographic based artwork for exhibitions inspired by the rich history of photography. She also works with major exhibitions to develop and deliver innovative photography related education programmes. Her specialist area of knowledge is the practice of early photographic processes and translating these difficult techniques into engaging hands-on workshop activities. She enjoys working collaboratively and thrive on working with and learning from enthusiastic partners and knowledgeable curators. She has recently created work exploring the River Cole through photographs exploring the stuff of the landscape and history, the materials of the chemicals, paper, soil, water and place.
Juneau Projects was formed in 2001 by Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler. Their work is made in collaboration with other people, ranging from one-off workshops that introduce people to a skill or technique to long term projects working with communities to create artworks for their area. They work across a broad range of media including sculpture, animation, print making, Riso printing, performance, music and public art. They are interested in the urge people have to be creative, how that has manifested throughout history and how we can work with groups to create work together.
Kate Thompson is an artist, musician and gardener nestled in a passion for connecting nature to people in their hometown of Birmingham. They are an experienced singer-songwriter known for their playful and engaging solo performances as well as their permaculture folk duo called The Untidy Gardeners. They will work in collaboration with Stirchley Singing Group and a children’s group from The Springfield Project to create and perform a song along the River.
Lee Mackenzie is an artist and poet living in Birmingham. He works on interdisciplinary projects combining poetry and the visual arts. He has been awarded Arts Council funding for research into the practice of 'Poetry Mapping', and worked on a number of societally-engaged projects, producing commissioned work for The National Trust, Elan Links and Multi Story.
Mahawa Keita uses her textiles practice to connect with people and their stories in different communities, using her work to help raise awareness of the issues that affect them. She describes her practice as ‘a journey taken by yarn, structure, texture and colour.’ Mahawa works with sustainable materials across knit, crochet, macramé and hand embroidery to produce both large and small sculptural pieces.
Mary Partridge is an installation artist deeply invested in the study of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and medieval architecture and its incorporation into her artistic practice. Mary’s exploration of this subject matter has led her to create unique and engaging art installations that evoke a sense of timelessness and historical resonance. She has also delved into the realm of outdoor talc drawings, leaving marks on various pavements. Her passion for this topic is also reflected in her series of drawings, which follow the famous artist Pieter Saenredam as he travels from church to church in 17th Century Holland.
Roo Dhissou is an artist and doctoral researcher who works with communities, diasporas and her own histories. Using community engaged practice, craft, cooking, performance and installation she explores how communal and individual identities are formed. Roo has worked with Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, New Art Gallery Walsall, The Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool, Primary, Eastside Projects, Ikon Gallery and more recently internationally in Spain, Canada and Poland via residencies.
Sahana Bajpaie has a PhD in Music (Rabindrasangeet) - the first doctoral thesis on the musical genre in the UK and European academia - from King’s College London. She was awarded at the UK Parliament "The Bengal's Pride Award" for her contribution to Arts and Culture. She was brought up and trained in Rabindrasangeet and Bengali Baul Songs in Santiniketan. She now travels the world singing and collaborating with musicians from different countries, has published five critically acclaimed studio albums, several singles and playback for Bengali films. She has performed at the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Festival Hall, Cambridge University, SOAS University of London, to name a few. She had spent quite a few years in Dhaka, Bangladesh and is now based in London. She teaches Bengali Language and Literature at SOAS, University of London of which she is an alumna.
Textile artist Mahawa Keita uses her textiles practice to connect with people and their stories in different communities and create a colourful sculptural intervention.
Artist Jo Gane will be invited to share her photographic project created along the River Cole which explores the stuff of the landscape and history, the materials of the chemicals, paper, soil, water and place.
Artist-printmaker Haseebah Ali will collaborate with Concord Youth Group to make geometric prints inspired by water. These will be crafted into tiles using sustainable materials to create a seating area, mural or walk way.
Artist and poet Lee Mackenzie will encourage participants to discover and connect with the Burbury Brickworks Nature Reserve and his workshops will result in the creation of poetry interventions shared along the tow path.
Carolina Caycedo will be invited to share her prolific work on waterways as part of the Celebration Day via an online talk. Serpent River Book (2017) is a 72 page accordion fold artist-book, that combines archival images, maps, poems, lyrics, satellite photos, with the artist’s own images and texts on river bio-cultural diversity, in a long and meandering collage.
Roo Dhissou will share their new work 'A Voyage on Water – The Komagta Maru Revisited' as part of the Celebration Day. Her presentation will use a style of A qissa (quisse plural), a tradition of Punjabi oral storytelling with communities which emerged when the local Punjabi people and migrants from the Arab peninsular and contemporary Iran fused.