TÎM / TEAM
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Dr. Alexandra PlowsCyd-Ymchwilydd / Co-Investigator
Ysgol Gwyddorau Cymdeithas, Prifysgol Bangor School of Social Sciences, Bangor University a.plows@bangor.ac.uk |
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Sara Penrhyn JonesCyd-Ymchwilydd / Co-Investigator
College of Liberal Arts; Bath Spa University s.jones3@bathspa.ac.uk |
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Principle Investigator
o.jones@bathspa.ac.uk College of Liberal Arts; Bath Spa University o.jones@bathspa.ac.uk |
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Dr. Tom PayneCydymaith Ymchwil /
Research Associate College of Liberal Arts; Bath Spa University t.payne@bathspa.ac.uk Website |
ARTISTS & FACILITATORS
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Jo Munton
I am participatory community artist. My art form is workshop and on my eclectic palette are puppetry, poetry and parade, storytelling, sculpture and animation.
My training was sculptural and word smithery. (Fine Art- installation and creative writing – Bath Spa) And my love for these processes is still very prominent and I practice them whole heartedly. But I yearned for more engagement. I stumbled into puppetry, performance and the stage. I create (co-create and devise) puppet shows, usually aimed at family audiences, usually quite silly, sometimes a bit sorrowful and often with a heap of educational sauce. I love the laughter and relish the heart felt tears that is shared in those times. But still when i ask the audience to come on a journey with me i want them to really come. But truly my greatest artistry and passion lies in the Art of Collective Creative Exploration. It is a unique and relatively new artform. Yet it is as old as the shamens call to the fireside. It is engaging and tiring like nothing else i have ever experienced. Part performance, part play, part work, part game, part science, part dance and all alive and engaged. vagabondipuppets.com Hydroscope | Autumn Gathering |
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Esther Tew
Esther Tew is a multimedia artist and artists technician who works with sound and light installations and site specific reactive sculptures driven by sound, light, water, wind, people, fruit, etc. Her background includes working on large-scale evening walkabout events like Sounding the River and For the Birds. She has also worked with climate change researchers to create and deliver play based workshops to communicate the findings to wider audiences in an immersive and self-directed environment. She has desired to collaborate with Borth based artists since meeting the community through discovering the events in the Friendship Inn and joining the choir. esthertew.com
Water Water Everywhere | Autumn Gathering |
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Jude Macklin
Towards Hydrocitizenship’ invites us to engage with the watery realm in an inclusive platform. Initially, at local level, it provides opportunity for dialogue and conversation with the range of people and communities that inhabit the hinterland of Cardigan Bay skirting south of the Dyfi Estuary along the Afon Leri towards Borth and Tal y Bont.
The landscape of the Cymerau (Confluence) project provides an arena in which we can initiate a new response to a local environment through a shared experience. Initially using drawing, as idea and process, to tease out a sensory connection with the space and environment surrounding us for the purpose of re-imagining human-nature relationships. Our interest in landscape as a subject for drawing and printmaking has been facilitated by a transdisciplinary approach with an emphasis on artists-scientist collaboration. In turn, working with archaeologists and geomorphologists a bigger picture has opened up through travel/work opportunities in Europe, Australia and New Zealand. What has helped to sustain, grow and guide these collaborative projects, in unexpected and interesting ways, is to ensure they are locally ‘grounded’ within the community and seek to address issues that have practical utility as well as benefit for human well-being and ecosystem health. judymacklin.com Concertina Books | Autumn Gathering |
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Gwilym Morus-Baird
In 2012 my long running interest in Medieval Welsh poetry resulted in a doctorate from Bangor University. I have also worked as a research fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, comparing international performance practices. I currently offer online courses in Welsh Mythology (see chwedloniaethgymreig.com) and fulfil music commissions.
Commissions include an album of songs responding to art works at the 2011 National Eisteddfod; music for television (f.e. Y Tad Deiniol by Pixel Foundry), for puppet shows and for arts installations (f.e. a piece included in Jony Easterby’s For the Birds). I am currently working on a commissioned piece for an arts consortium making music out of bicycles, and a collaboration with the painter Laurel Gallagher on her extensive project Feral State. Since 2005 I have released several albums of original material, and was lead singer and percussionist for a twelve piece afro-funk outfit called Drymbago. I have also released popular versions of folk songs such as Ym Mhontypridd and Tra Bo Dau that are played occasionally on BBC Radio Cymru. I have also been responsible for collaborations with musicians from Palestine. My music is online at mwncinel.com and gwilmor.com. Cymerau Launch | Ar Lan y Leri | Penillion y Leri | Autumn Gathering | Spring Gathering |
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Jane Lloyd-Francis
My practice has been developed by theatre and live performance. I produced and directed Equilibre Horse Theatre for 15 years, a company known for its unique and diverse work. Horses were central, their mythic and symbolic presence permeating all the work.
I like to create performances and interventions that are visually led and I am interested in exploring the space that exists between theatre and the visual arts. My work is eclectic; I welcome the synchronicity generated within process, I embrace stitching together a patchwork of ideas to create responses that are textural, detailed and emotional. janelloydfrancis.wordpress.com Cymerau Launch | Ar Lan Y Leri | Spring Gathering |
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Anne Marie Carty
Anne Marie Carty is a filmmaker who uses video as a tool to create safe spaces for reflection and imagination for people and communities. She has 20 years’ experience as a filmmaker and participatory video worker, and since 2006 she has been developing a reflexive filmic practice with, and for, the rural communities of the Dyfi Valley, including a series of 6 documentary films called Tir Cyffredin – Shared Land. annemariecarty.co.uk
Y Gors | Autumn Gathering | Spring Gathering |
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Dafydd Sills-Jones
Dafydd Sills-Jones is a lecturer in media production cultures at Aberystwyth University. He works through traditional scholarly approaches, as well as through filmmaking. His recent work includes the documentary film ‘17’ (2014) that depicted the serenity of the collective cultural script of a Helsinki suburb, and ‘Pwy Yw T.H.?’, a video installation that conjured the voice of the late poet T.H. Parry-Williams through a contemporary ‘choir’ of readers. dafyddsillsjones.weebly.com
Y Gors | Autumn Gathering | Spring Gathering |
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Nick Jones
Nick Jones is a composer/songwriter creating music for the theatre at home and abroad. He runs and leads the Borth-based community choir ‘Côr Y Gors’. The choir is unusual in that its subscription base pays for Nick to write music for the choir; they sing his music exclusively. He teaches and leads workshop, and sings and writes for local 3-piece band, ‘Whistler'. nickjonesmusic.co.uk/Home.php
Cymerau Launch | Y Gors | Autumn Gathering | Spring Gathering |
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Jenny Hall
Jenny Hall is an architectural designer, artist, and maker and the creative director for Craftedspace, a successful, experimental studio based in Wales. Both technically adept and sensitive to space, her work seeks to explore how built form can shape human experience, as well as the reverse - how human experience can shape space. She creates playful architectural spaces for people to bring to life with their own narratives and explores the intersections of play, space and performance. craftedspace.co.uk
Cymerau Launch |
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Jess Allen
Since 2010, and intensively over the past three years of doctoral practice-as-research, I have been developing a rural, relational arts practice (‘tracktivism’) that is a synthesis of walking art, talking art (dialogic practice) and ecological activism. In that the shapes, routes and rules of my walking are guided by environmental concerns, it is a subtly activist redeployment of the aesthetics of walking art. But the walks are principally a device, used to facilitate unexpected conversations or interventions with the strangers I encounter.
These conversations are guided by the theme of the walk and the act of walking into them brings a neutrality that allows the dialogue to meander safely around more difficult (political) territory. Taking place in unusual, rural locations – from footpaths and farmyards, to river banks and bus stops – also brings an immediate relevance to conversations that are most often about the landscapes we’re standing in and the issues that affect them; as well as creating a transient community of participants along the route. In this sense, tracktivism is a peripatetic, pedestrian, pastoral version of what Wallace Heim has termed ‘slow activism’: creatively-facilitated, artist-mediated conversations along social or environmental themes, that have a subsequent, transformative potential. watertreatmentwalks.org.uk Water Treatment Walks | Spring Gathering |
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Peter Stevenson
Peter Stevenson is a storyteller, children's writer, book illustrator, folklorist, purveyor of Magical Lantern Shows, concertina and banjo player, organiser of the annual 3 day Aberystwyth Storytelling Festival and Y Mabinogi Project in collaboration with Aberystwyth Arts Centre, and runs Stories by Gaslight, a storytelling club that encourages collaborations with visual artists, musicians, dancers, puppeteers. He has illustrated, compiled and written many children's books, travelled the country with storytelling shows for adults that use hundreds of projected illustrations and live music, has just finished collecting and writing The Ceredigion Folk Tales for the History Press, and tramps the roads with mud on his boots and his head in the clouds. Peter is an associate partner with Aberystwyth Arts Centre. cabinetofcuriosities.moonfruit.com
Story Walks | Spring Gathering |
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Erin Kavanagh
I am a poet, artist and archaeologist. My research concentrates upon the space between disciplines, where narrative is transformed. This encompasses geomythology, art'chaeology, theory and site specific performance. I am currently working under two grants, one directing a deep map of Cardigan Bay under the ISRF and the other a collaboration under Cymerau in which I am engaging poetry as archaeological method for public engagement. Both are intrinsically interdisciplinary and are concerned with the subject of deluge myths through applied epistemology. independent.academia.edu/ErinKavanagh
Stories, Songs, Science and the Sea | Spring Gathering |
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Lynne Denman
Lynne Denman performs music deeply rooted in the landscapes of the British Isles. She has sung for audiences in five continents and her repertoire includes traditional and new songs in Welsh, English and French. She is a founder member of Ffynnon. For bookings contact her at lynne@ffynnon.com. lynnedenman.bandcamp.com.
Stories, Songs, Science and the Sea | Spring Gathering |
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Kate Doubleday
My current artistic practise involves working directly with people from my local community to collect stories, making observations of the landscape and develop songs that make an oral documentation of a place and time. I am particularly interested in the wildlife habitats that exist and evolve within my local environment. This new activity will facilitate and further establish the original style of my own work as a singer song-writer, having particular influences drawn from the Welsh landscape and performing within special and beautiful surroundings. I have experience of working with the RSPB and Wildlife Trusts to create music Tours and publicising such events. The music group I work with includes multi-talented musicians:- Trevor Lines ( Bass), Dan Wilkins ( Guitar/Kora) and Marie Smith ( Cello). katedoubleday.com
The Water Pipe Project |
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Helen Kennedy
Helen Kennedy is a community arts practitioner at Aberystwyth University and is part of a co-operative of interested parties involved in Borth Community Gardens. We are resourceful and tough (the saying goes - "if you can last a winter in Borth you will stay for ever"). We possess a broad range of skills and experience including the following : Carpentry, sculpture making, 2d and 3d creative arts, organic gardening and permaculture, photography and image making, song writing and musicianship. Many members of our group are qualified and experienced workshop leaders and educators.
The Water Shed | Spring Gathering |
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Boz Groden
My 2D practice is a combination of humour and conventional illustration techniques , that often deal with the conflict and hypocrisy of our worldview and institutions. I am particularly interested in the idea of Psychogeography , the visual representation of peoples concept of a landscape, rather than the surface reality.
Water Map |
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Ffion Jones
Ffion Jones is a Lecturer in Practical Theatre at Aberystwyth University. She has undertaken her BA, MA, and more recently, her PhD at the department. Ffion teaches practical workshops on the English medium Theatre curriculum. She is also a practising artist, currently working on a film commissioned by AHRC funded, Hydrocitizenship research project, and continuing to work with fellow National Theatre of Wales performers- Rosa Casado, Richard Huw Morgan and John Rowley as part of the performance collective AS. She developed a mode of working with rural-identities and cultures during her BA (2004-2007) and MA (2007-2008) at Aberystwyth University. Work such as her MA solo Fleece, attempted to challenge the idea of the rural idyll with the realities of rural-life through an engagement with mental health issues within rural society. Her experiences of growing up on an upland sheep farm, and her current status as artist/farmer academic often feature within her practices, as she bridges the gaps between her various life-roles. Her most recent work was the result of a four year practice-as-research PhD (2009-2015: Woollying the Boundaries: Perceptions and interventions into Upland Sheep Farming in Wales. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Rural Research).
Treiddio / Permeate | Spring Gathering |
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Becky Payne
Map Dwr Prints | Cymerau Launch |
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Bodge
Bodge is a community arts practitioner, Adrift Gallery. http://adriftgallery.wixsite.com/adrift-gallery
Cymerau Launch |
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Tom Gunn
I live in Borth on the West Coast of Wales with my partner Helen, our dog Dan, our cat Molly and Mrs Bunny. I spent so many hours on the beach taking pictures that I named myself Seaside Man. I like nature, particularly beaches and forests, and I find the beauty of Wales inspirational. I play the guitar reasonably well and sing fairly poorly. Music is my chief interest apart from photography.
I left the computer industry in 2007 and took up photography. I gained a Masters Degree in Fine Art/Photography at Aberystwyth University, graduating in 2012. Over the last few years, I have completed a range of photography contracts for local organisations. I learned with film but now exclusively use digital. My current main camera is a Nikon D700, for which I have a good selection of top end lenses. I work to very high standards and have a deep love for all aspects of photography. I am also a skilled web designer and programmer. seasideman.com Cymerau Launch | Autumn Gathering |
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Jo Shapland
I am a multi/interdisciplinary artist, choreographer and performer with over twenty-five years professional experience of devising and presenting dance performances and installations. My work is rooted in landscape. It is developed and presented in spaces ranging from ruined farm-buildings to traditional proscenium theatres, from natural wilderness to urban architectural interiors. I have wide experience of collaborating with artists from a broad spectrum of disciplines and bring them into both my own and freelance projects. I constantly seek out and research the body through international workshops and placements. In 1998 I established Man Troi as an identity and vehicle for the presentation of my work in the public domain. mantroi.wordpress.com
Cymerau Launch |
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Ariana Jordão
Ariana Jordão graduated in marine biology and mastered in human ecology before starting to work with the arts. In 2013 she joined Helloearth.cc visual arts company (DK) on Re+Everything at Transforma Laboratory of Contemporary Arts, Portugal. Since then, with Hello!earth, she has been involved in an ongoing research process on phenomenological performance-making that extends awareness of interrelation with the whole biosphere, developed through residencies in Iceland, Finland and Sweden facilitated by Kedja Nordic Dance Network’s Wilderness program.
Cymerau Launch |
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