People Involved
Barb is an award winning singer, writer and theatre practitioner who has worked internationally for four decades with more than 20 acclaimed recordings as a solo artist and many more made in collaboration with other major artists. She has recently collaborated with US Grammy winning pianist, Laurence Hobgood, on the jazz project "Shelter From the Storm" which tours internationally in 2016 alongside her collaboration with US Emmy winning Musical Director, John McDaniel, with whom she has created a new live piece celebrating the Beatles’ songs. She is known for her radical interpretations of songs, a powerful and passionate performer with a unique voice and as a songwriter both for herself and for theatre productions. For the last three years she has been a Master Teacher at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center’s Cabaret Conference in Connecticut. She has been the Artistic Director of the Deep Roots Tall Trees project in Corby alongside Cultural Engineer and Producer, Rosalind Stoddart, for 5 years working with local musicians and singers, and songwriters, creating a now established repertoire of Songs of Corby’s experiences and life, past, present and future. She has written for many major publications including The Guardian, contributed chapters and essays to books including The Cambridge Companion to Blues and Gospel and is a regular contributor to many BBC Radio programmes. She recently was the subject of an hour long special currently airing in the USA on PBS National Television and has appeared on BBC Breakfast, BBC4 TV and BBC2 TV, as a performer and contributor on singing and the voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqnMF7tnbs0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCplstWgjyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tssuy8Y5YrE
www.barbjungr.co.uk
After graduating from Camberwell School of Arts and crafts with a BA (Hons) in Painting, Rosalind gained a PGCE:AD. She then spent a few years teaching before working full time as an artist gaining certain recognition including being selected for one of the 1000 residencies across the country awarded by The Arts Council England in the year 2000.
From late 1998 she began to exhibit other artists work in her home. Her organisation, Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, formally became a not-for-profit limited company in 2004, and a charity in 2008 with Rosalind as Artistic Director.
She has a broad interest in the arts with a focus on the visual arts. At Fermynwoods she was particularly interested in engaging with the environment (both rural and urban) especially with the Forestry Commission, as well as current agendas in the locality. This was achieved through exhibitions, education programmes, residencies and outreach community projects. Rosalind resigned from her position at Fermynwoods at the end of 2009 and is now working independently. The main project she is presently involved with is Deep Roots Tall Trees which she initiated in 2011. She is currently a Trustee of The Core at the Cube in Corby and an observer on the Groundworks Northants Board.
Judy Caine
Judy is Project Manager for Our Woods. Her association with Deep Roots Tall Trees began initially as a choir-member and later as one of the musicians (flautist) at their sell-out concert in August 2014 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
She has a BA in Creative Arts and has specialised in arts project management for over 20 years. Judy has worked across many disciplines including dance, drama, sculpture, music, lighting, visual art and video.
When not project managing Judy spends most of her time producing documentaries. Her clients have included, the BBC, Channel 4, Arts Council England, Heritage Lottery Fund, Universal and CBC (Canada), to name a few. She has won nine international awards for her work.
She currently chairs SEMLEP’s Creative and Cultural Committee and is very committed to making Art accessible for all.
Kate Dyer
Kate has been a key figure in the Corby arts community since 1985. She is both part of the Deep Roots Tall Trees management team and Artistic Director of Corby Community Art, which aims to build a sense of belonging and responsibility to local neighbourhoods through active participation in the arts. In her own right, she is a published photographer and community artist, and has worked on projects as diverse as Our Corby (an arts and heritage project) and is a founder of Late Developers photographic group.
Neil Paris
Neil is Director of SMITH Dance Theatre. His first work for SMITH, Agnes and Walter: A Little Love Story, toured the UK to critical acclaim. He was commissioned by The Bloomberg Place Prize for Dance to create The Devil's Mischief, which also featured at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival and Bristol Old Vic Ferment and is currently developing After The Fall: A Little Morality Play, a new work for SMITH.
Other recent work includes choreography for Wolf’s Child by WildWorks, Motion Scores for the ProArt Company in the Czech Republic and Red Shift for The Voice Project choir in Norwich.
He was a core member of Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre performing in five productions; Giselle, The Bull, James Son Of James, The Flowerbed and The Rite Of Spring in collaboration with English National Opera. Fabulous Beast toured internationally, receiving three Olivier nominations and winning numerous awards. He worked with Dan Canham/Still House in the creation and touring of Ours Was The Fen Country and has recently devised a one-man version of Chaucer's The Knight’s Tale for family audiences.
He teaches and and leads workshops in the UK and Europe including voice and body intensives with Margaret Pikes of Roy Hart Theatre Köln, the Pro Art International Workshop Festival in the Czech Republic and across the education and community sector in the UK. In 2012 he was the recipient of an Olympic Inspire Mark Award for Dance Aloud, a collaboration with Norfolk County Council and deaf students from City of Norwich School. He is currently visiting lecturer at Brunel University, an Artist Mentor for Barbican Creative Learning and Associate Artist with UROCK Creative.
www.agnesandwalter.co.uk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTgwV93ybBs
Kurt Laurenz Theinert
Kurt is a live performing light and media artist. His "visual piano“ performances are shown all around the world in Sao Paulo, London, Sydney, Berlin, New York and Singapore.
He transforms commonplace situations into artistic, poetic and dynamic spaces by the ephemeral means of light. This mismatch of our inner image, created by our experience, with the new experience, opens the perception of the visitors and leaves them in a new cosmos of light, shapes and colours. He plays with the thin skin of constantly varying light on the physical objects - the world is his canvas.
In collaboration with Philipp Rahlenbeck, he invented the worldwide unique instrument "visual piano“ which enables him to fill spaces with lines, objects and colours in real time without using prefabricated clips.
He creates pure visual music – live, abstract and space filling by using 360° panorama projection. There is no technical link between sound and image to enable a spontaneous dialogue between him and the musician. In his compositions and improvisations, he pries open the static properties of his projection spaces in favour of only those spatial correlations that can be perceived in the dynamics.
www.visual-piano.com
about the instrument: https://vimeo.com/150907431
with choir: https://vimeo.com/160223235
with dance: https://vimeo.com/25555221
Radio Symphony Orchestra: https://vimeo.com/97050761
Different spaces:
https://vimeo.com/85154678
https://vimeo.com/149034948
John Haughton
"I retired in 2011 and live very close to King’s Wood Local Nature Reserve. I started walking through the wood with my camera taking photographs of plants and insects and trying to identify them. It was not long before mushrooms became my main interest, I find them particularly fascinating and they can be extremely difficult to identify. There is a lot about them that I don’t know and I also have difficulty remembering the names of some of them – my wife suggests that this is because of my age. I do enjoy sharing the bit that do I know (and can remember) with others who might be interested.
The photo is of me and a Barn Owl that I met at a display of raptors in Market Harborough. (It is one of a few where I don’t look like a grumpy old man!)"
Carry Akroyd
A painter and printmaker, Carry Akroyd has lived in Northamptonshire for most of her life. Much of her imagery is drawn from the landscape, literally originating in walks with a notebook and pencil, but also from an interest in the history of events over centuries that have affected our rural surroundings. Carry was elected to the Society of Wildlife Artists in 2000, as incidentally birds and botany became a significant element in her work. Nevertheless, colour and composition are just as important to her work as subject matter.
Paula Bolton
Paula uses nature as her inspiration for her music, dance and poetry and can be found in the wildest of places making beautiful music, swaying with the wind or writing down words which the muse sends her.
She recently composed an orchestral suite inspired by King's Wood where she walks daily.
She has delivered countless projects in Corby over the last 30 years and trained in music, dance and drama in York, London and Rotterdam.
Jo Blake Cave
Jo performs nationally and internationally as a storyteller, actor and performance maker. Her work particularly explores the interface between traditional practices and contemporary stories, taking the form of site-specific events, storytelling sessions and staged performances for theatre spaces. She has collaborated with the National Trust, National Theatre and British Council, and was recently guest artist at the Leeds Lieder Festival 2016. In 2009 she was the youngest storyteller to be nominated for an Arts Foundation Fellowship Award for Storytelling and was Resident Storyteller at Royal & Derngate Theatre from 2010 to 2013. Recent performances include ‘Wishbone’ as part of the NOW 16 Festival at The Yard theatre, premiering in May 2016. She is cofounder of Talking Skull Collective – a network of international storytellers. She is Associate Lecturer on the BA Acting degree at Northampton University, with an MA in Dance Theatre from Trinity Laban. and is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Chichester in emergent storytelling practices.
Sophie Cullinan
Sophie is a visual artist who works with diverse age ranges of children and adults, to make participatory workshops where each unique, individual contribution is a vital element to the creation of dynamic, large scale, site-specific installations, which incorporate, light, sound and colour to the landscape.
Sophie has previously created participatory works for Tate Liverpool and The National Trust and in Northamptonshire locations for Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, MK Gallery and Metro-Boulot-Dodo.
Anna Douglas
Whilst Anna Douglas likes digging about in archives she also loves collaborating with people. She produces projects that on a broad level deal with everyday culture. Sometimes she curates gallery exhibitions, and at other times produces events and performances. She likes projects that reveal and open-up neglected lines of cultural history and enjoys it when she can invite individuals to enquire into our collective social and cultural identities, considering how these have been shaped in the past, and continue to be shaped in the present. She founded the artist group &some so that with friends she could work more playfully. For ‘Our Woods’ she wants to fulfill a longstanding ambition to let off steam and play Hide & Seek on a big scale with other grown-ups.
Cat Gerrard
Cat is a storyteller, theatre-maker and director based between Berlin and Wales. She trained at LISPA, Drama Studio London and the Young Vic Directors' Programme. With a love of physicality and cross-arts experiment, Cat blends narrative with many forms, including percussion, puppetry and cycling. Cat is Founder and Artistic Director of storytelling company TailSpin, with which she curates and MCs events across Europe, creating a space for innovation and play (including the Night of the Storyteller, The Story Bazaar festival and The TailSpin Cabaret). As a storyteller she is currently working with Tim Ralphs on The Four Chambers of the Heart, a panoply of traditional LGBQT love stories and ritual theatre. She is also currently directing and performing in her first short film, Mutilated World. She is a founder member of Impronta Teatro, appearing as part of the Lighten Up festival.
Performance credits include: The Tempest (Prospero/Caliban/Ferdinand, Crow Tree Theatre, Secret Spaces Tour), Theatre Témoin’s 5-star show The Fantasist (Edfringe 2012, 2013; UK/Ireland tour); Cycles of the Southern Wild (Storyteller, TailSpin, Blue Elephant Theatre); A Christmas Carol (Tiny Tim/Ghost of Christmas Present, Metal Rabbit, Old Red Lion Theatre); Epic Jukebox (Storyteller, Pandvani 108/The Crick Crack Club, Soho Theatre; Richmix). She was selected for the 2014 Young Vic Springboard programme for emerging directors. Directing credits include: Red Sky at Night (The Old Red Lion Theatre); The Odyssey (Northampton Univeristy); Smooth Landings (Michael Frayn Studio, Hampstead Theatre); Look, But You Must Leap (First Draft, The Horse).
Vanessa Grasse
Vanessa is a dance and multidisciplinary artist from Sicily now based in Leeds, UK. Her work embraces improvisation, cross art-form collaboration and site-specific performance. Her cross disciplinary approach has let her work take different forms, including video installation, walks and outdoor installations.
In the recent years, walking and exploring urban and rural environments has formed a base for her movement research and choreographic practice.
She has been commissioned choreographic, led and audio walks by Dance4, Still Walking Festival, The University of Leeds, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Ludus and Juncture festivals among others.
She is interested in how we experience and practice perception in our daily living with the environment and with others, and how we sense and inhabit a place. Ecology is an important aspect of her work, acknowledging the relational nature of self and environment and the resonance of movement, action and agency. Her work is underlined by a movement practice based on attentional and perceptual investigations. She is interested in offering settings to experience embodiment, composition as kinesthetic experience and stimulating different channels of attention.
Dr Peter Hill
Peter Is a musician, lecturer in adult and higher education, and the author of 21 books, including: Rockingham Forest Then and Now (1995), Rockingham Forest Revisited (1998), various books on Corby and district, and the phenomenally successful Folklore of Northamptonshire (2005) which was shortlisted for the Folklore Society’s prestigious Katharine Briggs Award.
In the past few years he has been part of a team of specialists, working with communities, and documenting the county’s heritage via three major projects: People of the Forest, Rose of the Shires, and Here Be Dragons, which have been exploring the archaeology, landscape changes, social history, folklore and customs of Northamptonshire.
Virginie Litzler
Virginie is a French artist currently living in Belgium, who is interested in the dialogue between people, urban spaces and motion. Virginie photographs and interacts with people in everyday circumstances to explore how they belong to and move through places, finding ways to communicate and experiment with gravity.
Virginie worked with members of the public in Corby in 2013, as part of Fermynwoods Contemporary Art’s Gesture project. This time Virginie will be exploring how members of the public interact with Corby’s woodland with a series of workshops that aim to shift how we might perceive trees and feel weightlessness in the forest.
Francis Lowe
Francis is an artist and award-winning academic with over 20 years’ experience working in the creative industry. He started his career working in Hollywood on ‘Alien 3’, ‘Solar Crisis’ and ‘Tom and Jerry the Movie’ and moved on to Children’s Television in the UK (CITV’s ‘Wolves, Witches and Giants’ and BAFTA-nominated ‘Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids’). He works as a Senior Lecturer and Course Director in Illustration and Animation at Coventry University, contributing to cutting edge research and delivering papers all over the world. Francis believes that art should be inclusive and accessible. He also believes that everyone has a story inside them, so when he’s not creating his own, he’s helping other people to bring theirs to life or to find the stories that surround us.
Matt Merritt
Matt is a poet and journalist from Leicester. He has published three collections of poetry - Troy Town (Arrowhead, 2008), hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (Nine Arches, 2010), and The Elephant Tests (Nine Arches, 2013), and his latest book is a prose birdwatching memoir, A Sky Full Of Birds (Rider Books, 2016). He is the editor of Bird Watching Magazine, and blogs at polyolbion.blogspot.co.uk. He lives in Southam, Warwickshire.
Matthew Oats
Matthew is a naturalist, author, broadcaster and poet, and a specialist on butterflies. He works part-time as a specialist advisor to the National Trust, and writes regularly for The Times Nature Notebook. Although a nature conservationist by calling, he is greatly interested in people’s relationships with nature and with places, and has a strong interest in the concept of spirit of place. His work embraces both science at art.
Anthony Shrag
Once described as 'fearless', Anthony Schrag has been known to blow things up, kidnap people, attempt the world record for hand-holding and recently walked 2500 km across Europe all in the name of art. For Our Woods, Anthony will be doing something else he loves, climbing trees. In his climbing trees for grown-ups, the artist will help you scale new heights and escape into the the simple pleasure of exploring just about the only place the modern town-dweller can find solitude these days... up a tree.
Anthony Schrag was born in Zimbabwe and grew up in the Middle East, the UK, and Canada. He is currently based in Scotland. By his own admittance he prefers to work with people rather than produce art objects.
Photo: Craig Hutchison
Charlotte Spencer
"I initiated Charlotte Spencer Projects (CSP) in 2009 and use this banner to draw together a broad range of exceptional artists from the fields of choreography, dance, music, visual art, writing and the environment to produce original and exciting new work. With a philosophy that art is inseparable from life – that it draws from, comments on and seeps back into it, I aim to dismantle boundaries between stage and life. I choreograph for public spaces and am committed to creating performances that put the audience at the heart of the work. As a choreographer, I am inherently interested in movement. Movement in all its manifestations must always involve a change or a shift. In my work, movement is the journey, the being in transit, the process. It does not have end points because then the changing stops. My work rises from the landscape. I look to question ideas about journey, presence and time and aim to build community by inviting people to re-encounter themselves in relationship to their lives and their environment. I look at the traces we leave, the journeys we take, the maps we make to the tell the story of our shifting, living presence. I work extensively across art forms and in outdoor environmental contexts."
Charlotte Spencer www.charlottespencerprojects.org
Katharine Thoday
Katharine is a sustainability professional experienced in incentivising environmental governance and decision making. She was the UK Government's advisor on international forestry and climate change and in her spare time occasionally partakes in coppicing in her local Cambridgeshire woods.
Ben Waddington
Ben is Director of Still Walking, since 2012 Birmingham’s festival of guided tours and walking events. Still Walking’s programme celebrates the many different ways people have of seeing and understanding the world and supports turning their knowledge, experiences and outlook into guided tours. Audiences are generally encouraged to share their own observations rather than merely ‘follow the leader’ and receive information. The result is a closer connection with our environment and the walks can lead to new avenues of research, interest and activity.
Ben has worked as a local historian and researcher in Birmingham since 1995. For the last ten years he has been interested in the format of a guided tour; why people lead them, who attends them, what subjects are covered (beyond heritage and ghosts) and what people get from them. In recent years, the walks have extended beyond Birmingham at the invitation of other organisations, with walking events planned in Leeds, Hay-on-Wye, London and Hong Kong.
Matt Westbrook
Matt is an artist and educator based in Birmingham. He has been consistently involved with developing artist led activity in the city and is a f ounding member of Grand Union Artist Studios and Gallery. He has exhibited widely as an individual practitioner and in collaboration with artist Chris Poolman as part of BAZ (Birmingham Art Zine), a self styled ‘think tank’ who’s focus of attention is often the art world itself.
As an individual practitioner he has been building a body of work that uses imagery derived from early 20th century tool and engineering catalogues. He is currently artist in residence in the Research and Cultural Collections at the University of Birmingham, where he is researching a new body of work that explores the nature of collage itself using pareidolia1, cultural memory and narrative.
www.mattwestbrook.co.uk
www.bazbazbaz.com
www.grand‐union.org.uk
Miles & Dacombe
Miles & Dacombe have been collaborating since 2010. Their work aims to creatively engage people with environments, often enhancing the senses and leading walks into undiscovered places, connecting people with their surroundings in surprising ways. They work nationally, running walking projects and creating interventions in landscapes. They have worked on trains, in fields, climbed trees and explored crossings between the urban and the rural, even in the rain.
Impronta Teatro
Created by four graduates from LISPA (London International School of Performing Arts), from Italy, the Basque Country, Germany and England, The company devises highly visual, short pieces of performance to be taken out of traditional theatre settings and into interesting spaces for anyone who is there. Working with puppetry, physical theatre, storytelling and using recycled materials, Impronta Teatro brings you something between a flash-mob, street theatre and pop-up puppetry. With the support of the Little Angel Theatre's INCUBATE scheme, Impronta has developed short pieces for London's public transport and parks. Now the woodland of Corby beacons in a piece made just for the OUR WOODS festival.
Late Developers Photographic Group
The group began in 1996 where we used the darkroom in Canada Square to develop and print black and white films and photographs. We created a community group and our first publication was ‘Corby in Black and White’ We have had many exhibitions throughout Corby and,working with other community groups, produced the Corby Diary for 7 years.
Our main activity is walking, talking, noticing and making beautiful images.
20 years on and we are mostly digital and still have access to a dark room where we can pass on the craft of black and white printing. We connect with other community groups and enjoy the gatherings where food and socialising are important.
We currently meet every fortnight at Stevie Way Community Centre from 10.30am till 12.30 pm
The Eloquent Fold
Carole Miles and Phiona Richards normally work individually as freelance artists but have worked together collaboratively as The Eloquent Fold since 2013 in order to design and develop innovative arts initiatives together. Both artists are drawn together by a love of text, books, maps, fabric, history, journeys, exploration, photography, making and doing. In their work they use recycling and upcycling as a way of connecting with participants of all ages and abilities.
Photo: Electric Egg
Iris Bertz and John BellWoodland Wizards
Iris and John have worked together for fifteen years on many projects.
Iris is a Willow Sculptor and Creative Mentor who has trained basket makers in Brazil, exhibited in the UK and Germany and led many outstanding willow workshops throughout the UK and Germany.
John is a Theatre Designer and Maker who has led more theatre projects than he cares to remember, helping a whole school draw with light in a glorious night-time festival, building processional puppets, lanterns and masks, making theatre on the streets of Hoxton.
"We have both worked extensively in the UK and abroad helping people to explore their creativity, learn new ways of doing things and make wonderful work with simple materials, colour and light. We are looking forward to working with everyone on “Deep Roots Tall Trees” to help tell the story of the woods of Corby."
www.irisbertz.co.uk
www.jbd-arts.com
Fermynwoods Contemporary Art
"Fermynwoods Contemporary Art commissions artistic dialogue between artists and audiences, people and place. As an educational charity we initiate innovative and meaningful ways for non-arts audiences to engage with local and internationally acclaimed artists, in public spaces across Northamptonshire. We infiltrate the everyday through temporary interventions that reflect the performative nature of inter-disciplinary art, in real and virtual spaces across Northamptonshire. We work collaboratively to fuse urban culture with the rural landscape and bring rural perspectives into the urban environment to create contemplative spaces for audiences."
Simon Heijdens, Tree, projected onto Corby Cube, 2010.
Image taken by Andy Eathorne.
Electric Corby
a key part of the growth and regeneration plans which aim to make Corby, Northamptonshire one of the most environmentally and economically sustainable areas in the country.
The Wildlife Trust
The Wildlife Trust for Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire works to make our three counties a place where nature matters, where wildlife can flourish and enrich the lives of the people who live here: with your help we care for local wildlife. Ninety five per cent of the local population live within five miles of one of our 126 reserves and contributions of time or money will directly benefit local wildlife www.wildlifebcn.org
