Talk
Artist Talk; David Spero on 'Settlements'
15 Mar 2023
Regular hours
- Wed, 15 Mar
- 14:00 – 16:00
Free admission
Address
- University for the Creative Arts at Canterbury
- New Dover Road
- Canterbury
United Kingdom - CT1 3AN
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- Travel from London Victoria to Canterbury East Station (1h 13-30mins), then by taxi or foot to the campus (10 minute walk). Canterbury West Station (which is a twenty minute walk from the gallery) is also served by trains from St Pancras and Waterloo (1h
Taking place as part of 'Dawn' UCA's spring curatorial exhibition program, photographer David Spero will present their 'Settlements' photographic project.
About
David Spero:
David Spero was born in 1963, studied photography at the Royal College of Art, London and has since worked on a number of interconnected photographic projects. His work is in numerous collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum and British Council.
Settlements:
Building and exploring alternative land-based, low impact ways of living. They aim to be ecologically sustainable and for their dwellings, economy and way of life to have a minimal environmental impact. Renewable energy sources are used as are locally sourced natural and recycled building materials.
Taken from 2004 onwards, the photographs chart their evolution and growth seen through homes, communal spaces, infrastructure, food growing areas and periodic community portraits.
They centre on four settlements: Steward Community Woodland, Tir Ysbrydol and The Roundhouse at Brithdir Mawr, Tinkers Bubble and Landmatters. These are followed, for reasons of privacy, by a section titled ‘Locations Undisclosed’, and then by a smaller number of images from two more recent settlements, Fivepenny Farm and Lammas, which evolved out of the preceding settlements and were set up more as communities of smallholders.
The photographs document and reveal a more sustainable way of life and a closer, more balanced and symbiotic relationship with the natural environment. Together they provide a record of communities and individuals whose way of life challenges the mainstream, and in the process expand debates on growth, land use, environment and notions of development and progress.
Settlements was published in March 2017. The book consists of 151 photographs accompanied by settlement introductions written by each of the communities which give accounts of their histories, aims, structures and economies, and texts by the author that explore connected historical and contemporary issues.
Dawn:
dawn. brings together artists whose practice uses performance, sculpture, photography and film to call to attention the connection between humans and the land. The exhibition programme seeks to activate and awaken ideas of simultaneously beginning and returning, to new-ancient knowledge, to ancestorial stories held in the body and the desire to belong as part of the land.
Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of progress – Anna Tsing
