Fourthland with Rosalind Fowler

About

This is a project collaboratively devised by Fourthland, Rosalind Fowler and a gathering of people from across the world whose paths converge on the Wenlock Barn Estate in north London. 

At PEER, the artists present a new film and sculptural installation that focuses on a staged performance enacted in the public spaces of this housing estate, informed by Fourthland’s nine-year engagement with people living there. 

The film has developed out of a series of what the artists refer to as ‘visits home’; as they accepted invitations into people’s individual dwellings they held conversations, gathering materials and cultural acts that could be made public through collective enactments. These performances feature crafted objects that the artists  see as an embodiment of the reference points they encountered, as well as an elementary mobile stage setting or backdrop. The objects and reenactments create a liminal space for stories to collide and take on new forms using the language of myth and symbol. The project aims to use the idea of dreaming, or the unconscious imagination, to shift ways of thinking and allow new forms of kinship to emerge. 

Captured on 16mm film this performance becomes a collectively produced constellation of moments, memories and histories that people carry with them; the Estate no longer just a place of residence, but a living archive of cultural inheritance. 

“An endless walk, a notation of the sole – this wandering tale of potential and encounter materialises the intangible complexities of experience into something with edges and ambivalence – exposing, cyclical and binding.”
– Fourthland with Rosalind Fowler

Permissible Notations of was shot on 16 mm film and hand processed before transferring to digital format for its presentation at PEER. This will be screened alongside an installation of the objects used within the film. Throughout the exhibition period, the gallery will be activated through gatherings and an open seminar and discussion. This is the first time Fourthland and Fowler have worked together, and they have collaborated on all aspects of the project.

Fourthland (Louise Sayarer and Eva Knutsdotter) is an artist collective that uses objects, ritual, storytelling and enactment to co-create public space and performances. Recent and forthcoming solo works include BearMotherHouse, SPACE, London October 2017, The Storm within Jeremy Deller’s Utopia Treasury Somerset House (2016) and back to where we have not quite been, Arnolfini (2015). Other art commissions include Resilience Lab, Aldo Rinaldi and Everything Happens on The Street, PEER (both 2015) and Public Dreaming, Errant Bodies, South London Gallery. 

Rosalind Fowler is an artist and filmmaker, with a background in visual art and anthropology. Her work explores the politics and poetics of place and belonging in the contemporary English landscape through the prisms of folk culture, alternative communities, science fiction, pre-history and the language of dreams. Her recent ACE/Barbican funded film installation was presented at William Morris Gallery, the Barbican and Somerset house’s Utopia season. This work evolved out of an artist residency at the William Morris Gallery (2016). Other commissions and awards include Wellcome Trust, Arts and Humanities Research Council, A-N, NOW gallery. Selected screenings and exhibitions have taken place at ICA, BFI, Jerwood Gallery, Plymouth Arts centre and PLACE: Common Ground curated by Gareth Evans.