Od Arts Festival - Thinking in Circles

About

The theme for the 2025 iteration is Thinking in Circles, exploring ideas of growth, production and consumption, in relation to the local rural setting of East Coker and West Coker, and internationally in response to the global climate emergency. Thinking in Circles aims to acknowledge ecological grief and culpability in consumerist and colonial cultures, allowing artists, residents and visitors to discover alternative ways of thinking.

Artist Emii Alrai will produce a new commission for Dawes Twine Works, the UK’s only surviving 19th century twine works, and historic producer of rope and flax for the maritime industry. Emii’s new commission will look at the role of map tables in the lands that empires conquer and their relationship to the maritime industry. Also at the Twine Works, will be The West Coker Strop by Vicky Putler in collaboration with Rachel Dobbs, a new community folk art object made from rope which will be intertwined with the wishes, hopes, magic manifestations and affirmations for the village and its community; a performative piece by Groundmouth (Harry Martin and Milly Melbourne) will become an installation and sculpture made from natural flax and local found materials; and film works by Geoff Diego Litherland.

In the Great Hall of the fifteenth century manor house of Coker Court in East Coker, Adam Chodzko’s 2009 video The Pickers (17’52”), explores the links between migrant work and climate change, following Romanian migrant workers labouring on a strawberry farm in Kent. Yelena Popover’s large-scale tapestry I Feel Thy Footsteps in Thy Skin (2024) seemingly depicts the ancient symbol of the ouroboros eating its own tail, to question provenance, authenticity and materiality.  Made from cut grass and black light, Simon Lee Dicker’s monumental sculpture Red Hot Haystacks (2025) investigates the unseen environmental impact of human activity wrought by nuclear testing in the 1960s.

In the cemetery chapel in East Coker The Summoning (2024), Chantal Powell’s ceramic and iron sculpture of clustered hands, connects the mythology and alchemy of harvesting to suggest powerlessness within global economies and politics. Ella Yolande’s installation Find us in the slip spaces (2024), is made from textiles, plant matter, images and sound, drawing on plant histories and symbology, land-based folklore and thin spaces to rethink the human body and its place within speculative ecologies. Also in the cemetery chapel, Dermot Punnett’s paintings Almanac (2020) and Noontide (2020) evoke the metaphysical experience of landscape through folk magic, the commons and rights of access.

On a site once occupied by a car sales showroom at The Old Saw Mills in East Coker, Libby Bove stations her work of speculative folk fiction, Museum of Roadside Magic (2024), a travelling ‘lost’ archive documenting magical practice, folk custom and plant knowledge in vehicular maintenance, repair and journey making. 

At OSR Projects and on noticeboards across East Coker and West Coker, new drawings and collages by Mónica Rivas Velásquez look at exotic botanical plants connecting notions of origin and destination from rural local to global. OSR also presents Rowan Corkill’s installation Floriculture (artificial environment 1) (2024), examining the concept of collapse within artificial growing environments in a work created from materials from mass monoculture farming that have no physical resemblance to natural habitats.

In St Michael’s Church, East Coker, Jennifer Taylor’s golden sphere spills out sound and light, and an eclectic mass of low-tech shiny objects, tangled wiring, old electronics and discarded novelty ephemera, imagining a future when homes and cathedrals are rebuilt from the wreckage of urban decay and horizonless seas of landfill. t l k will present a one-off performance in the church questioning collective responsibility and action amid consumerist environmental collapse.

In a new iteration of her Soil Séance work, Michele Atherton invites individuals to spend time listening to the soil at a site of their choosing in one of the villages, connecting to the ground more spiritually to consider the role of this contested substance in climate change.

The Festival will comprise artist-led workshops, walks, talks, residencies, film screenings, and a seminar in the months leading up to three days of exhibitions, installations and performances from Friday 23 May to Sunday 25 May.  Artist collective PaC (James Aldridge, Laura Eldret, Gemma Gore, Alys Scott-Hawkins and Melanie Rose), who have an interest in commoning and the meaning of climate change in the present rural context will make an intervention in a festival event.