The Mountain Arts Festival

About

Community Action Nepal, in association with RGS-IBG NW Region, are pleased to announce the inaugural Mountain Arts Festival at The Rheged Discovery Centre, Penrith Cumbria. The event will bring together an illustrious line up of writers, thinkers, artists, climbers and performers to celebrate the culture of the uplands and mountains and their contribution to creative writing and art-making.

Over the course of the Festival there will be an art exhibition of Mountain Artists ranging from the internationally acclaimed walking artist, Hamish Fulton, rarely seen archival works from the Alpine club collection, landscape painters including Julian Cooper, Jim Curran and John Innerdale, , Sculptors including Brian Thompson, Simon Hitchens, Paul Vanstone and Andy Parkin and photographers, Rob Fraser, Martin Hartley and Henry Iddon, and many more up and coming contemporary artists. A number of the artists will also be speaking about their work.

The exhibition will be complemented with two days of talks, readings and debates from many acclaimed writers speakers, including Sir Chris Bonington reading extracts from ‘The Best of Bonington’, Doug Scott on his quest to write an autobiography, and other noted writers including Phil Bartlett Julie Summers, Angela Locke, Steven Goodwin, Andrew Greig and Howard Hull discussing a range of topics around the subject of climbing and writing. This will followed by a round table debate chaired by Steve Goodwin on the topic of mountain writing. Cumbrian photographer, Rob Fraser, and writer and poet, Harriet Fraser, will be launching their most ambitious project to date, ‘The Long View’.

There will also be a variety of musical performances over the course of the weekend including the Blues duo of Jeff and Alisa Frew, a performance of a musical biography of Mallory and Irvine entitled ‘Icepicks and Violins’, narrated by Doug Scott and a Ceilidh lead by renowned band Striding Edge, as well as various acrobats and singers from Mongolian Artists.  A range of films will also be shown that celebrate mountain people and their lives.

The weekend will culminate in a symposium hosted by the Royal Geographical Society NW region and IBG entitled ‘Whose broad, sunlit uplands?’  which will bring together a range of noted speakers to discuss how best to manage upland farming in the UK.

With painting and writing master classes, a Nepalese Bazaar too, there will be over thirty separate events taking place across what promises to be an unmissable weekend.