Nature Sings

Nature Sings

10 ECHOES

Location: Twickenham, Greater London, England, United Kingdom

Orleans House Gallery

Nature Sings is a new album by Finn Chatwyn-Ros, created for families to enjoy together. Each song is influenced by children in the family workshops Finn leads at the gallery, Finn’s own daughter’s interactions with nature, and the gallery’s ecosystem – the woodland, the Octagon Room, the river.

The songs support families to explore how to look after our shared planet, with the focus being on how to renew our relationship with the magic of nature through the eyes of our children.

The album supports adults in introducing their little ones to concepts of taking care of our shared planet. Children are seeing sunlight on clouds for the first time, smelling plants for the first time, crunching on gravel for the first time. The songs help children to make sense of and fully engage in the sensory experiences that our planet gives us. At the same time, Finn hopes this album shifts the perspective for grownups to see the ‘magic of nature’ through children’s eyes.

Search for yellow ribbons to find where the next song starts on the Echoes app.

Tribute to the Thames

London

A trubute to the Thames. (From the archive UbuWeb) An extensive iteration of Roni Horn's encyclopedic project to photograph the Thames, staged at the Art Institute of Chicago, saw the artist partner her own signature fluidity with the solidity of the modernist canon. Curated by James Rondeau, this remarkable exhibition, "Some Thames," consisted of seventy-seven framed photographs installed throughout twenty-five galleries devoted to the museum's permanent collection of modern and contemporary art, as well as in its corridors, stairwells, lobbies, offices, and library. The footnotes that Horn employs in her work usually provide textual counter-points, but in Saying Water, 1999-, a monologue that she performed at the exhibition's opening, literary allusions became discursive. Dressed in black jacket and pants, she assumed the mannered cadence of a poet, showing slides and interrogating her work, her viewers, and herself. Emphasizing in her poses the androgyny of her name, her self-conscious attitude shifted to become by turns conversational, anecdotal, and seductive. Paired with the non-narrative structure of her photography, chains of quotations linked figures as disparate as Emily Dickinson, Hank Williams, and Martin Heidegger. These accumulations reiterated a desire for transparency in the face of opaque mundane experience. "Water is the master verb," stated Horn, "an act of perpetual relation." Horn's attention to what she characterizes in her accompanying text as "the minuscule," the "aberration that is rare formation," accounts for the work's haunting presence. If we accept Horn's larger project as a sustained meditation on identity, then our task is equally charged by its endless variability. We followed the unexpected contingencies of "Some Thames" like a treasure map. The identification of Monet with water may be cliched, yet as we viewed Horn's photograph next to Matisse's Interior at Nice, 1919-20, a sunny seascape reverted to what it actually consists of, a slice of blue paint. In a gallery of German Expressionism, the sour effect of Ludwig Meidner's 1913 portrait of Max Hermann Neisse was heightened by Horn's mustard-colored photograph. Elsewhere an orange speck on a mottled Thames surface echoed the edge of Clyfford Still's abstraction 1951-52. Not only formal, Horn's edits were also conceptual. Like a liquid connoisseur, she replaced one too many Giacomettis with a photograph in which a brittle black branch matched the paintings' skeletal linearity. Abutting a Juan Gris Portrait of Picasso, 1912, the choppy river informed the jittery gestures on the canvas. Horn's glittering surfaces chimed with the hallucinatory landscape of Roberto Matta Echuarren's The Earth Is a Man, 1942, and the popular Magritte Time Transfixed, 1938, will never seem quite the same after Horn's pairing of the steam from the locomotive with the water's smoky wake. Twins are never truly identical, and by Horn's analogy, water does not reflect us, but rather we reflect the water, in all its confounding mutability. The theoretical implications of this installation complemented and supplemented the chronology of the museum. We were encouraged to proceed through the modernist canon as if walking beside a river, Horn's quasi-abstract surfaces provoking reciprocal exchanges that marked formal and iconographic similarities between permanent masterpieces and temporary photographs. An allegorical exercise, "Some Thames" partook of and amplified conventional taxonomies while resisting their classification. In most cases, Horn's image was the other to the museum masterpiece, and yet, following its wide-ranging itinerary, the Thames became the figure, the collection the ground. The absence of labels for Horn's series signaled the uncertainty of authorship yet marked the photographs as interlopers. In this project, Horn complicated her system once again. In its insistence on doubling and difference, "Some Thames" first queered the river, then the museum in which we were reflected.

free

10 ECHOES

Location: Twickenham, Greater London, England, United Kingdom

Hello Our Friends

I Spy (through the seasons)

How Can We Help This Planet

Patterns in Nature

There's Something in our Garden

Chasing the Moon

Chasing the Moon (Sung by Penny)

Keeping Warm and Dry

Dandelion, Dandelion

Goodbye Our Friends

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Other walks nearby

The Sound of Memory

Cultural Reforesting - voices of the ecosystem

Lines of Dissent - The Tale of the Cedar of Lebanon

Ducks Walk

Cobblers Way

Escape the Park

Talking to plants (Kew Gardens, London)

Boston Manor Park

Tribute to the Thames

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