Lines of Dissent - The Tale of the Cedar of Lebanon

Cultural Reforesting is a series of artist-led, multi-disciplinary projects set in the context of the ecological crises of our time. Scientists have given this decade as the crucial 10 years in which to find solutions, indeed Richmond Council declared Climate Emergency in 2019, so what can we all do?   Each artist project responds to the question – how can we renew our relationship with nature?  We at Orleans House Gallery are supporting artists wishing to explore local solutions to this crisis, and feel that the Gallery, with its vibrant grounds and creative setting can be a place where all can come to collaborate, find a community and make a difference, no matter how personal or small.   We hope that artists, working with scientists, further researchers, volunteers and other participants will turn this place into a vibrant community of people taking action.   Orleans House Gallery can become a place for hope and ideas in our ecological crisis.  Cultural Reforesting is about:  Environmental justice   Biodiversity, ecology and botany   Climate Emergency   Indigenous knowledge and perspectives   Local solutions   Imagination and creativity   Well-being   Ecocentrism   Education

Artist: Ana Heilbron-Jácome Memory is a journey through time. Every time we remember, we go back to the past to reaffirm the present and write a new future. Either consciously or unconsciously, it is part of our routine. In this process, an update of feelings, emotions and memories, meaning and identity are generated. The same happens with sound. Sound is invisible. It takes no physical space but it is part of the construction of the ecosystem, and it is part of the relationship humans have with the environment. So how do we want this relationship to be? How can the sound help us to reconstruct the environment? Is there a past, present and future of sound for the ecosystem? Enjoy these three paths that will lead you to reflect on the sound of memory, the sound of the ecosystem. Ana has gathered people’s impressions and memories of ecosystems to create this geolocated audio experience. If you would like to participate and share your sounds, please share them via this email info@anaheilbron.com. Ana will continue to revisit the sounds shared to allow the sonic ecosystem to flourish – these sounds could be from any place, at any time.

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.

Listen to the ducks.

A Walk along Cobblers way with ambient spot sounds

It's a birthday like no other but something sinister is afoot. Follow the clues on this audio trail to collect important clues and help to discover what is behind this recent crime spree.

A walk in the wonderful Kew Gardens listening to poems, sounds and music from archives and collections. You will find yourself immersed into a touching reality. This sound walk will make you laugh, think, reflect, forget. You will feel happy, sad, nostalgic, euphoric. Well known artists or unknown performers will accompany you in a journey through the garden echoes of voices taken from the past and present. Concept and idea by sound artist Giovanna Iorio. The images are Voice Portraits, spectrograms of voices by Giovanna Iorio This is a Creative Commons project and it's a free project with the purpose to share culture and knowledge.

On the Boston Manor Park audio trail, you’ll discover some of the wonderful sounds found here or inspired by this beautiful park in the heart of west London. The park has many natural, historical and contemporary features and places for you to explore, including the Grade 1 listed Manor House, ornamental lake, Walled Garden, meadows and woodlands. You will hear a selection of music by local artists including Little Lore, poems, bird song and other mindful soundscapes on this journey around the park. Now let’s get started! Sound walk by Giovanna Iorio Narration by Natasha Gavin and Tom Gavin Planning by Vanessa Hampton and Giovanna Iorio Music accompanying narration by Lucio Lazzaruolo & Notturno Concertante Thanks to Little Lore (https://littlelore.uk/) Jonathan Ashby and Lucio Lazzaruolo for donating music recordings.

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.