‘Ghost Mills’; an exhibition of responses, as part of Stroud’s 2019 Wool and Water Festival.
Walking the Land projects integrate art, landscape and community through direct involvement with ‘place’.
In ‘Ghost Mills ‘ the Collective’s artists engage with ‘the search for lost time’, examining the links between the mills, textiles, agriculture, geography, power and wealth in Stroud’s valleys.
The exhibition features the work of artists who have been inspired by some of the many mills that have over the years disappeared, are derelict or have changed use. They have examined traces, remnants and ghosts of the past, while imagining those of the future.
Aside from the mill’s physical aspects, the buildings or the space they once occupied, artists have viewed the influence that mills had on communities; their products ranging from textiles, to walking sticks and umbrellas, corn and pins; their effect on landscape, the environment and the economy; their place in history. All the while there is recognition that behind the surface of the present picturesque Cotswold landscape there is another haunted by the ghosts of poverty, wealth, trade, slavery, war and Empire.
Walking the Land artists include radical historians, walking artists, printmakers, painters, map and book makers, textile artists and photographers.
Exhibitors include:
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- Christina Bingle
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- Stuart Butler & Deb Roberts
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- Debbie Cox
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- Nettie Edwards
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- Annelies Egli
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- Andy Freedman, Dr Richard Keating & Allan Mossman
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- Zoe Heath & Susan Kester
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- Lucy Guenot
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- Ruth Illingworth
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- Sabine Kussmaul
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- Rachel McDonnell
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- Caroline Morris
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- Alice Sheppard Fidler
- Kel Portman
The exhibition was shown in 2019 at SVA’s Gallery in Stroud and accompanied by a series of short journeys and performative walks led by Walking the Land artists.