Land of Plenty (in the making)

Land of Plenty… One week in, two weeks to go. Meanwhile I’ve come back to the UK to rehearse and perform a new bobbin dance for the opening of Yan Tan Tethera, now on show at Walford Mills Crafts in Wimbourne, Dorset.

It’s not easy to switch from one immersive project such as the one in Ghent to rehearsing a new bobbin dance and perform it all in the course of a couple of days. I now have however something new to introduce to the Oya group. Lace making, which initially inspired these bobbin dances, used to be a major industry in Flanders, so there’s at least one good reason to do this. How great would it be too if Yan Tan Tethera was to come to the Museum over Industrie, Arbeid and Textiel (MIAT)…

Dancing with bobbins and yarn is one thing, but what of all the plant materials wed collected which is a key element of the Land of Plenty project? So far we’ve used grass, buddleya, cotoneaster, willow and poplar combined with a stock of yarn and threads from the Oya studio, to plait, coil, stitch and twine a number of objects including an outdoor loom. The skills we exchanged have guided us through this process, as well as inspiration from De Site itself.

The plan is for all this work to inspire the creation of a large scale outdoor installation at the end of the project. But what might this be? What might the planned sculptural intervention do for the space at De Site and the people who frequent it?

The process of making the piece is of course key so we might choose not to present a finished piece at the end of the three weeks, but instead a durational piece or an interactive or performative work during which participants involved in the project make something and share this with the broader public. There is a lot to sort out still, and plenty of food for thought in the land of…