Road for the Future

Road For The Future is a year long collaborative art project initiated by Anna Best around a historic Common and a decommissioned railway, now proposed as a Sustrans Trailway (for bicycles, horses, walkers, wheelchairs, buggies). This will provide access to what some locals call the deep dark heart of Dorset. Artists, architects, educators and conservationists are working concurrently in exploring and articulating our ideas about the countryside, contributing to the debate about its future development and sustainability.

30/04/2012

Artists’ Biographies

Adam Chodzko lives and works in Whitstable, Kent. His art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Working across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm, his work investigates and invents the possibilities of collective imagination through using a poetics of everyday life. He has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions in the UK (Tate St Ives 2008), Europe and the US, and has work in international public and private collections. www.adamchodzko.com

Anna Lucas is a London based artist film-maker. She makes work that develops observations of social networks and group dynamics in response to specific geographic and architectural locations. In 2008, she was Artist in Residence at The Oxford University Department of Physiology, Anatomy, and Genetics where she connected blindness, drawing and neuroscience through a series of events called ‘Land of Silence and Darkness’. Her films have been screened in the UK, Germany and US, and she has had a number of solo shows in the UK and Australia. Her work is distributed by LUX.

Judith Dean is a reactive artist who responds to whatever context she finds herself in, using a wide range of materials and methodologies including sculpture, installation, video and performance. Since winning the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2005 Judith has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has held solo exhibitions at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (2006), and at The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere (2006). In 2006 she also exhibited in the Whitstable Biennale, and most recently at The Poetry Society in London. Dean currently teaches sculpture at University of the West of England, Bristol.

Sophie Hope Through her work, she tries to inspect the uncertain relationships between art and society. This involves establishing how to declare her politics through her practice, rethinking what it means to be paid to be critical and devising tactics to challenge notions of authorship. She writes and teaches on subjects such as public art, art and labour, the politics of socially engaged art and curating as critical practice at Birkbeck, University of London, where she works as a lecturer in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies. www.sophiehope.org.uk/

Anna Best’s work covers a range of media, publishing books, broadsheets and websites, film and video as well as the ephemeral format of live events. She has made work for public gallery commissions, eg. Tate Modern (1998), The Barbican (2007) and the Photographers’ Gallery (2003), taking place in diverse sites and contexts. She has initiated ambitious projects prior to Road For The Future including “Vauxhall Pleasure” on a local traffic interchange in London. She has maintained a part time teaching practice at a range of institutions including Goldsmiths College and Brighton University and currently lives in Dorset. www.annabest.info