July 2024
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. June 3 Sunday 11-4 performance, video and walks by Adam Chodzko, Judith Dean, Anna Lucas on Powerstock Common, Treewise KIDS workshops & June 4 Monday 11-1 Futurology with Sophie Hope at Bridport Arts Centre. FREE
www.annabest.info/roadforthefuture
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
… about the project’s relationship to the art world audience …
… about the cycle path …
… about working with the AA at Hooke Park and the wild kitchen proposal …
He calls whilst I am recording the dawn chorus. His two year old son has hidden his keys so he is late. He finds them in the funnel of the toy train, and arrives in a pick up at the head of the drive at six. We drive to the top of the hill, park and walk to the Warren, a large open field recently mown with bales dotted across it.
We stalk and talk.
He tries to kill two and a half does for every buck. You have to keep the female population under control otherwise they take over. They breed you see. They have twins or even triplets. Two this year had triplets.
Will leave a buck until he’s about six and then take him out. That’s the best age, if he’s a good one, let him pass on his genes.
If the antlers don’t grow up above the ears in the first year then we’ll take them. But we’ve got one roe buck who’s a six pointer already after only a year.
He looks after 25 – 30,000 acres. There’s no-where like this. They don’t fertilise here because it’s SSSI land, so you get so many butterflies and flowers here. Orchids that you’ll find nowhere else. Just up on the Dorchester road where it’s commercial farming, there’s nothing like what you’ve got here.
He’s going to have his ashes buried under a high seat in a field just over the road. Mapperton. Already squared it with her ladyship.
I hate squirrels, and foxes and badgers. Shoot them or poison them. Get rid of them, grey squirrels. Ninety percent of the trees they took out of the woods there were ruined by squirrels. They ring ‘em.
When he has shot an animal, he’ll hang it straightaway in a tree or on a fence, and then come back with bike or truck with a winch, grollock it right there, and then winch it out. He takes them back and hangs them in the larder for a month and butchers them for burgers, sausages and meat which he sells from a trailer at fairs. You have to check them from the diapraghm down. He has a man who comes once a week to take the innards and the legs to be incinerated.
He saves some of the bits. All the light pulls in his house are made from antler bits. There’s a factory that still make coat toggles out of the antler ends. He knows a guy who builds furniture out of antlers. He’s a real artist. He carves a stag head onto the end where the antler joins the head at the end of the armrest.
He talks about a millionaire he knows in the states who has a trophy room the size of a football pitch with a retractable roof that he used to crane in two elephants. He has everything he shoots taxidermied. He has built a fiberglass mountain in there for all the goats and sheep. He has two Marco- Polo longhorns in there, the rarest thing you can shoot, they cost quarter of a million each.
