The Larks and Ravens

On Saturday, we took 2 of our cardboard ‘gods’ – Death & Growth to London for a session with writer and Improv performer Susan Harrison on ways we might create more animated dialogue with the gods we have made.

The Improv training session was inspiring, fun and useful. Once we’d got over the hurdle of relinquishing control, we surprised ourselves by generating a series of wild and whimsical conversations triggered by varying god combinations in different ‘real world’ scenarios proposed by Susan.

For a start, Growth & Death were involved in a couples counselling session where the therapist was encouraging the pair to talk out the tensions and incompatibilities in their clearly fraught relationship. Next came Lady Justice and Lady Luck (two of the gods we’d left behind) as guests being interviewed on a TV Chat Show. The Chat Show host and Lady Luck were both challenging a somewhat defensive Lady Justice on how she could be so absolutely certain on right versus wrong. She had to admit she wasn’t but needed, for the sake of society, to portray that the difference matters. On the other hand, the two Ladies discovered a shared scepticism of the fairness of a society based on meritocracy. Finally, Death and Lady Justice found themselves on holiday idly chatting whilst lying on adjacent sunloungers. While Justice was suffering from guilt at not being in post on top of the court buildings ensuring justice was administered, Death was alarmingly cheerful about the fact that no-one could die whilst he was on holiday! But they both agreed they needed a break from their extremely stressful lines of work.

The big learning for us from the day was that we didn’t have to ‘act’. Given a simple structure of 2 or 3 characters and a recognisable scenario, then compelling and enlightening conversations readily flowed without us consciously thinking about what to say. Each conversation created intriguing narrative threads revealing the character of each ‘god’ as well as surprising insights into the abstract concepts they stand for which can otherwise remain elusive.

We were delighted by the enthusiastic response to our invite for a small group of diverse artists from different practises and perspectives to join us for 3 days at the Centre for Alternative Technology in mid October to work together on imagining and creating ‘the gods for our time’. The really hard task last week was selecting a diverse mix of only 6 from the many really interesting artists who applied. Thank you everyone for the response to the invite and the interest in the topic shown. We look forward to sharing some of what happens on this experimental collaboration.

‘Creating gods for our time’ – 3 day residential workshop https://larksandravens.com/an-invite/
14th-17th October 2024.
Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Wales, SY20 9AZ

We are looking to bring together 6 diverse creative practitioners and thinkers to playfully address the question “what gods have shaped our current world and what counter gods could we imagine and create who might challenge and help us reshape the narrative?”. Over the 3 days, we will think, eat, imagine, share ideas and practices and co-create a panoply of lifesize gods with different transforming narratives.

Applications from artists & philosophers, to story tellers & puppet makers welcome – closing date for applications is 02/09/2024 https://larksandravens.com/an-invite/

After experimental pie suppers with a mix of guests and gods around the table, we decided that we needed to find more powerful ways of animating our gods and ways of interacting with them.

Reading Lewis Hyde’s book together ‘Trickster makes this world – How disruptive imagination creates culture” has proved a fun and thought provoking activity alongside our drawing and making practice.

In March, we enjoyed presenting our work to an online audience courtesy of Dougald Hine & his Long Table network – a group of people from all parts of the world who, in their own ways, are exploring how to regrow a living culture in the ruins of modernity. We gave them a chance to experience a sample of our practice of drawing as a way of knowing and their questions and thoughts stimulated our thinking in some new directions.

We are now exploring ways to bring together a small group of creative practitioners from different interests and backgrounds to collaborate in identifying the gods and forces who shape the world we find ourselves in today and then imagine and co-create a collection of ‘counter-gods’ who can help us challenge and evolve a world of different values & narratives.

And, as we face a General Election, what would be a Trickster move that could unexpectedly topple the all powerful god of economic growth?

Some reactions to Bob-the-god

Check out our latest Bird work here.

We were delighted to meet Kevin Sinnott today – he came to see the reproduction of his ‘Running away with the hairdresser’ which we had painted on the outside windows of y Gaer to engage with the wider public who use that space.

As ‘Running away with the hairdresser’ is part of the Welsh National Collection of Art https://museum.wales/art/online/?action=show_works&item=707&type=artist, it belongs to everyone in Wales so we thought we would bring it outside so a wider ‘everyone’ can enjoy it.

We are grateful to the Welsh Government’s Summer of Fun programme https://gov.wales/7m-summer-fun-officially-underway for helping fund this project.

The evening began with an engaging conversation with the group who hang out by y Gaer at the end of the school day. They keep commenting that what we are doing is “so cool”. They are also very happy to share “their” space with us. They suggested we continue the painting – maybe in a “what happened next?” story line across the rest of the y Gaer windows. We thought that was a great idea. A couple of the group also came into y Gaer with us to see the original painting in the current exhibition.

Meanwhile, we decided to take a different tack with the painting tonight. We cleaned off some parts which we weren’t happy with and then, having asked for the youngsters’ advice on whether we should try to copy the colours exactly or “do our own thing”, we followed their strong recommendations that we should do our own thing.

We are much happier with the result when we left for the night.

The Larks & Ravens are reproducing one of Wales’ National artworks onto the outside windows of y Gaer each evening in Brecon this week (5-9th September). The painting is ‘Running away with the hairdresser’ by Kevin Sinnott currently on exhibition at y Gaer. The National Welsh Collection of art belongs to everyone in Wales so we wanted to bring it outside for everyone to enjoy. Our reproduction is getting more challenging as we grapple with the mismatch between the colour palette of paints selected for the original artwork and the bluer palette of our large digital print.

Here’s how we ended Day 2..

Economic Growth on a finite planet – Who’s inflating the balloon and who is benefiting from it getting every bigger?

So in order to ‘stay safe’ we need to protect ourselves from

• the air we breathe through nose and mouth,
• the air that we move through that might have Covid 19 moving through it too, looking for wet  mucous perhaps in our eyes
• the surfaces we touch on which Covid 19 may have landed and which we may inadvertently transfer to our eyes,nose or mouth

In short sensory organs that impact on communication

• smell
• taste
• touch
• sight

Only hearing is left and we need to listen carefully, having possibly lost information from those other senses as we put on masks, face shields and gloves. How hard it must be to help the sick and dying, the isolated and lonely, the confused and frightened. But the sense of hearing can be honed. As I listen now to the sounds around me, it changes my breathing and stills my busy mind.

A small space opens up for, using Dylan Thomas’s words, to maybe let another thought to ‘creep or flash or thunder in’

• Forms of life get very small, I am unsure but I think that viruses are the smallest. Strands of ribonuclei acid , RNA,wrapped up in a coat to protect themselves when not happily reproducing in some other living organism. So here is a highly magnified image I found on the internet

What do I know about this Covid 19?

• As viruses go it is quite large and heavy reducing the distance it can easily travel through air
• It invades lung cells of humans where it happily reorganises things so it can reproduce itself. I think it kills the cells it invades, taking over the reproductive mechanisms of the cell to make more of itself.
• It has swept across the world getting into human bodies via their mucous membranes in noses, mouths and eyes .
• It gets there in a droplet of moisture coughed or sneezed by an infected person, landing on a surface where another host human transfers it to their mouth or nose or eyes where it can move in our mucous off into lung tissue
• Lots of people get infected and survive after an unpleasant time of fever and coughing
• Some people die
• The mathematical models indicate that the rate of spread is fast because every one person can infect three others, those three then infect another three each and so on
• Reducing physical contact slows the rate of infection, the virus has nowhere to go
• ‘Lockdown’ has been effective in slowing infections
• But ‘Lockdown’ is creating more problems both now and almost certainly for the future

 

Things that are changed

Our behaviour towards one another, can we care, can we still find ways to communicate, touch and soothe?

Or are we gradually seeing the fault lines opening both at an individual and social level?

Our attitude to some of the lowest paid workers in our societies, people who keep us clean, help us when we are ill, care for us in old age and often when we are very young, move us around on public transport, grow and deliver our food, keep the lights on and water running, bins emptied and sewers unblocked, bury the dead and deliver the newborn, the list is long, people on it invisible,  until they are not.

Like that tiny virus

So how am I going to live with the fear of dying? As I write that I think it sounds like an oxymoron. I know that being alive means that I have to die.

and the economy

This seems even harder to unpick. If those with wealth have 42% of it from private pensions where did that money originate?

Somehow the conversations around fairness and furloughing, value and money, money and wealth, education, inheritance and upbringing merge into a tangled web.

A little like tracing the spread of that tiny virus.

What steps do I need to take to untangle the knots?

Each one of us may have a different answer

Right now we are denied the chance to physically sing, dance and feast together

Right now some people are working in difficult conditions, with lack of sleep and lack of solace

Right now new connections are being made

Just like that tiny virus