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Rhôd seeks to expand the ideas surrounding an urban/rural dialogue. Following the third Rhôd exhibition at Melin Glonc, in West Wales, the symposium seeked to form an understanding of artistic activity across the UK and to what degree site dictates the nature of this.

Guest speakers included Reveal Somerset, David Shepherd and Open Empty Spaces.

For more information please visit/am ragor o wybodaeth ewch i: www.therhod.wordpress.com

Speakers:

Reveal Somerset (www.revealsomerset.org)

Tim Martin (Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre), Carol Carey (Somerset Art Works) and Phil Shepherd (Somerset Film) represent partner organisations in Reveal Somerset, a collaborative group whose aim is to raise the profile of visual arts and media in Somerset.

Tim Martin is an artist and curator living in Devon. He has been visual arts coordinator at the Brewhouse Theatre and Arts Centre (part-time) since 2000. For the past 8 years he has also lectured in professional practice at Somerset College, Taunton on the Fine Art Degree. Tim is chair of Blackdown Hills Artists and Makers (BHaam), an artist’s led organisation on the Devon/Somerset border and currently is treasurer of Turning Point South West. In 2010 Tim received an Arts Council of England Award to produce a new body of sculptural works at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Gardens at Rosemoor, Nr Torrington as well as a new series of paintings in the Plough Art Centre Gallery.

Carol Carey is development manager of Somerset Art Works. Since 2007 she has steered the growing breadth of the organisation’s work. She is passionate about contemporary art, community and the environment. Previously this had led to her serving as a director of Viz and People, Community Arts, Bristol and the Small Woods Association. She has also spent 6 years as a member of the Exmoor Sustainable Development panel and currently is a member of the arts committee at Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton. Carol has a BA Hons in three dimensional design from Middlesex University and an MA in Urban Design from Oxford Brookes University. For 14 years she worked as a designer for consultants and architects in London and Bristol on a wide range of public and commercial projects.

Phil Shepherd is a Creative Producer. His day job is Facilitator for registered charity Somerset Film and Bridgwater¹s Engine Room community media centre (opened 2003). Somerset Film provides accessible film and digital media training and production resources, producing local stories on universal themes with a wide range of individuals and organisations to develop skills and facilitate creativity. Phil is also Chair of Council for the UK Community Media Association, which supports community radio and television services across multiple platforms – making the case to government and regulator for proper provision for local and community broadcasting in the UK.

Open Empty Spaces (www.openemptyspaces.co.uk)

Open Empty Spaces is an artist-led initiative aiming primarily to commission temporary artworks for unusual spaces in the public realm, and give artists, whose work is both conceptually and aesthetically interesting, the opportunity to produce work in interesting and challenging locations. In doing this it hopes to bring contemporary art to a new audience and allow people to see new and exciting projects as they go about their day-to-day lives.

The spaces used are in the public realm and are unusual and unique. The projects are intended to challenge and inspire artists to push their work further, encourage people to see public art in a different way and to look at the environment around them from a new perspective.

For the Rhod Symposium Sam Aldridge (OES) talked about the curation of contemporary art outside of the gallery and in a public places within a city. This was in relation to Open Empty Spaces’ 2009 project “River”, in which five artists were commissioned to produce artworks in and around a specific area of the River Taff in Bute Park, Cardiff. He looked closer at the variety of ways in which the artists reacted to the site, the ephermality of work in this context, and the ways in which public art work benefits from public interaction and vice versa.