Remote Performances Artist Bio’s

Artist Bio’s for Remote Performances, a collaboration between artists London Fieldworks and Resonance104.4fm, the world’s first art radio station, and the Live Art Development Agency. For one week in August 2014, 20 specially commissioned performances by visiting artists and local residents will be broadcast live from Outlandia, a unique artists’ tree-house studio in Glen Nevis, Lochaber, Scotland.

Bram Thomas Arnold is an artist whose practice involves walking, performance, drawing, writing, broadcasting and trans-disciplinary amalgamations of these practices. He is a founding member of POST, the artists peer-led network and runs a weekly radio show on Source FM from his base in Falmouth, blending his passion for the arts with an eclectic musical exploration of the world. Bram will create a new performance work involving walking drawing and writing, a development of his series of rural based performances: ACTIONS FOR AND AGAINST NATURE.

Ruth Barker is a Glasgow based performance artist whose work involves the re-telling of ancient myths through original poetic composition, becoming a gesture towards the ritual understanding of self, gender, and mortality. Barker’s performance poems are hypnotic, ritualised, events. Her words are recited from memory with a concentrated focus that becomes by turns magical, claustrophobic, and cathartic. For Remote Performances Ruth will read a new work that speaks as a genius loci, a meditation on place and voice for the landscape of Outlandia.

Ed Baxter is CEO of Resonance104.4fm, the world’s first radio art sta- tion, and director of the Resonance Radio Orchestra. He was named BASCA Composer of the Year (Sonic Arts) for his sound work “No Such Object,“ composed with Chris Weaver for NVA’s “Speed of Light” at Ed- inburgh International Festival 2012. For Remote Performances Ed will lead the Resonance production team and will realise a new radiophonic work, responding to the geography of Glen Nevis and exploring local collaborative possibilities for live broadcast performance.

London based radio broadcaster, theatre maker, writer and musician, Johny Brown formed The Band of Holy Joy in 1984 in New Cross, South London making early experiments revolving around cheap junk- shop instrumentation and rudimentary electronics. Alongside James Stephen Finn and Inga Tillere he has produced and broadcast a number of radio shows with Resonance FM including “Mining For Gold” and “Such a Nice Radio Show”. They produce and DIY transmit “Radio Joy” from their Stoke Newington home – a blend of theatre, song and multimedia exploration. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES, the trio will perform the Band of Holy Joy’s recent work THE NORTH IS ANOTHER LAND and as part of the core team will collaborate with the participat- ing artists to create fluid mixes of soundscape, art and text. The North Is Another Land will be released as a digital download album on the Radio Joy label on Monday August 4th to coincide with the Remote Performances week of broadcasts.

Clair Chinnery is a practicing artist, and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. Thematically her interests utilise natural history to understand contemporary human behaviour and society, and explore issues of gendered and maternal experience. Clair’s contribution to REMOTE PERFORMANCES will focus on different ideas about nesting and bird communication and will involve the making/ dismantling of a ‘hybrid’ nest and the mimicry of birdsong through performance using man-made whistling devices, multiple recording and playback.

Adam Dant is an east London based artist who won the Jerwood Draw- ing Prize in 2002. Through his peculiar approach he addresses issues such as ideology, politics and British culture. Dant’s works often take the form of large brush and ink drawings and socially engaged perfor- mances. His drawings have been described as Hogarthian or Swiftian especially in relation to his use of satire and continue his interest in depicting and interacting with the public space, the anecdotal and uto- pian grand models. He will broadcast an exploration and development of the utopian/imaginary maps first created at Outlandia in 2010.

Tam Dean Burn is a Glasgow based actor (TV, Theatre and Film), cultural activist and singer in the Bum-Clocks. Tam has made a number of programmes with Resonance FM including the complete works of William Blake. Coming direct from Scotland’s Culture2014 project and the epic Marathon Storytelling Cycle Challenge he will continue his longterm collaboration with the Resonance Radio Orchestra creating a new work inspired by the environs of Glen Nevis and take on the role of MC.

Benedict Drew is an artist exhibiting internationally and based in Kent who works across video, sculpture, music and their associated technologies. He has frequently collaborated with a diverse mix of artists and musicians and has made many works for radio, including the series Unter Radio for Resonance FM, and most recently Concrete Decent Transmission for Writtle Calling. For this commission he will soundtrack a new video work using live foley techniques during broadcast.

Alec Finlay is an artist and poet whose work crosses diverse forms and media, often reflecting on human engagement with landscape. Alec, in collaboration with the poet Ken Cockburn, will broadcast a performance of their innovative book-length word-map, the road north, a journey around Scotland guided by Basho, with field-recordings by Geoff Sample. The road north will be published by Shearsman Books in Autumn 2014.

Parl Kristian Bjørn Vester (aka Goodiepal) originally from the Faroe Islands, is a musician/composer best known for his performances/ lectures/concerts in which he explains, lectures, raps, and sings. Goodiepal travels the world by his home-made bike KOMMUNAL KLON KOMPUTER 2 and makes his own electricity with dynamos. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES Goodiepal will begin a new performance work in Glen Nevis that will begin with his arrival by bike from Norway.

Kirsteen Davidson Kelly is a pianist, researcher and music educator based in South West Scotland. Kirsteen co-founded the immensely successful and innovative ensemble Piano Circus, where she stayed for thirteen years, commissioning, performing and recording works by composers such as Julia Wolfe, David Lang, Steve Reich, Graham Fitkin and Brian Eno, and running an international education programme for diverse communities. Current projects include the two piano duo KDKDK, regular performances of work by Max Richter including Waltz with Bashir, Live with the Philharmonia Orchestra

at London Southbank’s Meltdown Festival, and a collaborative performance and recording project with Edinburgh-based composer Vroni Holzmann. A recently completed PhD explored ways in which expert musicians imagine music during preparation for performance. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES, Kirsteen will work with local non- ‘musicians’ or non- ‘composers’, exploring musical responses to the environment, collaborative imagining and its translation from thought to production. The resulting musical compositions will be performed in Glen Nevis.

Stirlingshire based Sarah Kenchington is an artist who builds mechanical instruments from discarded materials to create unique musical machines. Previous works have included a pedal-powered hurdy-gurdy and a brass band powered by discared tractor inner-tubes. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES she will create a new work which will blur the boundary between musical instrument and performance space, exploring ways of enhancing acoustically interesting spaces in the landscape.

As lead artists, Jo Joelson & Bruce Gilchrist will draw from experience of a sustained engagement with the Scottish Islands and Highlands. They created the telematic artwork, Syzygy in 1999 which transmitted data via mobile phone networks from the southern Hebridean Island of Sanda to the ICA gallery in London, and they formally twinned the summits of Ben Nevis and Haldde Mountain in northern Norway in 2004 as part of their Little Earth project. For remote Performances they will provide support for commissioned artists and create a new sound and film work in collaboration with Mark Vernon and the local community: THE SOUND OF LOCHABER.

Lisa O’Brien is based on the North West coast of Scotland. Her practice over the years has encompassed, performance, composition, video, sound, and installation. Her practice has been influenced by living in one of the remotest parts of North West Scotland for the last 10 years and is often linked to the environment and weather conditions. Her work explores the idea of temporality, and she strives to capture the essence of fleeting moments so that they can be re-examined, to some extent re-lived and this also links with how we experience memories. She is interested in how the link between time, place and sound contribute to a specific moment in time. For remote performances Lisa will make field recordings of perceived silence in the rural setting and she will continue her exploration of developing a graphic notation to record nothingness, or what we think of as silence.

Lee Patterson is a sound artist based in Manchester working across various forms, including improvised music, field recording, film soundtrack and installation. Lee attempts to understand his surrounding through different ways of listening. His unorthodox approach to generating sound has led to collaborations with a host of international artists and musicians. Using a selection of microphones, Lee will forage and scavenge for sound and sound making objects within and around Outlandia and the environment within which it sits, gathering what he can from it’s structure and surrounding landscape features – water bodies, man-made structures, vegetation and other resident sounds. Recordings and objects thus gathered will form the basis of a new sound work for performance and broadcast.

Michael Pedersen is a poet, playwright and performer based in Edin- burgh with a broad track-record of collaborations with musicians, film- makers and artists across the UK. He is co-founder of the literary night and record label Neu! Reekie! and is a creative presence within Dream Tower Productions. He is the lyricist for the band Jesus, Baby! and has written short plays for Edinburgh Arts Festival and National Theatre

of Scotland/Five Minute Theatre. For this commission Michael will collaborate with Scottish Bafta winning sound artist Ziggy Campbell (FOUND) to construct a poetry performance sound mash in response to the Glen Nevis environment.

Geoff Sample is based in Northumberland and has spent the last 22 years recording and studying wildlife sound, with a special focus on birdsong. He has been making environmental sound recordings in the Scottish highlands over the last 20 years and often collaborates with artists and musicians on creative projects, such as Marcus Coates, Hanna Tuulikki and John Cage productions. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES Geoff will make and broadcast his first ever sound recordings from the Nevis range and collaborate with the other artists to explore the influence of sound on the association of ideas conjured up by the word ‘glen’.

Mark Vernon is a sound artist and radio producer based in Glasgow. His radiophonic creations range from documentaries and radio plays to experimental audio collage and soundscape pieces. He is a regular producer for Resonance FM and has also created content for stations including Radia, CKUT, Sound Art Radio, VPRO and BBC Radio 4. Together with Monica Brown he runs Lights Out Listening Group, a monthly listening event that takes place in complete darkness. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES he will be working with Jo Joelson and Bruce Gilchrist on production of ‘The Sound of Lochaber’ radio segments.

Tracey Warr is a writer based in Pembrokeshire, Wales. She has pub- lished many books and essays on contemporary artists, and two histori- cal novels: Almodis (Impress, 2011) and The Viking Hostage (Impress, 2014). She also writes for New Welsh Review and Times Higher Educa- tion. She has a long-standing relationship with Outlandia as associate curator and member of the Outlandia steering committee. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES Tracey will lead “walking, mapping, writing” with a group of local writers to, in and around Glen Nevis with text based outcomes performed for radio broadcast. Tracey will co-edit artist blog entries during the week.

Tony White is the London-based author of novels including Foxy-T (Faber) and Shackleton’s Man Goes South (Science Museum). He has given hundreds of readings from his novels and short stories in the UK and internationally, at venues ranging from the National Portrait Gallery, London to the Glastonbury festival. For REMOTE PERFORMANCES, Tony will create up to three new readings for radio, including a new fictional work completed on site, that attempts to explore boundaries between documentary and fiction, capturing some of the texture and detail and subjective experiences of the forest at night. Tony White is currently Creative Entrepreneur in Residence at King’s College, London.