January 2022
A very happy new year from everyone at Cove Park!
Our first residents of 2022 arrived at the beginning of the month to take part in our annual programme of Winter Subsidised Residencies. Participants include Claire-Louise Bennett, dance artist Jenna Corker, visual artist Martin Harman, ceramic artist Wen-Hsi Harman, musician, producer, DJ and broadcaster Nabihah Iqbal, artist, dancer and writer Jamila Johnson-Small, visual artist Yolanda McKean, writer and performer James Mitchell, composer James Ross, visual artist Iona Roberts, and artist RL Wilson.
Our programme of Winter Subsidised Residencies continues during February and March, and a few dates have become available due to last-minute Covid-19-related cancellations. Scroll down for more information or simply get in touch directly to book your residency!
Also in January we host The Flames in January, a wonderful performance company for creative people aged 50+ who wish to create high quality collaborative work. The Flames was established in 2016 by the performance company Tricky Hat and the residency participants are Eileen Finlay, Jess Fitzgerald, Jane Johnstone, Freda MacDonnell, Kerrie Ross, Kate Sloan, Polly Smith, and Marianne Yeomans.
We are very pleased to welcome two new team members to Cove Park this month. Alex Marrs was appointed in December 2021 as Programmes &
Communications Producer, and Jill Lee joins as Emerging Creative Producer, working with Cove Park on the Dandelion programme and the creation of unexpected gardens here on Argyll's Rosneath peninsula. You can read about our team here.
Please scroll down for news of a special online event featuring Scotland's Makar Kathleen Jamie and Innu poet Joséphine Baker, plus the announcement of Cove Park's Youth Arts Fund Bursary Programme, a new Storytelling Residency and Commission, an update on our residency exchange with RAW Material Company in Senegal, a call for architects and designers to take part in this year's Architectural Association Visiting School, the release of the Compendium of Climate Literacies, our next Climate Café, and the launch of the 2022 Saturday Studios programme!
Image: The Jacobs Building, Cove Park (Tracey Bloxham, Inside Story Photography)
Exploring Environment Through Literature:
Kathleen Jamie & Joséphine Bacon
Join us on Thursday, 27th January at 6pm for our virtual event, 'Exploring the Environment Through Literature, in Scotland and Québec: Kathleen Jamie and Joséphine Bacon in Conversation.'
In a week where Scotland and the world celebrate Robert Burns’ poetry, join us to hear from two internationally acclaimed poets from Scotland and Québec, who share Burns’ strong appreciation for nature. Scotland’s Makar Kathleen Jamie and Innu poet Joséphine Bacon will explore the relationship between literature and the natural environment, share their own personal connections to nature and how environmental writing not only inspires readers to take individual action, but can also be a healing and spiritual foundation for communal collaboration. The event will be chaired by Glasgow University’s Pauline Mackay of Robert Burns Studies.
'Exploring the Environment Through Literature' is presented in partnership with the Québec Government Office in London and Scottish Affairs for Canada, with the support of British Council and the collaboration of Scottish Poetry Library.
Find out more and reserve your free ticket here.
Image: Left, Kathleen Jamie (photography, Robin Gillanders), right, Joséphine Bacon (photography, Mélanie Crête).
Youth Arts Fund Bursary Programme
Call for Applications
We are pleased to announce the call for applications to Cove Park's new Youth Arts Fund Bursary Programme!
Support from Creative Scotland's Youth Arts Fund means we can offer four Bursaries beginning in the Spring this year and continuing until February 2023. Early career writers, theatre makers, designers, and digital artists based in Scotland - and aged between 18 and 24 - are welcome to apply. The bursaries will include a one-month residency at Cove Park, plus networking opportunities, peer-to-peer support, and mentoring throughout the year.
Further information on this programme, and details of how to apply, is available here. The deadline for all applications is Monday 21 February 2022.
Image: Heiba Lamara, Early Career Resident, 2018 (photography, Alan Dimmick)
Year of Stories 2022:
Storytelling Commission & Residency
Call for Applications
In December 2021, Cove Park announced a new storytelling residency and commission as part of Year of Stories 2022.
'If Our Trees Could Talk' is a storytelling commission focused on the unique habitats of Scotland’s rainforests, and those who live and work in these environments. We would like to engage a storyteller to capture existing stories and craft new ones in response to this endangered landscape. The resulting digital audio artwork will weave together stories from environmentalists, climate scientists, local communities and school children, and will be launched at a celebratory Climate Café event - as part of Cove Park and Argyll & the Isles Coast & Countryside Trust's Argyll Beacon programme - in May 2022.
The deadline for applications is 31 January 2022 and further information on the project and how to apply is available here.
Image: Saturday Studios, Cove Park, winter 2021/22 (photography, Caitlin Hegney)
Cove Park / RAW Material Company
Ibrahima Thiam
We are thrilled to welcome Ibrahima Thiam to Cove Park this month. This is the first artist residency within our wider exchange programme with RAW Material Company - a centre for art, knowledge and society in Dakar, Senegal. This project, supported by British Council Scotland, began last year with a residency at Cove Park for RAW Programme Curators Dulcie Abrahams Altass and Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy.
Ibrahima is a photographer based in Dakar, Senegal. He will be at Cove Park for eight weeks and during this time will develop a new body of work. The Scotland-based artist Juliane Foronda, and a member of Cove Park's team, will travel to Senegal later this year to work with RAW.
Image: Ibrahima Thiam (photography, Antoine Tempé)
Architectural Association Visiting School 2022
Cove Park and the Architectural Association are calling upon architects, designers, and artists to generate spatial propositions for Cove Park's site in collaboration with the Architectural Association's Visiting School (AAVS).
The Visiting School is a global network of courses and workshops pursued and shaped by students working intensively in small groups led by AA tutors. Central to the programme is the idea that experimental, new, and provocative forms of architecture are best learned by doing. The school promotes, tests and challenges global interests in architectural learning and exchange by embedding a diverse group of creative students and tutors in an array of unique rural, urban, and international contexts.
Cove Park is very excited to be the location for the 2022 Visiting School from 4 - 24 July. The School will engage with Cove Park's ambitions for the development and extension of our accommodation and facilities on site, integrating principles of low embodied carbon, co-living and responsibility towards the land. The School will invite participants to consider what these terms mean today as we plan for an uncertain future defined by climate breakdown. How can we integrate a radical ethos of environmental sustainability with flexible land management planning and ever-changing user’s needs and desires? How can we best relate to the scale of the site, the challenging presence of the natural elements, and the existing buildings?
AAVS Cove Park will be a three-week experimental programme in which to explore these questions by interrogating, researching, and testing spatial propositions within the context of Cove Park and our 50-acre site. Participants will be free to undertake an individual or collaborative approach to their projects amongst a multi-disciplinary cohort. As a group AAVS 2022 will transform Cove Park into a dynamic forum, generating and exchanging ideas which will contribute towards the design brief of the centre’s future development.
Register your interest now by visiting the Architectural Association's website.
Image: AAVS
Turbulence / Emergence / Enchantment:
A Compendium of Climate Literacies
In November 2021 Cove Park hosted over 36 national and international artists, cultural practitioners, researchers, writers, collectives, and activists for Turbulence / Emergence / Enchantment: A Compendium of Climate Literacies, an experimental intensive/symposium and a landmark event that signalled the launch of Cove Park's first enquiry connected to the environmental crisis.
We are pleased now to be able to share 'A Compendium of Climate Literacies' with you. This is an assemblage of audio and video recordings from the symposium. Organised around three keywords, Turbulence, Emergence, and Enchantment, the Compendium brings together contributors from a wide range of different backgrounds to ask the question: How can we progress towards mutual literacy between the arts, the humanities, the hard sciences, and civic responsibility? Visit our News page to access the Compendium and hear from Maureen Penjueli, Adrián Villar Rojas, Janice Parker, Territorial Agency, and many more.
'Turbulence / Emergence / Enchantment: A Compendium of Climate Literacies' was organised in partnership with the Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies and Professor Jason König at the University of St Andrews, London-based curator Lucia Pietroiusti, TBA21-Academy and Markus Reymann, and the School of Classics and the College of Arts and Humanities (Environmental Humanities Research Strand) of University College Dublin and Dr. Giacomo Savani. The symposium was made possible by funding from Arts & Business Scotland: Culture & Business Fund. Special thanks also go to Green Art Lab Alliance, the network of arts organisations contributing to environmental sustainability through their creative practice.
Image: Maureen Penjueli, Coordinator of Pacific Network on Globalisation delivering her lecture at Cove Park, November 2021 (photography, Sarah Frood).
The Argyll Beacon Climate Café
15 February 2022
Please join us at Cove Park on Tuesday 15 February, from 2-4.00pm, for the second in our series of Climate Cafés, organised as part of the Argyll Beacon, a partnership between Cove Park and Argyll & the Isles Coast & Countryside Trust (ACT). The Argyll Beacon, which focuses upon Scotland's rainforest, is one of a network of seven Climate Beacons across Scotland, launched in 2021 in advance of the COP26 Conference in Glasgow.
This Café will focus on local biodiversity, and our guest speakers are Marina Curran-Colthart, Local Biodiversity Officer for Argyll & Bute Council, and Angharad Ward, ACT's officer for the Collaborative Action for the Natura Network, a consortium of 11 partners working to save peatlands and wetlands across Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland. The Café is an opportunity to learn about key environmental projects in Argyll and to take part in an informal conversation about the impact of climate change on our region.
This event is free and everyone is welcome. Places are limited, so please book via EventBrite. Contact Emma Henderson, Cove Park's Curator of Engagement, for further information.
Image: Glen Creran, Argyll (courtesy ACT)
Cove Park Engagement
Saturday Studios in January
Our monthly programme of Saturday Studios begins again on Saturday 29 January with Awaken, a Celebration of Imbolic, with artist Juliana Capes.
Juliana is visual artist based in Edinburgh and a former Cove Park resident. She was commissioned at the end of last year to work with us on our Artists in Schools programme as part of the Argyll Beacon. This new online workshop, for school age children and young people, invites participants to join Juliana for a celebration of Imbolic and the awakening of the forests. Imbolic is a traditional Gaelic festival which marks the beginning of Spring.
Please register for this free online workshop via Eventbrite. Following registration, you will be sent an activity pack for the workshop. More information is given on the Eventbrite page, and a Zoom link will be shared with you on the day before the event.
If you have any questions concerning this event, please contact Emma Henderson. We look forward to seeing everyone online!
Image: Cove Park's Highland Cows (photography, Juliana Capes)
Book Cove Park - Last Minute Winter Dates
During the winter months Cove Park's accommodation is available at subsidised rates for individual and group bookings. Due to a few cancellations, as a result of Covid-19, we can offer some last-minute deals for our private accommodation and studios.
Available dates include: weeks commencing 31 January, 7 February, 14 February, 21 February, 28 February, 14 March, and 21 March.
Please contact Zoe Robinson directly for information on costs and the accommodation available during the above weeks. Images and descriptions of Cove Park's accommodation can be found here.
Image: Cove Park's Robertson Trust Room, looking across to Cowal peninsula (photography, Juliana Capes)
