SONIC COMMONS

SONIC COMMONS is a series responding to the poetic and phonic landscape of North Kent, produced in collaboration with FIELDNOTES. 

Featuring field recordings, readings, and sonic landscapes, the series was produced whilst walking along the Thames Estuary. It includes encounters with people met along the way, who give voice to the collected texts that reference these places.

The resulting soundwork, composed by artist and musician Rob Shuttleworth, ranges across a sonic and textual landscape, producing unexpected encounters and resonances.

Thanks to all the collaborators, those who sent us texts and those who voiced them: Kashif, Eugene, Shippey, Joshua, Ollie, Katie Lane, James Hendrix Elsey, Gina Prat Lilly, Carolyn Oulton, GK Mollett, John Hartley, Jon Davis, Monty Williams, Nicole Mollett and Sarah Westcott.

Starting in Gravesend, the first episode, was broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Tuesday 23 January 2024.

SONIC COMMONS #1

SONIC COMMONS is a series responding to the poetic and phonic landscape of North Kent, produced in collaboration with FIELDNOTES. 

Featuring field recordings, readings, and sonic landscapes, the series was produced whilst walking along the Thames Estuary. It includes encounters with people met along the way, who give voice to the collected texts that reference these places.

The resulting soundwork, composed by artist and musician Rob Shuttleworth, ranges across a sonic and textual landscape, producing unexpected encounters and resonances.

Thanks to all the collaborators, those who sent us texts and those who voiced them: Kashif, Eugene, Shippey, Joshua, Ollie, Katie Lane, James Hendrix Elsey, Gina Prat Lilly, Carolyn Oulton, GK Mollett, John Hartley, Jon Davis, Monty Williams, Nicole Mollett and Sarah Westcott.

Starting in in Sheerness on the Isle of Sheppey, this episode was broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Tuesday 27 February 2024.

SONIC COMMONS #2

SONIC COMMONS is a series responding to the poetic and phonic landscape of North Kent, produced in collaboration with FIELDNOTES.

Featuring field recordings, readings, and sonic landscapes, the series was produced whilst walking along the Thames Estuary. It includes encounters with people met along the way, who give voice to the collected texts that reference these places.

The resulting soundwork, composed by artist and musician Rob Shuttleworth, ranges across a sonic and textual landscape, producing unexpected encounters and resonances.

Thanks to all the collaborators, those who sent us texts and those who voiced them: Kashif, Eugene, Shippey, Joshua, Ollie, Katie Lane, James Hendrix Elsey, Gina Prat Lilly, Carolyn Oulton, GK Mollett, John Hartley, Jon Davis, Monty Williams, Nicole Mollett and Sarah Westcott.

Travelling through Warden Bay and the Leysdown Arcades on the Isle of Sheppey, this third and final episode was broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM on Tuesday 26 April 2024.

SONIC COMMONS #3

Welcome to the inaugural episode of Notes From The Field, a Cement Fields podcast where we talk to artists, practitioners and researchers to dig deeper into our projects and the people behind them.

Our very first guest in this series is Floating University Berlin. We’re really grateful that we got to spend some time with a few of the team behind the pioneering project this Summer, as part of a Cultural Bridge funded peer to peer exchange programme called Wetland.

Through a series of online reading groups and two week-long labs in London and Berlin, we explored and reflected on the practices of care and hospitality we use to engage communities and redefine our former industrial locations.

Condensing several month’s worth of discussions proved challenging, so we have chosen to zoom in on our visit to Berlin as the culmination of our time together, and as such the moment when the threads of our exchange began to gather.

This episode of Notes From The Field invites the listener into our week-long Lab, which took place during a September heatwave in the rainwater retention pool of the former Berlin Tempelhof airport, the site which floating has called home since 2019. Over 36 minutes we attempt to encapsulate the spirit and potential of Wetland and provide a window into our shared practice.

Cement Fields is a visual arts organisation working collaboratively with artists and communities to create ambitious new art along the Thames Estuary in North Kent. Our programme is an exploration of place and process, defined by the multiple shifting landscapes that stretch along the Thames from Dartford to Whitstable. We invite artists, participants and audiences to use North Kent's unique contexts to ask radical questions and explore new ideas. Through this interaction we create experimental art and develop imagination, skills and pathways into creative careers. Cement Fields has grown out of Whitstable Biennale, a visual arts festival founded in 2002. We’re proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation, supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and the University of Kent.

Floating University Berlin is a Natureculture learning site and fully functioning urban campus run by non-profit organisation Floating e.V., a self organised group of practitioners whose mission is to open, maintain, and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary, radical and participatory programs to the public. Floating operates in solidarity with the site's history and the lineage of alternative narratives for urban development. It is an ecosystem in which to learn to engage, embrace complexity, and imagine different forms of living.

Wetland was funded by Cultural Bridge, which celebrates bilateral artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany through a collaboration between Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, Creative Scotland, Fons Soziokultur, Goethe-Institut London and Wales Arts International.

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Notes From The Field 001: Wetland

Welcome to the second episode of Notes From The Field, a Cement Fields podcast where we talk to artists, practitioners and researchers to dig deeper into our projects and the people behind them.

Our guest for this second episode of Notes From The Field is Sea Like a Mirror lead artist Ivan Morison. Sea Like a Mirror is an ambitious national partnership programme, commissioned to mark the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, inspired by the profound legacy of their life-saving work. 

At the heart of the programme is a newly commissioned artwork, White Horses, by Ivan Morison, from the collaborative practice of Heather Peak and Ivan Morison. Produced through a series of visits to lifeboat stations in six diverse seaside towns around the coastline, this travelling 16mm film work, housed in a sculptural tent, explores the myriad roles the sea plays for those who hold a deep connection to the water.

Across May and June this year, White Horses returned to these locations, and in each setting was presented alongside a series of commissions from local artists, made in collaboration with the area’s community, making up the Sea Like a Mirror programme.

Ivan Morison has established an ambitious practice that transcends the divisions between art, architecture, theatre and social practice; questioning what it means to be an artist in the 21st Century. His primary preoccupation has always been how we navigate catastrophe and the violence of change – from the wider collective view down to how individuals deal with moments of personal calamity. Alongside Heather Peak, he is co-director of artist-led creative practice Studio Morison, whose work centres around spaces of human coexistence and the communities that occupy or may gather there. They categorise their work as a situated practice constructed from layers of social sculpture and sculptural space.

Sea Like a Mirror is a partnership project led by Cement Fields, with Art Gene, Norfolk & Norwich Festival, North East Lincolnshire Council & East Marsh United, and Super Culture. With thanks to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Supported with public funding from Arts Council England. Presented in Gravesend for Estuary 2025 with Estuary Festival.

Thank you for listening.

Notes From The Field 002: Ivan Morison

Cement Fields is a visual art organisation working collaboratively with artists and communities to create ambitious new art along the Thames Estuary in North Kent.

Cement Fields

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