Gardener's Bar: Events Programme - Camden Art Centre

Join us in Tamara Henderson's exhibition for an interdisciplinary programme of Garden Bar events housed in a distinct artwork crafted from a garden shed. 

Suitable for all ages, the programme intertwines art, film, poetry, and sound, exploring the bar’s role as a metaphor for composting. Here, contributors and audiences become the microorganisms fueling transformation and exchange.

26 October 9 November 16 November The Artists Images

26 October: Stephen Watts and other poets

Join us for an evening of poetry with Stephen Watts and other poets, as they respond to themes and subjects presented in Tamara Henderson’s exhibition.

With special thanks to Rory Cook and Protype Publishing.

 

9 November: Worm charming, rural characters and queering the land with Georgia Gendall

Join us for a two-part event featuring Georgia Gendall. The evening will start with a talk by Gendall on her rural praxis, shedding light on her various animal collaborations, dedication to organising community worm-charming events, and continuous endeavour to queer the landscape.

For the second part of the event, the audience will be invited to venture into the garden for a worm-charming session by torchlight as night falls. Participants will require torches and worm-charming tools. The more inventive, the better! The goal is to send vibrations into the ground to charm the worms. However, please note that mechanical vibrators are not permitted.

For inspiration and ideas, visit Georgia’s worm-charming tool archive.

16 November: per.mutation () with Beau Beaumont

per.mutation() challenges the human perception of sound. Transcendental in nature, this piece explores auditory art forms and sonic experimentation informed by synthesis and the senses of touch, coding techniques and the interpolation of movement in our ecosystem.

Listen to the cross-pollination of travel between Liverpool, London, and Japan. Microscopic surface vibration and the iteration of permutable frequencies coincide with mutated sounds of the natural world.

The Artists

Stephen Watts was born in 1952. His father was from Stoke-on-Trent and his mother’s family from villages high in the Italian & Swiss Alps. He spent very vital time – in place of university – in northern Scotland, especially the island of North Uist, but since 1977 has lived mainly in the richly multilingual communities of the Whitechapel area of East London. Geographies & location (as also their negative theologies) are urgent to his life & his work. Recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; repr. 2020) & Republic Of Dogs/Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020) & a b/w 16mm 70-minute experimental film The Republics was made from the latter by Huw Wahl in 2019. He’s also a translator working closely with exiled poets & inter alia has co-translated Pages from the Biography of an Exile by the Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh (Arc Publications, 2014) & Syrian poet Golan Haji’s A Tree Whose Name I Don’t Know (A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2017). A book by the Iranian poet Ziba Karbassi awaits publication & co-translations of two other Iranian writers, Esmail Khoi & Reza Baraheni, are forthcoming from Tenement Press. His translation research was the subject of two recent exhibitions : ‘Swirl Of Words/Swirl Of Worlds’ at PEER Gallery, Hoxton, for which he edited a book of that title (its subtitle ‘Poems From 94 Languages Spoken Across Hackney’ describes it best) & ‘Explosion Of Words’ with the Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach, which celebrated his 2,000-page Bibliography of Modern Poetry in English Translation at the Straühof Gallery, Zurich, & Nunnery Gallery, Bow, in summer 2021 & 2022 respectively. His own poetry has been translated into many languages, with full collections in Italian, Czech, Arabic, German & Spanish. Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975–2005 (Prototype, 2022) gathers together much of his work from the years 1975 to 2005, published & unpublished, & a second volume, including further early & later work, is due to be published in 2025. A book of his Drawn Poems is forthcoming from Joe Hales’ Sylvia imprint.

Stephen Watts’ recent books include Ancient Sunlight (Enitharmon, 2014; repr. 2020) & Republic Of Dogs/ Republic Of Birds (Test Centre, 2016; Prototype, 2020). A b/w 16mm 70-minute film The Republics was made from the latter by Huw Wahl in 2019. Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975–2005 (Prototype, 2022) gathers together much of his work from the years 1975 to 2005, published & unpublished, & a second volume, including further early & later work, is due to be published in 2025. A book of his Drawn Poems is forthcoming from Joe Hales’ Sylvia imprint.

Georgia Gendall is an artist, facilitator and seasonal shepherd living and working in Cornwall. Rooted in the landscape, she eavesdrops on the lives of rural characters and the structures of their environment: worms, cows, potatoes, scarecrows, deer, gusts of wind, biscuits, kissing gates, the feeling of the inside of a ewe, and fields of grain – commune in her work. Using event structures, sculptures, performances, and videos, she brings these characters together through multi-sensory encounters that take delight in unravelling our preconceptions of the rural as idyll and subverting the familiar to embody queerness.

Georgia Gendall (b. Cornwall 1991). In 2023, Georgia was nominated for the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award, received a Henry Moore Foundation Artists  Award for sculpture and an Arts Council England Project Grant to run her project space Allotment Club and Falmouth Worm Charming Championships 2023. In 2022, Gendall was awarded the Peoples Choice Award and the Additional Award for her work in Exeter Open Contemporary.

Recent solo/group exhibitions/events/ commissions, and residences include: Falmouth Worm Charming Championships (2021 – 2023); Allotment Club, Penryn (2023); Exeter Open Contemporary, Exeter Phoenix Gallery, Exeter (2022); Stokkøyart, Norway (2022), Bothy Project, Scotland (2022), Thanks for the Apples, Falmouth Art Gallery, Falmouth (2021); When was the last time you lay down to look at the sky? Whitegold, St Austell (2020); In Other Words, Darling, Kestle Barton, Lizard, Cornwall & Auction House, Redruth, Cornwall (2019); also, also, also, Whitstable Biennale, Whitstable (2018)

Beau Beaumont is a Liverpool-based composer and performer. Her works traverse ideas surrounding physical place, a means of connection mediated through sound and synthesis, computation, and coding to carve out thought provoking and left of centre performances. Beau’s installation-based works adopt an interdisciplinary approach combining sound, image, and sculpture; informed by her interest in narrative and the exploration of sound in unconventional locations. Her varied history includes commissions and performances for The Royal Opera House, Nike, Tate Gallery, Resident Advisor and Red Bull Music. Support from Metal Culture and FACT Liverpool has enabled the artist to produce new experimental works exploring social change, translated into sonic collages. Most recently, Beau spent two months in Japan as Artist in Residence at Paradise Air. Developing sound works and recording with local artists, whilst exploring different methods of recording and composition for live performance, Installation-based works, and radio broadcasting. Beau is a resident on NTS Radio, often focusing on psychoacoustics and differing recording techniques to create experiences that imply and challenge the notion of music as an art form.