Metal Harvest LAB Commissioned Artist
In 2015 ten artists were selected to respond to the theme of Harvest, to attend a research and development lab at Metal (Peterborough) mentored by lead artist Lucy Orta, artist and curator Simon Poulter, creative producer Sara Black, and director of Museum of British Folklore Simon Costin, and then subsequently to respond with a bespoke artistic commission.
Background:
Arts organisation Metal planned a large scale, weekend-long Harvest Festival in Peterborough’s historic Cathedral Square. The festival celebrated the relationship between the city and its rural countryside, connecting people to the land and its associated Harvest rituals, whilst promoting local food and its suppliers. Overall this city wide, family orientated event, focussed on ecological and social sustainability including localism, food production, food waste/sustainability, agricultural education and collective responses to the land.
This was a publicly engaging weekend of art and culture that reinvigorated and transformed the ancestral ritual of Harvest and attracted thousands of people into the city centre; here is a brief outline of the weekend and what it involved.
At the heart of the festival was an outdoor meal for 500 people created by international artists Studio Orta.
‘Harvestment’ (2015) provides a meditation upon celebration and harvest; mortality and growth. Filmed in diverse locations which include a waste pickers co-operative in São Paulo, Brazil, and a large-scale horticulture unit deep within the eastern agricultural belt near Peterborough. The work focuses upon what humanity sees fit to harvest, or re-purpose, from a Scottish estate’s snow-clad stag remains to the urban detritus of Latin America. The soundtrack to the work includes Highland pipers, choral practice from Peterborough Cathedral and a vintage gramophone.
'Robyn has created a powerful short film telling stories from across the world that act as mirror and microcosm for our relationship to the land in the 21st century.
Collectively the vignettes raise fundamental questions about how we use and shape our natural environment to our own ends, constructing and destroying, manipulating and managing for profit and gain.
There is also real beauty here, and a genuine respect for the workers who toil on production lines to meet consumer demands or clean up our mess.
The cycles of life and death are evident, and the stark juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, celebration and despair, verdant abundance and polluted wasteland, chaos and order.
This is a beautiful and thought provoking piece.'
— Mark Richards, Director, Metal (Peterborough)