PLAYGROUND

We would like to invite you to the opening of Playground, an exhibition featuring artists from Derbyshire Artists Residency Program (DARP).

Artists Ella Fleck, Ella Yolande, Fibi Cowley, Maggie Campbell, Sean Roy Parker, Solomon Berrio-Allen and Sonia Odedra are currently in residence at the Artcore Cabin on Osnabruck Square, where they have been engaging with the public through collaborative workshops and skill-shares.

Playground highlights the community-focused approach of DARP’s residency with Artcore, where they have been connecting with the local people of Derby and inviting them into Artcore’s space and DARP’s imagination.

The group exhibition will be a celebration and hope for the future, sharing what they have learnt through practicing and living together at DARP, and thinking about creative possibilities of Derby’s regeneration.

Book your tickets here!

About DARP

DARP (Derbyshire Artist Resident Programme) is a co-living and co-working art practice experiment situated in a disused school in the Derbyshire countryside. Founded in January 2021, their project was born of a desire to provide artists and creative practitioners with the time and space to focus on individual projects, while simultaneously benefitting from communal living and proximity to the natural world. At DARP artists work autonomously and collaboratively, focussing on finding ways to live and practice together in a dynamic and environmentally responsible way.

Public Programme

Saturday 20th November 2pm-4pm & Saturday 4th December 12-2pm

‘Future Creatures’: Costume-making workshop with artists Sonia & Maggie. For children.

Friday 10th December 6-8pm

Exhibition Opening at Artcore Gallery and Cabin.

Saturday 8th January 2022

3:30– 5:30pm: Sauerkraut Demonstration with Sean Roy Parker.

6pm-7pm: Rural Imaginaries: Long Table Discussion

About the Artists

Ella Fleck

Ella Fleck is an artist, writer and curator based in Derbyshire. She works with drawing, performance, sculpture, digital tools and people. Ella thinks about ways to create systems with pedagogical love that nurture play and art practice in a digitally dominant world. She recently opened her first solo exhibition, ‘Doomer Mommy’ at Newgate Gap, Margate UK in October 2021 and has exhibited as part of group or two-person shows internationally in the UK, USA, Greece and Japan. In 2018 she co-founded the curatorial project, 650mAh www.650mah.com which has been featured in publications such as The Art Newspaper, Artnet, Frieze, New York Times, Die Welt and The Guardian. Ella has written for Frieze and Dazed and recently performed at the Icelandic Festival of Electronic Arts in Reykjavik. She also runs an OnlyFans account with artist Jaana Kristiina Alakoski.

Ella co-started DARP in January 2021 with Sophie Ruigrok. Her work is influenced by outdated Steiner methodologies, computational thought, sociocracy, collapse communities and video games.

Ella Yolande

Ella Yolande is a multimedia British artist working primarily with video, sculpture, digital media and experimenting with installation and expanded cinema practices. By looking at ecological systems and structures, she uses digital and physical processes to create surreal biomes and reimagine relationships between, and with non human worlds. Her work is driven by a curiosity about different ecosystems, gardens, fictional hybrid organisms, metamorphic states and interspecies entanglements, along with what we might learn from the fluidity of plants and non human organisms.

This is a way to acknowledge current climate urgencies and invite people to consider our interwoven existence with our surroundings, as well as stimulate playful thinking on imaginary and speculative realities. Over the last 7 months she has been based at DARP in Derbyshire.

Fibi Cowley

​​Fibi’s experience-led practice centers performance and participation in video making and watching. Through the ‘performing object’, she explores communal trances, the persistent usefulness of non-rational human phenomena and multi-generational movements. Influenced by personal and cultural recollections of the dream, the drug and the hallucination, her performance ‘happenings’ disrupt public spaces to teeter between the mundane and magical, depicting a world-in-drag inspired by countercultural mischief. This direct engagement with audiences is informed by her work within Myriam Lefkowitz’s participatory performances ‘Walk, Hands, Eyes’ (2019) at The Talbot Rice Gallery and within the team that animated Vision Mechanic’s large-scale puppet, ‘Storm’ for Celtic Connections Festival (2020). In 2017 she helped to found the artist collective ‘BOG’, whose members have curated group shows in 2017 and 2019.

Sean Roy Parker

Sean Roy Parker is an artist, environmental educator and fermentation enthusiast currently based at DARP. His work examines the lifecycle of materials, complexities of civic responsibility, and problem-solving through collaborative action. He practises traditional approaches to craft and art-making, using leftover or abundant items of nature and artifice to explore feelings of eco-anxiety in late-stage capitalism and redistribute resources through flexible care structures. Over summer he delivered a Learning Project for Liverpool Biennial on bacteria called “A Processing Medium”, and was recently at Pols in Valencia researching anarchist solidarity with the peasant farmer network.

Solomon Berrio-Allen

Solomon is a choreographer, movement director and facilitator working in the field of visual arts & dance. His work spans across stage productions and film and carries an affinity with unfolding the poetry, playfulness & sensibilities of our human nature and the heartbeat of the world beyond.

Engaged in creating immersive, holistic, open spaces and experiences stemming from his care for laying the ground to see people bloom and step into their aliveness. This called him to found the online platform @howareyoudance standing as a home for conversation, community, exchange, opportunities and exploration from an embodied perspective. Employing conscious movement as a key to how we can come into greater harmony and freedom with our body, the collective body and the world around us. Opening to it’s symphony and the healing and heart within motion. HAY’s HQ now happily residing at DARP.

He has also worked on commissions from Moscow to Italy for companies such as Stanislavsky Ballet Company, Dance Arts Faculty and initiatives including ICA, Nowness, Sony Music & Channel 4.

www.solomonberrioallen.com

Sonia Odedra & Maggie Campbell

Maggie and Sonia collaborate with choreographers, composers and dancers to create experimental performances. They make large-scale, sculptural costume pieces which act as a stimuli for movement, informing how performers can move through extending or restricting their bodies. These otherworldly creatures are inspired by magnified forms of micro-organisms and bacteria, which morph, merge and recoil, exploring their symbiotic relationships whilst inviting the audience into uncanny worlds. They use exclusively up-cycled, organic and biodegradable materials, and ultimately aim to develop a practice as zero-waste as possible. They run workshops for young people which focus on sustainability in costume and set design. They have worked in disused office buildings, deserted universities, abandoned theatres, and a vacated military base. They now call DARP, a former Steiner school, their home & studio