Artist Ruth Levene and baker Kimberley Bell talk about their work with biodiverse grain, and re-imagining food systems. The talk will be accompanied by fresh bread and followed by a group conversation.

This free public event is co-organised with by Primary and UK Grain Lab

As part of Coventry Biennial, Social Art Network Sheffield, a community of artists building agency for the fields of art and social practice, come to Coventry to share exciting and experimental grassroots art practices around food cultivation, foraging, harvesting, preparation, cooking and the shared eating of meals. The network will be represented by a collective of artists and social practice projects – the Foodhall Project, Social Pickle, Ruth Levene, and network co-leads Jennifer Booth and James Harrington. 

These practices demonstrate how grassroots, DIY, social practices can suggest, uncover, or indeed create, new possibilities for how we may live together – through distributed communities of micro-farms, public kitchens and cafes, universal access to healthy food, tackling isolation through social eating, circular economies innovating and using surpluses, as well as the harnessing of cultures to transform our foods.

This free event offers a day of exploring art, ecology & community collaboration, drawing inspiration from two UK-based Peatlands projects. When we combine the scientific with the felt and experienced, our capacity to connect to a landscape and begin to understand it is greatly deepened. How can we begin collaborative projects between communities, artists, landscape management and ecologists? How can this process open up discussions and opportunities for deeper understanding and complex action, and what practical support or guidance is needed?

As a part of Water@Leeds water governance webinar series, Ruth will be talking alongside her collaborator Megan Clinch about their Arts Catalyst commission A Common Waters Policy in the session Creative ways toward healthier human-river relationships. Also speaking is Christian Ernsten from University of Maastrict whose research is situated at the intersection of the fields of heritage studies, urban studies and postcolonial studies.

Exploring the devaluing of water and the arts despite being essential to our survival. Social anthropologist Megan Clinch (Blizard Institute, QMUL) and artist Ruth Levene will introduce their research exploring the impact of flooding on the communities that live in the Calder Catchment, Yorkshire. Louise Younie, GP and Clinical Senior Lecturer at Barts and The London medical school, will talk about her pioneering creative enquiry work with medical students and health professionals. After this, the co-directors of the MSc Creative Arts and Mental Health, Bridget Escolme (Professor of Theatre and Performance, QMUL) and psychiatrist and theatre scholar Maria Grazia Turri (Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine, QMUL), will reflect on the value of the arts for mental health and social justice.

LU Arts and Radar working with artist Ian Nesbitt have organised a day of discussion which will interrogate ‘care’ as a key political concept for our time. Exploring how care is unevenly distributed and can perpetuate injustices, it will also probe how care can be mobilised to build a fairer world. Speakers will connect healthcare with ecological devastation, interrogate the role of care in social movements, and think about networks of care that extend beyond ‘the human’. There will also be a screening of Care Notes, followed by a Q&A with Ian Nesbitt.

The first event in a series exploring the theme of Edgelands.

Sheffield premiere of Edgelands – a short fiction film by upcoming film maker Broden Salmon which contextualises stories of food poverty, homelessness and youth welfare into a realistic drama.

The main feature is ‘Field Notes’ from The Boundary Project – a collaboration between film maker Ian Nesbitt and artist Ruth Levene. The collaboration began as a 9 day, 67 mile walk around Sheffield’s metropolitan boundary, where both artists live. Followed by Q&A and conversation with Ian and Ruth.

'Our whole lives are defined by the time it takes to live them. It’s in the past that we remember and the future that we imagine together, the centuries of change and the here and now'

This immersive new exhibition looks at how contemporary artists have approached our complicated relationship with time. Lose yourself in artworks that question how time affects everything we do. Artists include Helen Chadwick, Braco Dimitrijević, Katie Paterson, Ruth Ewan, Ruth Levene, James Nares, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Mathew Weir, Andrew Hunt and more.

Working Waters is an artwork that takes the form of a 3D model representation of the Calder Catchment. Populated by a variety of moveable miniature scenes – from canal locks to flood defences, tourists on walking holidays to flooded shops – visitors are invited to direct the scenery around, to activate and exert control over the landscape itself and become a steward of the water systems. Building on research developed over the past two years Working Waters is part of the wider project, Test Sites: Calder, which brings to the fore the complexities of the valley, its material and immaterial infrastructures and its governance. Here, a cyclist, a reservoir and a group of protesters become part of a multi-layered micro-reality in which visitors are invited to re-imagine their own agency within the ecology of the valley. Working Waters is made in conjunction with model maker David Riley.  

The launch of Practising Place, a new publication which explores our relationship with places through a collection of creative projects and conversations between artists and academics.

The Practising Place book explores our relationship with place through a collection of co-authored texts, visual essays, creative projects and conversations between artists and academics. Featuring new and existing artworks and covering a range of themes, including rural mythologies, urban noise, boundaries and seaside nostalgia, this highly visual book demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary discourse and presents an approach to the study of place as a creative and critical practice.

The publication, which features a foreword by Lubaina Himid CBE, includes creative explorations of places across the north of England – including a Cumbrian Center Parcs resort, Stanlow Oil Refinery, working-men’s clubs, Manchester Central Library and the edgelands of Preston and Sheffield ­– as well as more general themes, such as urban planning and digital space.

It includes an essay by artist Ian Nesbitt, Landscape Archeologis Bob Johnston  and myself discussing our 9 day walk around Sheffield Boundary.

The event will be followed by a drinks reception and the opportunity to purchase the book for the special price of £10 (RRP £15)

This one day symposium will explore how contemporary artists can contribute to the environmental aims and strategies of Landscape Partnerships and environmental programmes.

A day of conversations, presentations and round table discussion about peat restoration and how working with artists creates new cultural connections with landscape and environment projects.

Greening Arts Practice is a professional development programme run by Chrysalis Arts to support artists’ practice and engagement with climate change and related environmental and sustainability issues. These GAP sessions involve artists, curators, producers and those who work with them with the aim of offering different perspectives and experiences and overcoming some of the barriers and perceptions that currently restrict creative participation. The events are open to all to attend and there is a small fee to cover a vegetarian lunch which is provided. GAP session five will be by Artist Ruth Levene and Anthropologist Megan Clinch discussing their project Test Sites commissioned by Arts Catalyst.

In conjunction with In Certain Places at UCLAN, artists Ian Nesbitt and Ruth Levene are staging a group exhibition, to which members of the public have contributed.

Like all cities, Preston is growing and changing fast, particularly on its outskirts. Ian and Ruth have invited residents of Preston and its surrounding villages to take part in an exhibition about how the outskirts of Preston and the land around the city is changing or has changed in the past.

The exhibition explores the relationships between people and place, city and surrounding landscape, through the lens of the people who live and work there. The exhibition will include prints, poems, maps, sound recordings, photographs and water colour paintings from Harris collection and takes place in a new build house (see picture left) on the outskirts of Preston.

Lie of the Land - a day of artworks, presentations and conversations about our relationship to the land organised by In Certain Places. Drawing on research undertaken by artists in The Expanded City programme, the symposium will explore how our everyday lives are shaped by the ownership, management and development of land. The symposium will present some of the artists’ key insights and observations, providing a snapshot of the project to date, and encourage discussion about wider issues of urban planning and policy. It will also feature talks by journalist and author Peter Hetherington and artist Julia Heslop and include a bus tour around some of The Expanded City sites, and the distribution of a limited-edition map of the project.

Together with artists, scientists and thinkers interested in re-imagining social, artistic and scientific research as a bottom-up community-led approach, particularly in relation to planetary health, we will explore the complex, interdependent relationship between the health of the planet and the politics of human health.   Drawing on examples from different parts of the world, the day aims to propose tactical actions towards asserting, enabling and promoting translocal commoning practices and methods of collective inquiry. Participants include Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (curator), Shela Sheik (curator), Luigi Coppola (artist), Darshana Chauchan (urban planner), Tom Wakeford (public scientist), Sylvia Nagl (complexity scientist), Neal White (artist), Ruth Levene (artist, and Nabil Ahmed (artist), chaired by Nicola Triscott (Arts Catalyst/University of Westminster) and Anna Santomauro (Arts Catalyst).    

Assembly: Planetary Perspectives is organised by Arts Catalyst in partnership with CREAM, University of Westminster. It is part of Arts Catalyst's Test Sites: Assembly, an 8-week co-inquiry and exhibition asking how we can respond collectively to social and environmental challenges.

Third Space Galway will initiate exciting working partnerships with artists, activists and leading researchers in Galway, NUI Maynooth and most crucially local stakeholders within the Galway community, working in partnership with Galway City Community Network. Highlighting the growing awareness and appreciation of regenerative arts and cultural practices, ecological living and food production.

Curated by Martina Finn the day will include a Symposium/Artists’ Presentations, Artists & Activists panel discussion, Open Consultation sessions available with the artists/activists and Convivial Food event open to all.

Maynooth University will host the 2018 Festival of Food Sovereignty. Social movements, activists, scholars and practitioners around the world use the term 'food sovereignty' as a way to highlight the scope that exists for all of us to create a food system around the core principles of justice, ethical production and consumption, ecological sustainability, and democracy. Food sovereignty is a live issue in Ireland. A growing number of people are familiar with and support food cooperatives, community supported agriculture schemes, social farming, seed saving, beekeeping, and more.  

The Festival of Food Sovereignty aims to bring together practitioners and the general public to celebrate and explore the possibilities of constructing food sovereignty in Ireland. There will be talks, conversations, workshops, music, art, activities for kids, and food.

Test Sites: Assembly is an exhibition and co-inquiry asking how we can respond collectively to social and environmental challenges.

An exhibition of works-in-progress by Test Sites artists Ruth Levene and Neal White will be shown at Arts Catalyst’s Centre, drawing on their research in the Calder Valley and Poole Harbour. Ruth Levene presents Working Waters, an installation of maps, videos and models created from her investigations into the flows and stewardship of water in the Calder Valley. Meanwhile, Neal White presents Brownsea: An Imaginary Island (An Island of the Imaginary), comprising a vivarium containing fauna and flora of an island in Poole Harbour alongside an archive of local knowledge, interrupted by industrial frequencies.

There will be an Assembly programme that sits alongside the works.

A morning of exploration and discussion about 'changing and precarious landscape'. Following their five-day walk around the metropolitan boundary of Preston last year to observe and gather information of the landscape around the city's edges, Ruth and Ian are looking to broaden and deepen their understanding by seeking the experiences and knowledge of others. The event will take participants on a coach to locations on the western bounds of Preston and include readings, discussion points, conversation and lunch.

The Connected City is a programme of creative activities and collaborative artworks focused on places involved in the City Deal – a £430m, 10-year infrastructure scheme that aims to deliver new jobs and housing to the centre and peripheries of Preston. Collaborating artists Ian Nesbitt and Ruth Levene will draw on their research they undertook during last years Expanded City programme to make a new work that considers the economically driven expansion of the city and making room for the ‘spiritual’ and ‘ritual’, as well as ‘bureaucratic’ and ‘metric’ ways of connecting with and understanding place.

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is a roving biennial of new cinema, digital culture and art, over four days the festival will see a host of site-specific installations, world premieres and performances take-over the village of Castleton.

Part of the AND festival Site Gallery presents Formation with artists Rose Butler, Ruth Levene, Victoria Lucas and Ian Nesbitt the works which all take a double look at the mythologies of landscape and the industrial infrastructures which transform them into human use. The works question notions of beauty and sustainability and the durability of systems we have come to rely on.

Everything Flows brings together work by emerging and established Sheffield-based artists working with painting, sculpture, video, photography and sound. The works are each united, in different ways, by a sense of ‘flow’, from choreographed movement and kinetic motion, through to the fluctuations of narrative, and the movement of international finance and migration.

Curated by Jeanine Griffin, the exhibition includes work by Paul Barlow, Rose Butler, Joseph Cutts, Natalie Finnemore, Ruth Levene, Victoria Lucas, Peter Martin, and Ryan Mosley.

Test Sites is Arts Catalyst’s series of inquiries into matters of concern connected with environmental change – such as flooding, pollution, and species loss – and their impact on local culture, and ecology. At each site, we are inviting local people and groups to be part of art-led co-inquiries, working with artists, scientists, and other experts.

In collaboration with Canal & River Trust, Ruth and Arts Catalyst will make two initial research journeys by narrowboat along the Calder/Hebble navigation, meeting local people, river/canal users and experts with interests in water (ecologists, fishermen, canoeists, etc), the history of the river and canal, water stewardship.

As part of the water themed festival, Ruth will be exhibiting Hidden Waters, a series of digital prints and etchings mapping the river networks and buried water and sewage infrastructure in the UK. In the basement, alongside the fading flood marks, will be Our Waters, a video work that reflects on the state of our urban water infrastructure system and The Water Cycle, a video work and poster and series of interviews with academics exploring the social, economic, political & environmental interactions we have with water systems.

As a part of the Cape Farewell exhibition FarmArt join us for a talk and discussion hosted by Laura Williams with artists Anne-Marie Culhane and Ruth Levene about A Field of Wheat. This will be followed by a communal, homemade meal with bread made from the wheat grown during the project. The exhibition will be especially opened before the event.

A Field of Wheat will be exhibited alongside two projects that were commissioned by The Arts Development Company and Cape Farewell that matched artists with farmers to examine our relationship with food, farming and the wider environment. EXCHANGE, by artist Chris Drury & poet-novelist Kay Syrad and contributing West Dorset farmers. Bristol based Project ‘The Milking Parlour’ by artist Vanessa Reid.

Inertial Frame, 2009 will be exhibit alongside Finnish contemporary artists and one of Finland’s foremost landscape painters Victor Westerholm (1860-1919). The works on show in the exhibition depict the archipelago islands on the south west of Finland. Inertial Frame was filmed between the islands of Pargas and Nauvo during a two month residency in Turku, Finland.

Radio 4's Farming Today, On Your Farm series produced a show about A Field of Wheat.

"Agriculture in Britain is a pretty lonely business these days. Many farming businesses are run by one man or woman who hires in contractors for the big jobs. In Lincolnshire Peter Lundgren has solved that problem by finding forty-two people to share a year in the life of a twenty acre field of wheat.

In an experiment in social art The Field of Wheat collective invited interested individuals from around the world to pay their share of the cost of seeding the field and then allowed them to share in making some of the decisions about the field and its crop".

Curated by Perthshire artist Su Grierson, this video art explores performance  in landscape, showcasing art’s ability to lead us to more complicated and abstract ideas of ‘place’.  Features Henry Coombes, Ruth Levene, Christopher MacInnes, Sam Spreckley, Emma Weislander, Adam Chienjo, Kyra Clegg and Su Grierson