Od Arts Festival

02/04/2026

Spring News -

Meet Al Kennedy, a designer, business consultant and arts practitioner based on the Somerset Levels. Trained at the Royal College of Art and also with an MBA from the University of Exeter, he has spent 25 years building creative agencies, training companies and social art projects across London, Bri...

31/12/2025

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🙌 Thank you to all the wonderful creative people we have had the pleasure of being with this year 🍾

Artists, curators, writers, visitors, volunteers and friends. We may have spent months hatching plans, weeks building exhibitions, or just sat next to each other at a talk, or shared a laugh and some food together… we love you all and wish you the best for 2026! 📷 mixed bag some 😉

05/08/2025

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It doesn’t escape my notice how unbelievably privileged I am - with the world in the state it is - to be able to work in a culture of abundance, where I can share food, collective moments of rest and practice generously and openly. I am hugely grateful to for this recent opportunity to do so as part of the ‘Thinking In Circles’ seminar day. The feast I offered up, gathered around a communal long table at , was called ‘Breathy Encounters’. The menu embodied moments of delicious encounter between temporalities of growth and decay, embracing seasonality, ancestral time and speculative futures. It was a meal shaped by slowness, improvisation and the cyclical rhythm of the breath - not a fixed event but a gathering within a longer flow of time. In the midst of it all we took a moment to lay our heads down and rest deeply together on the grassy mounds I had grown for everyone to use as plates. We were also joined by Alex Montgomery from .soil (amazing people - check them out!) with all his composting kit to ensure the cycle was complete.

These wonderful photos were taken by the very talented

MENU
inhale: plantain, lungwort, nettle, anise, oat straw, linden, red clover
exhale
saffron and fava bean, pickled oyster mushrooms,
fermented oatcakes, thyme
rest
beetroot and malted oat, pickled beetroot, wild garlic oat dumpling
inhale
fig and hogweed sowans bread, violet honey butter, bee pollen
apple blossom oat amazake
exhale

Thanks so much to and for making this happen and to and the lovely folk at Dawes Twineworks for logistical and moral support! What a totally gorgeous day.

16/07/2025

~~ From breath to dust ~~
Jes Fernie
 
“To reach the underworld, I walk on grass, tarmac, roots, concrete and soil. It’s not a long journey, but it’s more than likely that I kill a number of insects, fungi, and other microcosms along the way. I sit in a field and place headphones on my ears…’’ Listen to ‘From breath to dust’ read by Jes Fernie. 👂Link in bio.

Jes Fernie was writer in residence for the 2025 Od Arts Festival. Her text is a circular journey, starting in West Coker, travelling through the earth, out the other side and back again. It begins with Michelle Atherton’s ‘Soil Séance’, a deep listening to the underworld, and takes in a selection of artworks in the festival. .atherton

Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

12/07/2025

PaC⁠
Artists in Residence⁠
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Throughout Od Arts Festival PaC artists Gemma Gore, Laura Eldret and Melanie Rose were in residence and on Sunday festival goers were invited to join them for an artists-led walk through the ancient Holloways local to the Cokers. PaC - .el.gee

Together we walk, explore and create a commons of exchange and peer support. PaC: placing artists in common / practicing artists commoning / utm (utm = yoU Tell Me, acknowledging that PaC can be and is different in experience and meaning to different participants).⁠

Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

11/07/2025

EMII ALRAI⁠
Waypoints⁠
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Emii Alrai produced a new commission for Dawe's Twine Works in West Coker, the UK’s only surviving 19th century twine works, and historic producer of twine for the maritime industry. Mimicking geological forms, ancient ruins and artefacts, her works looked at the role of map tables in the lands that empires conquer and their relationship to the maritime industry.⁠
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Emii Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the complexity of ruins. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her work operates as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which concern archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in oral histories, inherited nostalgia and the details of language to question the rigidity of Empire and the power of hierarchy to interpolate the static presence of history. ⁠
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Past solo exhibitions include Lithics at Quench Gallery, Margate (2024); A Core of Scar, The Hepworth Wakefield & iniva (2022); and Reverse Defence at Workplace Foundation in Newcastle (2022). Alrai’s work is held in public collections including the British Museum, London; Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds; the Arts Council Collection, London; the Government Art Collection, and The Hepworth Wakefield.⁠
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VENUE⁠
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker⁠
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Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

10/07/2025

GROUNDMOUTH
Workshop and Installation

Groundmouth lead two workshops which explored the history of the flax industry: how hyper industrialisation has led to a sense of disembodiment and how the tacitly of flax can bring us back into relationship with ourselves and the land. They weaved new mythologies of industrialisation to intuitively understand its complex and haunting legacy, through a sprawling and scavenged installation of sculpture and sound.

Harry Martin and Milly Melbourne are Groundmouth, a collaboration born from The Field artist residency in the old headquarters of the National Coal Board in Derbyshire.

Harry Martin’s work describes alchemical transformations leading to a deepening sense of embodiment, interdependence and connection to the land, through shimmering pastel drawings, drag rituals and fragmented choral soundscapes.

Milly Melbourne is the founder of oB wear where pieces are slowly hand worked with care, incorporating labour-intensive historical garment making techniques and handpicking natural materials with a story to tell.

VENUE⁠
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker⁠
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Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

09/07/2025

VICKY PUTLER (FLAX PROJECT CIC) & RACHEL DOBBS
The West Coker Strop - 2025

Visitors and schools were invited to contribute to the making of the West Coker Strop while the artists ‘spin a yarn’, bringing to life the language and vocabulary of flax, linen and rope-making which still informs our everyday speech. The West Coker Strop will be a new community folk art object made from rope which is intertwined with people’s wishes, hopes, magic manifestations, and affirmations for the village and its community.

Vicky Putler is the Director of Flax Project CIC. Previously a textile designer/printer, frustration at not being able to source UK linen led her to want to grow her own flax. In 2021, under the name The Flax Project, she began growing flax in Cornwall and seeking ways to create the necessary green infrastructure.

Flax Project CIC has run several grant funded community projects in Plymouth and is currently commissioned for the two year HLF funded ‘Blockhouse Folk: Past, Present & Future’ project (Stoke Village, Plymouth, UK) led by Rachel Dobbs. Vicky recently exhibited linoleum experiments in ‘Pull My Thread’ at Brantwood House, (Coniston, UK) and flax straw work at ‘Green Making-Materials-Objects’ at the Levinsky Gallery, (Plymouth, UK).

Rachel Dobbs (IRL) is an artist based in Plymouth (UK) whose practice spans a range of collaborative artistic and community-focused projects, all with a strong emphasis on people, relationships, communication and systems of exchange. Rachel’s work as one half of LOW PROFILE has recently featured in Social Fabric (Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, Penzance), and Faraway Festival Reims (Reims, FR), and their artwork is part of public collections at The Box (Plymouth, UK), Harris Museum, Library & Art Gallery (Preston, UK) and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne (Reims, FR).

08/07/2025

GEOFF DIEGO LITHERLAND
Within The Surface and Tangle Formations (in D Major)

Film
Geoff Diego Litherland had two films on show at Dawe's Twineworks. Geoff has been redefining his artistic practice; discontent with simply depicting an idea of nature and landscape within his work, he sought to delve deeper into the interconnected threads between painting and the environment. He has used slow, pre-industrial craft processes to create natural canvas materials grown from the land and uses weave patterns to generate music and video work.

Geoff Diego Litherland was born in Mexico and is currently based in Wirksworth, Derbyshire. In 2012 he completed an MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London, he is an artist with a considerable exhibition profile, a part-time lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and co-founder of Haarlem Artspace. Litherland explores our relationship to the natural world through an engagement with the materials and processes involved in painting, including the collaborative production of hand woven linen canvas.

VENUE
1. Dawe’s Twineworks, West Coker

Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

04/07/2025

MICHELLE ATHERTON⁠
Soil Séance Sessions⁠
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‘What would it be like to commune with the ground?’ ⁠
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This workshop was an invitation to turn your senses downwards and take part in an experiment of transduction, where one form of energy is transformed into another by way of wires, minerals (extracted) and vibratory matter. Using an electrical device as a portal to the underworld, the sessions were offered on a one-to-one basis, listeners would hear micro frequencies communicating beneath their feet. ⁠
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Michelle Atherton’s work holds a fascination with the complex relations, dynamics and contradictions at play in day-to-day experiences and phenomena. Recent artworks have involved celebratory gatherings paying tribute to the dead across species; alternative imaginaries from the ocean’s depths; examining the nature of everyday irrational gestures and On Demand cultures. Her work often uses a remix aesthetic incorporating sound, image, text and installation to create fragmented narratives as hooks to explore our slippery perceptions of the world. The aim is to look again at matters that seem settled, beyond question, but where inherent instability opens into other questions of material states, refusals, politics and new imaginaries. Her research has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and shown throughout Europe in galleries, museums, festivals and publications. She teaches fine art to postgraduates at Sheffield Hallam University. .atherton⁠
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Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players

03/07/2025

ELLA YOLANDE⁠
But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower⁠ - (FILM)⁠
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But Why Tarnish the Beauty of a Flower uses recorded attempts to virtually access and experience botanical gardens and glasshouses via Googlemaps combined with 3D scans from Kew Gardens, to consider the colonial histories of these sites. ⁠
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The video emerged from an online residency with 11:11 Residency in 2022, looking into botanical histories and the extraction and commodification of plants through the legacies of plant hunters. ⁠
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Tangled in thoughts about the vegetal, wildness, seeds and our messy, multi-species bodies, Ella Yolande’s practice is informed by q***r ecologies, ideas of resilience, preservation and the more-than-human. She works across video, 3D animation, sculpture, textiles and text, with references to speculative fiction, botanical architecture and protective wear. Through considering the history and medicinal properties of plants, as well as the need for mutual flourishing and rethinking the human body as individual, she explores our interwoven existence with our surroundings through playful thinking on speculative ecologies. Ella is currently based in London studying a Masters in Art and Ecology. ⁠

VENUE⁠
3. OSR Projects, West Coker

Photography ⁠
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Od Arts Festival – Thinking in Circles took place 23-25 May 2025 organised by OSR Projects and supported by Arts Council England and we thank National Lottery players