Rebecca Chesney

www.rebeccachesney.com

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Storm Warning

Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange, Cornwall.

I have works included in this exhibition alongside Angela YT Chan, Joey Holder, Andre Kong, Harun Morrison, Ellie Robinson-Carter, Something & Son, Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, and David Watkins.

Storm Warning is a collaboration between Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, and Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea, which seeks to raise awareness of the impact of the climate crisis on coastal communities in Mount’s Bay, and South Essex.

And one of my Future Landscape collages made in 2020 has been used on the poster!

Exhibition runs until 13 April 2024.

Admission charges apply.

More info: Newlyn Art Gallery and the Exchange

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IN CONVERSATION The Weather and the Brontës with Rebecca Chesney

At the Brontë Festival of Women's Writing 2023

Sunday 24th September 2023

2.15pm - 3.15pm Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth £8 / £6

"Whether you’re looking out of the Parsonage window on a rainy day, or reading extracts from ‘Wuthering Heights’ as Cathy battles with the billowing moors, weather is integral to the Brontë story.

In October 2011 visual artist Rebecca Chesney sited a digital weather station in the garden of the Brontë Parsonage Museum to collect weather data for a year.

Through collating both historical and contemporary weather records and cross-referencing them with descriptions of weather in the Brontës' letters, poems and novels, she spent time exploring the influence the weather had on their lives and work. Returning to the project in 2023, Rebecca has continued her weather observations by inviting visitors in the museum to note their personal accounts of the weather in a Weather Book.

We’re joined by Rebecca Chesney as she reflects on weather in Haworth over the years, looking at weather as an importance force of nature, not only in regards to wellbeing and experience, but also what it can tell us about changing climate and affected landscape."

For more information and to buy tickets visit: www.bronte.org.uk

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British Textile Biennial 29 September - 29 October 2023 I have been commissioned to make new work for the British Textile Biennial 2023! Using discarded festival tent fabric I am making a field of windsocks to be installed on the front lawn of Towneley Hall in Lancashire. More information here: https://britishtextilebiennial.co.uk Call for volunteers: Working in collaboration with FWRD Together (Festival Waste Reclamation and Distribution) i’ll be collecting tents as well as other discarded items after this year’s Beatherder Festival here in Lancashire and I'm looking for people to help on 17th and 18th July 2023. Please come and help collect both tents for my installation as well as usable kit which can then be redistributed to good causes such as local homeless support groups and refugee support groups including : tents, sleeping bags, roll mats, tarpaulins, blankets and other usable aid.  For more information and to add your name to the list of volunteers please visit BTB23

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The Brontës and the Wild Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth, BD22 8DR 1 February 2023 - 1 January 2024

One of my colour wheels from my Brontë Weather Project in 2011/12 is included in this new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The Brontës and the Wild, considers how landscape, weather and the natural world play an important role in the lives and work of the Brontës. And to complement the exhibition I am again collecting weather observations from visitors to the museum in a specially made hand bound book throughout 2023. If you're visiting the Museum this year make sure you add your weather observation in the book. Wednesday - Sunday, 10am - 5pm and all Bank Holiday Mondays. Admission charges apply

https://www.bronte.org.uk

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Found Cities, Lost Objects : Women in the City Royal West of England Academy Queen’s Road Bristol BS8 1PX 20 May – 13 August 2023 Admission charges apply

I have a number of works included in this exhibition, curated by Lubaina Himid CBE. See my Water Lines (London) and Water Lines (Bristol) embroidered maps; 7 of my Future Landscape collages; my Weed Map of Preston; and research materials from my Particulate Matters project looking at air pollution in Preston, Glasgow and London. Found Cities, Lost Objects invites us, through the works of female contemporary artists, to consider the experiences of women in the city. With works from the Arts Council Collection, and including a number of works by Bristol based artists, this collaborative exhibition encourages us to bring our own experiences of the urban environment. Artists include Cornelia Parker, susan pui san lok, Anne Tallentire, Helen Cammock, Lisa Milroy, Magda Stawarska-Beavan and Elizabeth Wright.

https://www.rwa.org.uk

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I’ve been looking into folklore surrounding plants for my Astley Hall commission, and found an old  Anglo-Saxon 9 herb charm. There is some debate as to the exact 9 plants, but I have been trying to find specimens of each to make plaster casts. 

More information can be found on the 9 herb charm here.

I’ve not found all 9 on the list yet, but have already made 6 casts: plantain, nettle, apple, mugwort, bittercress and fennel. All but the mugwort were growing on my allotment. I’m yet to find chamomile (or mayweed perhaps) fumitory and chervil.... but it’s now October and my chances of finding them while I have fresh plaster in my pocket are pretty slim. 

So the charm is incomplete at the moment...

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Here are some of the porcelain thorns I've made (see blog post below too). They are so delicate and beautiful: expressing the fragility of nature.

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I’ve been experimenting with making plants in porcelain, with the help and expertise of artist Florian Houlker. 

I have bound certain plants together in slim bunches and then dipped them in the porcelain slip (ribwort plantain, fennel and mugwort). After being fired in the kiln these have come out quite abstract, but you can still recognise seeds and stems. I also tried giant hogweed stems - these have come out gorgeous, but incredibly delicate. And I also dipped lots of thorny twigs (rose, gooseberry and bramble) and some of these have come out fantastic - I'm really pleased with them. I’ve tried some longer thorny twigs and am waiting for them to be fired.

The images above show me dipping a mixed bunch of plants into the porcelain slip, plus the thorns drying before going in the kiln.

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I’ve had two trips to Yorkshire Sculpture Park this month to map bees around the site, and this last trip marks the end of my role as Visiting Artist at YSP - where did the time go?! 

I’m still going through everything I found and I will make a list of all the bee species identified on the site this summer, plus all the plants they prefer. 

This last trip was blustery, cool and rainy at times, so there wasn’t many bees. But I did see lots of common carder bees and a few honey bees feeding on the Himalayan balsam, plus masses of wasps also feeding on the balsam. I found a wasp nest too - lots of them coming and going into the stump of a felled tree. 

A lot of the flowers have gone to seed, but there is still patches of devil’s-bit scabious attracting the occasional common carder bee (image above).

There is a pink daisy type garden plant flowering in the formal gardens (not sure its name) that was attracting a couple of white-tailed bumblebees and a beautiful tortoiseshell butterfly.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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TONSPUR 89 Rebecca Chesney/Lubaina Himid The Storm - sound installation (duration 16 mins) and series of 7 posters TONSPUR für einen öffentlichen raum 2021 20 September —11 November 2021 TONSPUR_passage Micro Museum for Sound MQ Wien Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna Daily 10:00—20:00

And with the storm came a warning But you have not been listening I am the thunder You will hear me Combining field recordings and spoken word, Lubaina Himid and I have created a sound piece to conjure up a message of urgency. But, whose words are being spoken? And have you been listening?

Tonspur

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Invisible Narratives book now available to buy Rebecca Chesney, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska-Beavan ISBN 978-0-9546745-3-3 Foreword by James Green, Director of Newlyn Art Gallery Curator's Introduction by Lubaina Himid Texts by Ella S Mills and Christine Eyene 64 pages (plus 4 fold out pages), full colour Published in June 2021, the book celebrates our exhibition Invisible Narratives held at Newlyn Art Gallery in 2019

It’s a beautiful book, full of images and with two very thoughtful texts and my drawings of sea level rise flow over ten pages - it looks fabulous! Available to buy at Newlyn Art Gallery shop, or online:

Newlyn Art Gallery shop

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Two visits to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in July for my project there revealed more about where bees are feeding and which flowers they prefer. 

The thistles on the parkland are buzzing with bumblebees and honey bees (and lots of butterflies too); white clover, foxgloves, tufted vetch, birdsfoot trefoil, meadowsweet, knapweed, betony and rosebay around the site are all full of feeding insects. 

One great place was on the lime trees near the main visitor centre entrance - absolutely covered in bumblebees. Look up! next time you see a lime tree in flower.

Yorkshire Sculpture Park website

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I visited the Homegrown Homespun flax field in Blackburn to try and see which insects were around the site. Homegrown Homespun is a collaboration with designer Patrick Grant, his social enterprise Community Clothing, The Super Slow Way and North West England Fibreshed.

Although the weather was a bit dull there was still a few insects feeding on the flowers and around the site:

Ringlet, red admiral and small copper butterflies were skipping about, blue-tailed damselflies, loads of 7-spot ladybirds  and one harlequin ladybird, flesh flies were hanging around, lots of hook-banded wasp hoverflies dashing around and a black-horned gem - a splendid metallic green insect.

The flowers on the flax are incredibly delicate and fragile so there weren’t many bees, but I did see a very small red-tailed bumblebee bobbing about. Every flower it visited the petals fell off.

I only kept to the edges of the field, so I'm sure there would be far more to find if I hung around.

Community Clothing website

Super Slow Way website

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I am currently artist in residence at Astley Hall in Chorley. The residency started in 2019 but because of the pandemic it’s been delayed for over a year now and although I've been working remotely on it, it’s been a shame not to be able to go to the Hall. The Hall is now being renovated - so my residency is being lengthened during this time too...

I was lucky to be able to go on a site visit the other week while the Hall is being renovated and surrounded by scaffolding. It was really wonderful to go up close to the outside of the building and see the work on the brickwork, roof and windows - what a treat! I was also able to go and see the plaster ceiling up close in the main hall of the building - an incredible experience.

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Invisible Narratives 2

Rebecca Chesney, Lubaina Himid and Magda Stawarska-Beavan

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix Gallery

19 Goulston St, London, E1 7TP

Until 19 June 2021

A number of my collages are included in this exhibition, plus three of my hand embroidered maps of future imagined tide lines. Also on show is my installation Still in Silence, first shown at the Bluecoat in Liverpool. All works are for sale.

Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix

images: Rebecca Chesney Future Landscapes VII, Future Landscapes VIII, collage on paper

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I’ve been over to Yorkshire Sculpture Park a couple more times as visiting artist to continue to survey the site for bees. Just recently the hawthorn blossom was really spectacular with the trees laden with flowers. This attracted loads of bees - honey bees, bumble bees and also I saw an ashy mining bee (middle photo). It’s the first time I'd seen one - beautiful thing.

My digital map is filling up nicely with a number of people adding records to it in the last few days. You can see the map here.

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During my week planting 500 metres of wild flowers along the canal in Pontypool (see blog post below) we found a few bits and pieces in the bank as we dug out the turf to plant the flowers. We found lots of old glass - most of it broken - but we found an old bottle with “Calific. Successors to the California Fig Syrup Co” written on it and also an ink well. The best find was a bobbly bowl of an old clay pipe.