Sketches

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Sketches: Stories of Art and People

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Anna Freeman presents a showcase of stories about the meaning of art in people's lives.

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Sketches: Stories of Art and People: Soil, Steel & Stone

Soil, Steel & Stone

BBC Radio 4 - Sketches: Stories of Art and People, Soil, Steel & Stone

Stories of the meaning of art in people's lives

Anna Freeman presents three different artists' stories

The materials featured in this episode are ones that really matter to the featured artists.  The mycelium in the soil of the Welsh rainforest inspired sound artist Cheryl Beer to create music from the biorhythms of trees.  Cheryl was a professional musician until sudden devastating hearing loss meant she could no longer sing or play music.  Sound became ugly and distorted and she withdrew from the world until with the help of her hearing aids and the soothing sounds of Nature she was able to find a way back into creating music.  She has composed a Rainforest Symphony (Cân y Coed) Song of the Trees) available to listen to by scanning a QR code at the National Botanic Garden of Wales, Senedd Cymru and online at Disability Arts Cymru.

Ex soldier Matt Whitfield struggled with reentry into civilian life after twenty years in the army.  Desperately in search of something to add meaning to his life he began drawing scenes of his hometown of Middlesbrough.  Matt was struck by the decline of the town after the loss of the Teeside steel industry and began creating art depicting the end of a way of life.  His exhibition Ghosts of the Tees is a melancholy reflection of the changes Matt observed after his time away. 

We tend to associate stone carving with memorials and monuments, designed to stand the test of time. But on the rocky beach at Bucks Mills in North Devon, sculptor and stone carver Jo Sweeting is creating works of art that are designed to disappear. As part of a collaborative project with seven other women artists called Re-Wilding the Word Hoard she is gathering and celebrating local dialect words for landscape, and carving them into boulders which will one day be carried off by the tides. 

Producer: Maggie Ayre

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Soil, Steel & Stone

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