Sketches

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BBC Radio 4 LW

Sketches: Stories of Art and People

Documentaries

Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

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

BBC Radio 4 FM

Sketches: Stories of Art and People: On Dartmoor

On Dartmoor

BBC Radio 4 - Sketches: Stories of Art and People, On Dartmoor

Writer Anna Freeman meets three artists who've been inspired by the landscape of Dartmoor.

Anna Freeman meets three people with a deep connection to Dartmoor, who have found creative inspiration there.

Writer Anna Freeman presents stories of three people with a deep connection to Dartmoor and finds out how this landscape unlocked something creatively for each of them. 

"It seemed like it would go on forever, this vastness of terrain and weather - it was the only place i felt reflected". Tanoa Sasraku grew up in Plymouth and first came to Dartmoor as a teenager on an army cadet expedition. Something about the wild landscape with its bogs and mists helped her unpack her own experiences of growing up as gay and biracial in Devon. She shows Anna her Terratypes, sculptural works built up from many layers of paper, coloured with foraged pigments, stitched and torn, and submerged in the water of a Dartmoor bog. 

"I really found my Muscogee feet on the land here... there's something really holding about the valleys". Melinda Schwakhofer is an American textile artist and citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation who now lives and works on Dartmoor. She has reconnected with her Native American ancestors through learning about hide-tanning and working with buckskin, in a workshop at the edge of the moor. 

"It's like all the best bits of the rest of the British countryside but on steroids... It lights something in my soul... it changed my writing". Tom Cox is a writer who has made his home at the southern edge of the moor. He introduces Anna to some favourite spots along the River Dart and the densely wooded folds of the valleys he loves to walk in. This is a landscape that has continually sparked something for him, and that is woven into his fiction and essays. He had often wondered why the hills of Dartmoor kept calling him back and recently discovered a family link to the moor that made sense of everything. 

Produced by Maggie Ayre and Mair Bosworth

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Sketches: Stories of Art and People

On Dartmoor

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