Guide to the Waalk

Alec Finlay is an artist & poet whose work crosses a range of media and forms. Finlay has recently been awarded the 2020 Cholmondeley award for services to poetry. Much of his work considers how we relate to landscape and ecology, including place-awareness, hutopianism, rewilding, and disability access. Recent work includes HUTOPIA for the Fondazione Prada exhibition Machines á penser’ at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He is currently artist in residence with Paths for All.

Finlay has published over forty books and won seven Scottish Design Awards, including two Grand Prix Awards (2001, 2015). Recent publications include the Scottish Design Award best publication winner a far-off land (2018); gathering published by Hauser & Wirth (2018); th’ fleety wud (2017), minnmouth (2017), ebban an’ flowan (2015), and Global Oracle (2014).

Chris Watson was a founding member of the influential Sheffield based experimental music group Cabaret Voltaire during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Since then, he has developed a particular and passionate interest in recording the wildlife sounds of animals and habitats from around the world. As a freelance composer and sound recordist Watson specialises in creating spatial sound installations which feature a strong sense and spirit of place.

His television work includes programmes in the David Attenborough ‘Life’ series including ‘The Life of Birds’ which won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ in 1996, and as the location sound recordist for the BBC series ‘Frozen Planet’ which won a BAFTA Award for ‘Best Factual Sound’ (2012).

Watson has recorded and featured in many BBC Radio 4 and World Service productions including ‘The Wire’ which won him the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Broadcaster of The Year Award (2012). His music is regularly featured on the BBC Radio 3 programme Late Junction’. He has also worked extensively for RTE Radio 1 on series such as ‘Sound Stories’.

Andrew Burton is a sculptor who lives and works in Newcastle, where he is Professor of Fine Art at Newcastle University.

His work situates sculpture and installation in relation to landscape and architecture. He often takes an experimental approach to materials and processes, combining materials traditionally associated with sculpture such as clay with other materials that are more ephemeral – like plants, or embodying impermanence in the way the sculpture is made. Recently, he has been working in Africa collaborating with artisans and traditional craft workers as well as other artists. This work occupies a space between art, craft and the day-to-day object and is characterised by the importance of the human hand in the making process.

His work for the Amble Bird Trail is a return to figuration, a strand that has run through much of his sculpture. Here, it releases the expressive potential of clay to speak to powerful emotional characteristics we associate with birds.

Andrew’s work has been exhibited in Britain and across the world. Recently, he has completed artist’s residencies at the Bundanon Trust and Hill End in Australia, where he made work about a landscape of corrugated iron and eucalyptus trees. In 2019 he was invited by the Korea Ceramic Foundation to create a work that would speak to reconciling tensions between North and South Korea – the resulting work gathered together one hundred ancient kimchi jars.

Ben is a sculptor and artist from North Yorkshire. In his work he adopts a ‘hands on’ approach, moving between classical bronze to modern resins and everything in between. The defining feature of his work is a true affection for his subjects and a playful, unaffected style. Alongside working on public and private commissions Ben make sculptures, props and scenic elements for film, TV, theatre, museums, events and retail.

Celia Smith is an artist who draws with wire, as others draw with pencil. For her, creating sculptures out of wire is like drawing in three dimensions. Birds are her main inspiration; capturing their movement and character is her primary concern. She finds that wire has a spontaneity that can give her sculptures a feeling of life and energy.

The majority of Celia’s sculptures are of native British birds. She aims to capture not only their shape but also their movement and character. A lot of time is spent drawing and studying the birds and often, small wire studies and life-size pieces are made directly in front of the subject.

Diane Watson was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1968, developing an early fascination with pattern and colour inspired by the wallpaper sample books brought home by her painter and decorator father. Diane went on to study Ceramics at Loughborough and later a degree in Textiles which led to a teaching post where she eventually became course leader for Fashion and Textiles. Diane also has an MA in Ceramics, graduating from Sunderland University in 2009.

After leaving teaching, Diane threw herself entirely into her own practice, taking long contemplative walks along the beautiful northeast coastline with her rescue dog Bobby, which inspired her environmentally-themed work. These walks have borne many discoveries, starting out as a quest for exciting flotsam and jetsam but culminating in an awareness of the extent of the damaging impact of plastics which are washed up on the seashore.

Microplastics have been found in beer, honey and 90% of sea salt, one in three fish contains plastic, we are eating it! Diane’s response is to raise awareness of plastic pollution. By using photography, print, and installation her work challenges the viewer to inspect these objects in an unfamiliar context. She seduces the viewer with abstract shapes and patterns, once she has captured their attention the images unravel, and you start to recognise the strange array of objects. Her aim is to provoke a reaction to ongoing environmental issues.

Her collection of thousands of plastic tops, toys, bottles, lighters, and other discarded items are used to create kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of the 1970s wallpapers of her childhood.

John Kefala Kerr is a British-Greek sound artist, composer and writer. A prize-winning graduate of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and the University of Sussex, John has had work presented at festivals and venues in the UK, USA, Europe and Japan, including the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York; Wigmore Hall; St John’s Smith Square; South Bank Centre, London; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art; Select 107 FM; Teatro Rossini, Pesaro; Atelier St Ann, Brussels and De Singel, Antwerp.

John’s output includes instrumental, vocal, site-specific, installation and multimedia works. These are often conceived in close proximity to everyday events, situations and circumstances. His cycle of four site-specific operas, Beyond Belief, for instance, was commissioned in the wake of the Cumbrian foot and mouth crisis. Sited respectively in a sports centre, church, cinema and marquee, the cycle featured a cast of over 100 professional and non-professional performers, including magicians, hairdressers, piano tuners and gardeners.

John is a recipient of the Dio Award, the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust Contemporary Music Prize and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival Composer’s Prize. In 2003 he received the UK Arts Council Encore Award, and in 2006 his work for orchestra and mixed chorus, Panagia, won the gold medal in the Volos International Composition Competition. Collaboration credits include, Tandem Dance, Northern Stage, David Massingham Dance, Quarantine Theatre Co. Grand Gestures Dance Collective, Merlin Films and the animator Maki Kobayashi.

John’s past work includes Eight Bells—an elegy for violin and soundtrack developed in collaboration with marine scientists at the Dove Marine Laboratory. His ‘sound opera’ A Sign in Space was commissioned by Durham Cathedral and received a Journal Culture Award in 2012 and his site-specific sound installation Book of Bells—created for the 2013 Lindisfarne Gospels Exhibition-toured UK festivals, including Sonorities, Belfast and BEAST, Birmingham. As artist-in-residence at the UK National Railway Museum in 2014, John developed a multimedia opera (Steamsong), which was premiered at the Durham International Festival. In 2017 he developed Blood Choir, a work for mixed voices and soundtrack in which performers test their own blood glucose levels to determine the sung notes. In 2018 he was appointed Composer-in-Residence at Newcastle’s historic Grainger Market where he developed a mini opera (Arcadia) in one of the vacant shop units.

In 2020 John completed an installation for the National Centre for the Written Word, and composed the score for the 2020 Straight8 Film Festival winning film, Fly Home. During periods of covid lockdown, John contributed new works to Skipton Camerata’s Lockdown Diaries’ and Ghenadie Rotari’s ‘Quarantine Diaries’ projects. In 2022 John was appointed Associate Artist at An Tobar and Mull Theatre.

John’s debut novel Thimio’s House is published by Roundfire Books and his poetry has appeared in anthologies by Live Canon, Arachne Press and Crowstep Journal.

Jon Voss is a professional artist and architect, trained at the Bartlett in London. In 2004 Jon moved to Sydney Australia, where for the next 11 years he pursued his passion for art and design. Since 2014 he has been living in Southern France where he is now creating new exciting works of sculpture, illustration and kinetic art.

Jon’s art is a considered juxtaposition. It’s both a boyish fascination with our heavily industrialized world, and an unapologetic adoration for our natural world. While these two loves typically live in constant conflict, within Jon’s art the barriers and lines between the two are blurred and distorted.

“A large part of what I do comes from a love of machines and all things mechanical, however the form is borrowed from the immensely complex and elegant lines of nature. It is this unlikely but intriguing symbiosis of these passions that drives what I do”.

Jonny Michie is a sculptor from the North of England. He specialises in utilising a range of 3D fabrication techniques in his work. These include modern computer technologies as well as traditional analogue methods of construction. He believes that the convergence between these two worlds is where true innovation happens.

Jonny studied Glass and Ceramics at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland. During this time, he developed a foundation in traditional craft processes. These included designing and creating stained-glass windows and casting.

Afterwards he became interested in digital 3D modelling. He began to incorporate Computer-aided manufacturing processes into his work. This allowed him break free of the flat confines of stained-glass window construction and create more complex 3 Dimensional sculptures.

Jonny spent some time working in the film industry as a prop designer and maker. This was a fast paced, hectic environment. He was involved in a wide variety of productions, often simultaneously. During this time, he became familiar with a range of materials and making techniques.

Jonny has exhibited his work at several venues across Britain. In 2019 he was awarded the ‘International Artist of the Year Award’ by the Glass Art Society.

Father and daughter blacksmiths, Stephen Lunn and Ashlee Donaldson from Northumberland, have each created memorials to commemorate the centenary of the end of the First World War. The pair, who work for the family business JS Lunn and Sons, were both inspired to create memorials that symbolise peace and remember those who lost their lives in conflict. Amble Town Council worked with Stephen to create a new permanent memorial, with residents of the town having their say in what phrases they would like to see on the arches of his sculpture, resulting in one referring to service and the other to peace.

Stephen Lunn was awarded the Tonypandy cup by the Worshipful Company of Blacksmiths, just days before he completed work on the stunning new peace sculpture which has been placed in Amble’s Memorial Gardens.

Katrina is a Scottish-born poet and local historian based on the North Northumberland coast. Her work explores connections between human culture and the natural environment, and her special interests include Northumberland’s inshore fishing tradition. She has written extensively for radio, and her publications with Bloodaxe Books include The Lost Music (1996), Two Countries (2014), and Edge (2019).

Katrina enjoys collaborating with scientists, musicians and other artists, and created Longshore Drift with maritime artist James Dodds, and several pieces with electronic composer Peter Zinovieff. She also writes in Northumbrian dialect and is President of the Northumbrian Language Society.

Geoff Sample is a field recordist, natural history author and sound artist, with a special interest in birdsong and the cultural history of hearing music in nature. His books and audio guides have been published by HarperCollins, including the best-selling Collins Bird Songs & Calls. He has enjoyed a long collaboration with Marcus Coates, including the multi-screen installation Dawn Chorus (Baltic 2007), and other contemporary artists whose work explores elements of animal culture, sound and the natural landscape including Hanna Tuulikki, Caroline Bergvall, Daisy Ginsberg, and Mike Collier.

He regularly contributes to radio, most recently producing and presenting the BBC Radio 3 series A Birdsong Garden, commissioned as part of Culture in Quarantine.

Rob Mulholland, born in Glasgow, graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1986. He has exhibited work throughout the UK and Internationally.

His practise explores the complex relationship between humans and the natural world. Utilizing a wide variety of forms and materials his sculpture installations interact with their surroundings. He incorporates mirrored surfaces in his sculptures to reflect the given environment and alter the viewers perception of the space. The reflection is purposely distorted inviting the viewer to question their individual relationship with their surroundings. This nexus between people and the natural world is further developed in recent works such as ‘Natural Creation’ which illuminates this symbiotic relationship.

He is interested in elements of deconstruction and has interpreted this with sculptures such as Skytower and Evolve in which kinetic forces appear to have torn through and re-shaped the sculptural forms. These sculptures explore the boundaries of physical mechanics allowing him to develop his practise further. His work is both gallery based and sited in public spaces.

Recent commissions / Exhibitions:

2020 – K Woodlands Sculpture Trail, East Kilbride, Scotland
2020 – Osnova Gallery, Moscow – private commission
2019 – Sculpture installation – UK Pavilion and Garden at Beijing Expo 2019.
2019 – ‘Elemental tower’ Cypress Waters, Dallas, Texas, USA
2018 – ‘ Settlement’ Heysham, Morecombe Bay, England
2018 – ‘Natural Creation’ North Pennines, England. UK
2017 – Cheng Long Environment Art project – Taiwan
2017 – ‘Vínculo eterno. Madre e hijo’ at Nido de Quelzalcoat, Mexico City.
2017 – DZNE. Sculpture commission, Bonn University. Germany
2016 – ‘ Evolve ‘Glasgow Commonwealth Games Legacy – Major public commission. UK
2016 – ‘One Flock’ Art installation Portsmouth, Virginia USA
2016 – Fotokunst, Zingst, Germany
2016 – Oatlands Artwork Commission, Glasgow Scotland. UK
2015 – ‘ Emergence ‘ NHS Scotland, Sculpture for new Community Health Centre. Scotland. Uk
2015 – Artcurator Gallery, Sculpture commission, Moscow, Russia
2015 – ‘Rise of Oudinarde’ Perth, Scotland. UK
2014 – ‘Transmigration’ 17th International Sculpture Symposium, Icheon, Korea
2014 – ‘Lest we forget’ Installation for BBC London. England. UK
2013 – ‘The Watchers’ Mainau Island – Konstance – Germany
2013 – ‘Skytower’ Sculpture Commission – Forestry Commission Scotland UK

Sculptor and Printmaker Rodney Harris is based at Spike Island Studios in Bristol, UK, where he has held various positions including artist trustee on the board of Directors.

He has been commissioned by a wide variety of public and private organisations internationally for Public Artworks, mainly in structural materials such as brick or glass, that respond to site specific, environmental, and cultural themes.

He is part of an award-winning collaboration with artist Valda Jackson, Jackson and Harris, winners of the Marsh Award for excellence in Public Sculpture by the Public Statues and Sculpture Association (PSSA) in 2017.

He is co-founder of the Earth Art Fellowship and Gallery at Bristol University, following his Leverhulme Trust Artist Residency in 2015. He has collaborated with other international artists on Gallery based projects, live art, performance, and installation projects, in Korea, Turkey, US and UK.

The east window, in St Cuthbert’s Parish Church Amble, shows St Cuthbert with his Cuddy Ducks sitting around his feet. The church is open daily so you would be most welcome to come in and see the window. The church was built in 1870 by John Thomas Carse who had a building firm here in Amble

St Cuthbert became a popular medieval saint of Northern England and is regarded as the patron saint of Northumbria. He lived as a hermit on the Farne Islands which is the nesting place for Eider Ducks, known locally as ‘Cuddy’s’ or ‘Cuthbert’s Ducks. Cuthbert introduced special laws in 676 protecting the Eider Ducks, and other seabirds nesting on the islands; these are thought to be the earliest bird-protection laws anywhere in the world.

The beautiful East window first lit the chancel in 1927. The central panel shows Christ with St.Cuthbert and Cuddy ducks on his left and St. Oswald, crowned, on his right. The inscription, in the right hand corner, is in memory of John Thomas Carse of Amble (1851-1904) whose affectionate and respectful brass memorial had been placed on the North wall. John predeceased his wife Mary Ann who survived until 1927 when the window was dedicated to them both.

Stuart drives a varied practice output as public realm works which consider light, colour, neon, sculpture, digital and interactivity.

An ongoing interest in ideas of fantasy and utopia found in theme parks and coastal resorts drives him to realise work which captures our gaze to encourage free thinking and imagination. Since being awarded a commission for Lumiere Durham 2013 he has worked intensively to build a body of work which focuses on revealing magic in the mundane.

Frances Anderson works across multiple art forms: photography, film, textiles, site specific installations, live art, printmaking and 3d design, kinetic art and kites. Her work comes from an immersive process and embedded practice whatever the context, inviting the viewer to see and experience through her eyes. Although based in Amble Frances shows her work internationally and has had several solo shows in the UK.

Her work is held in private collections across the world, and she has won several international awards for her photography. Much of her work is influenced by the natural world around us and her experiences and relationship with water as a Channel swimmer greatly influence her work. Frances is Co-Director of Dry Water Arts Centre in Amble and has worked extensively over the past 25 years in participatory arts across the North East.