!! This Workshop is for 16 - 25 year olds,
Participants under 16 are welcome to attend if accompanied by a parent or legal guardian !!
In this workshop, led by the artist Claye Bowler, participants will explore how songs are transmitted, transformed, archived, and remade through both the body and materials.
Claye will draw on his recent work in his exhibition Dig Me a Grave. This exhibition featured a song book and altered soundtrack featuring traditional British folk songs depicting grave sites. Graves are described as active spaces, not spaces of death, but renewal, songs being from the perspective of the dead, or the landscape itself holding the memory. These folk songs are often passed down through oral tradition, in ways that parallel how queer histories - stories and knowledge are shared and carried through the body as the archive.
Claye has also been experimenting with the physical and sculptural histories of recording songs, working with materials such as wax cylinders, vinyl, and cassette tapes. These objects collect and hold songs and over time alter under the degradation of the wind, rain, mould, soil creeping in.
This workshop will combine learning and re-remembering folk songs with hands-on experimentation using recording media. It is a space for creative exploration, learning, and connection, where participants will explore how songs are transmitted, transformed, archived, and remade through both the body and materials.
Claye Bowler is an artist based in the UK. His practice centres on collection and documentation of experience, memory and the remnants of humanity. Bowler uses sculptural practices to highlight stories that are not historically collected through institutional means, often working with narratives of queerness and disability.
Whilst also working in museum registration, Bowler often incorporates, yet questions, the ethics, administration and aesthetics of museum collecting in his work. Bowler has a strong connection to sound and music, increasingly integrating these elements into his work, using field recordings and traditional British folk song.