What Matters is commissioned by Kettle’s Yard for the community exhibition Paint What Matters, generously supported by Arts Council England and High House Residency Programme.
What Matters is a 16mm video and series of collaborative texts made by children in Year 4 at Arbury Primary School in North Cambridge. Through six ecologically focused workshops devised with choreographer Daisy May Kemp, the children have responded to two conservation sites in Norfolk - Holme Bird Observatory along the East coastline of England and The River Nar, a globally rare chalk-stream that flows through the downs and fenland of north-west Norfolk.
Returning to traditions of folklore, the children have expressed their thoughts and feelings about the people, places, colours, words and environment’s that matter to them today through painting and storytelling. Their hand-painted journeys are layered with 16mm footage of the River Nar, Holme Bird Observatory and the hands and gestures of female ornithologists.
Transforming into birds, rivers, seeds, seasons, weather and characters they met along the way, their texts touch upon themes of care for self, community and the increasingly fragile balance of our ecologies.
Each text is carried by a bird that has rested at Holme Bird Observatory in Norfolk along its migratory route from places as far away as Syria, Nigeria and Israel.
