Meet your story weavers
Gemma Garwood
I’m an East Anglian site-specific live artist, born and bred in Essex. My lifelong obsession with myth, folklore and women’s histories stoked a relentless passion for exploring the hidden and colloquial mysteries of our significant places. I tell stories about people, seeking the individual within larger social and historical narratives and celebrating the ways in which people, places and stories collide and collude in landscape and imagination.
I’ve been digging into the idea of creative ‘cunning’, exploring the power of ritual actions and the imagination to build inviting and collaborative spaces. Here we can hold space, discuss the storytelling of our own personhood and share ways of moving through the world, through grief and trauma and victory, that are overtly and compellingly personal.
This manifested through 2021 in a triptych of video works for Magical Women, the development and delivery of a ritual walkshop for Sudbury Walking Arts Project, and in OTHERLAND, a deep exploration of Essex that I have been collaborating on with Lucy Gayler. In recent years I have also been the youngest Town Crier in the UK for a while and started UNFAMILIARS, a multidisciplinary arts zine/event platform.
In 2022/2023 I collaborated with Bethan Briggs-Miller (and other artists) on a large scale site specific project for Cudmore Grove, Mersea Island. Throughout the project we developed an “Anticipatory Folklore” together with the local community. Creating songs, stories, characters and rituals to record and celebrate this place, so close to the edge of disappearance.
Bethan Briggs-Miller
Bethan is an artist, broadcaster and folkorist. She is widely known one half of the Eerie Essex podcast team. That project has been going from strength to strength since being founded in 2022. She is just beginning an MA in Wild Writing.
In her art practice she uses a variety of media to create dreamlike landscapes with a hidden narrative. Working with alcohol ink and watercolours she applies these to the paper then uses sea salt and alcohol to create different textures and patterns. This process allows scenes and characters to emerge organically with even the smallest areas containing a hidden story.
A common theme she explores is the contrast between what is observed on the surface and the hidden stories beneath. Using this location as a map to explore these ideas, a scene that is so well known to many could still reveal secrets.
