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BBC Radio 4 - 92 to 94 FM and 198 Long Wave

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OPEN COUNTRY

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	PROGRAMME INFO

	Saturday 6.10-6.35am Repeated Thursday 1.30-2.00pm


	From Shetland to the Scilly Isles, Open Country travels the UK in search of the stories, the people and the wildlife that make our countryside such a vibrant place. Each week we visit a new area to hear how local people are growing the crops, protecting the environment, maintaining the traditions and cooking the food that makes their corner of rural Britain unique. Email: [email protected] Postal address: Open Country, BBC Radio 4, Birmingham, B5 7QQ.


	LISTEN AGAIN


	Listen to Open Country for 28 May 2005


	PRESENTERS

	HELEN MARK and RICHARD URIDGE



	More about Helen Mark




	More about Richard Uridge


	PROGRAMME DETAILS

	Saturday 28 May 2005
This week, Richard's visiting King's Wood Forest in Kent. Here, Stour Valley Arts - in partnership with the Forestry Commission - has been running a project which combines art and the environment. High-profile artists have been commissioned to make sculptures and a wide range of work in other media in response to the forest. Each individual project means the artists actively engage with the woodland, often for long periods of time. Sandra Drew, the woman whose vision made the projects possible, explains to Richard that the sculpture left in the forest is made from natural materials found in the forest or nearby, and is designed to be transient - they're biodegradable, or are eventually dismantled by the artists. Although the forest has become a gallery, the artworks are subtle and of the landscape, rather than imposed upon it. SVA's "gallery in the forest" is celebrating their 10th anniversary this spring. But not all the works remain in the forest - some, like films and books, are designed to take the forest out to people across the world. Richard meets writer and publisher Jenny Uglow, who lives nearby and has walked in Kingswood with her husband, children and friends for over 30 years. She loves this area of outstanding natural beauty in the North Downs. It's a multi-purpose forest managed by Forest Enterprise for conservation, recreation and timber production. It's a mixed woodland, with trees like Sweet Chestnut, Beech, Corsican Pine and Douglas Fir. It's an area full of wonderful plants and wildlife, including white deer. Jenny has written an essay for the book which will be published to celebrate the tenth anniversary of SVA in the Forest. Jenny Uglow One of the artists who've been exploring the wood is Edwina fitzPatrick. She has engaged with nature to produce artworks for 15 years. During a two-year residency in Kings Wood, she developed a multi-faceted piece of work which included working with international perfumiers at Quest International to create forest perfumes. The scents feature in one of the three separate but intertwined installations called "Arboreal Laboratory" - the results of experimenting with sounds, smells, time and space. Edwina explains her work to Richard, including the difficulty in capturing time in the wood in its smells, and the importance of smell and memory. The calm of the woodland is rudely interrupted with mobile ringtones when Richard encounters composer Matthew King. He's collaborated with Edwina to develop sound pieces from the birdsong of the forest, including mobile phone ringtones from birdsong. He agrees that the ringtones are a horrible sound, but explains that it's all for a purpose. Matthew King Another artist-in-residence, Emily Richardson has filmed the forest canopy over a year - SVA's first film commission - and the film (called Aspect) was premiered in the forest last September. She's used a mixture of photographic still images, including time-lapse photography, to build her ideas and shapes for the film, with the changes in light and colour condensing a year into nine atmospheric minutes. The images are set against a soundtrack devised from ‘unconscious’ forest sounds such as ants in their ant hills, the wind across the forest floor, the crack of a twig - all recorded on location and manipulated on a laptop computer by composer Benedict Drew. Email Open Country: [email protected] The BBC is not responsible for external web sites

	RELATED LINKS Stour Valley Arts BBC Holiday Category BBC Country file