Digswell Arts Fellows Dave Nelson and Kirke Raava are taking part in the group exhibition Poetics of Place. This exhibition focuses on how place shapes our memories, thoughts, and dreams through our perception.

22 October 2020 – 4 January 2021 at the University of Hertfordshire School of Arts, due to Covid-19, the physical exhibition is limited to students and staff, who can visit the exhibition in the Gallery. However, the digital exhibitions will be available with a curators’ introduction at http://www.uharts.co.uk/whats-on/2020/spring-summer/poetics-of-place. Interviews with the artists will be added throughout the event and there will be a live event in November for artists.

More about the exhibition:

Stay at home. It is the message we have heard countless times during this unprecedented period. Home has always been the foundation of our daily lives but suddenly its importance has amplified. We have perhaps never been more in tune with our sense of place than now, in this current environment.

The exhibition, which considers autobiographical thoughts, nostalgic narratives and re-interpretation of ideas, takes inspiration from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s seminal book The Poetics of Space. The book, written in 1958, applies the method of phenomenology to architecture, basing emphasis on lived experience in architectural places. It focuses especially on the personal and emotional responses to buildings and home objects. For Bachelard, domestic objects are charged with mental experience – a cabinet opened is a world revealed, drawers are places of secrets, and with every habitual action we open endless dimensions of our existence.

“Poetics of Place.” herts.ac.uk. UH Arts, n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2020.
<https://www.herts.ac.uk/uhbow/whats-on/2020/spring-summer/poetics-of-place>.

Poetics of Place exhibition is a part of the Hertfordshire Year of Culture, focusing on six artists working and living in Hertfordshire. Artists Kirke Raava, Amanda Ralph, Fiona Curran, Dave Nelson, Imogen Welch, and Yva Jung with diverging visual languages shared an intrinsic interest in the process of reassembling experiences of place or memory.

The exhibition outlines social histories, image-making, and the undercurrents of value systems consisting of installation, painting, textile works, assemblages, and photography.