CRATE
with Rebekah Ubuntu, Jules Varnedoe & Jerome White
Marine Ecologies
CRATE Programming team presents ‘Marine Ecologies’, an exhibition showcasing works by Rebekah Ubuntu, Jules Varnedoe and Jerome White, for which the artists were invited to team up with marine biologists from Plover Rovers to research marine ecology.
Rebekah Ubuntu
Ecologies of Belonging (a Meditation in Progress)
What does it mean to belong to our coasts, our oceans, marine kin and other living beings? Multidisciplinary artist Rebekah Ubuntu tunes into belonging for solace and hope, at a time of increased climate anxiety and immense change across our global coastlines. Her work meditates on marine and matrilineal ecologies, reciprocity, interdependence, remembering and healing. ‘Ecologies of Belonging (a Meditation in Progress)’ follows on from Rebekah’s long term project ‘Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice’, an audiovisual piece dedicated to the unique, fragile and imperilled equilibrium of our planet’s ecosystem and a tribute to global BIPOC (Black/Indigenous/People of Colour) communities fighting for climate justice.
Jules Varnedoe
The Marine Prelude
Jules Varndoe’s multidisciplinary research practice focuses on ecological relationships across species boundaries. Through video, installation, writing, workshops and sculptural assemblages, they explore entangled organisms across deep timescales and microscopic spaces. Alongside their artistic practice, Jules has developed a keen interest in fungi and teaches mushroom cultivation. Their installation for ‘Marine Ecologies’ focuses on the symbiotic relationships between marine organisms.
Jerome White
Washed away, washed up, and stuck on
Jerome White’s collection of works for ‘Marine Ecologies’ explores what happens to the structures left behind on the British coastline, and how nature begins to reclaim the environment surrounding them and regain ground. By taking interest in old structures scattered around his local coastline of Sheppey to his final destination in Margate, White proposes to chronicle a selection of environments highlighting their current configuration and the various ways in which nature has reclaimed or begun to impact them.
Statement
CRATE is an artist-led organisation based in East Kent supporting contemporary visual artists’ research and practice. CRATE promotes critical debate and the exchange of ideas without prescribed outcomes. We are committed to providing affordable studio and research space, engaging with our local community in relevant ways, encouraging and acknowleding that creativity is present and practised in everyone’s life, and celebrating creativity.
Biography
Crate Studio and Project Space has been operating since 2006 as an artist led organisation. Crate has a history of hosting public programmes that have emphasised the following core values:-
– Providing a space to support artists to research work without prescribed outcomes
– Supporting artists at the beginning of their career to gain experience developing work, hosting exhibitions and providing mentoring sessions.
– Collaborating with creative and community groups to share ideas and practices, and to present public outcomes in response to these residencies.
– Celebrating the diversity of creative output and recognising the creative element that is present through activities undertaken by groups and individuals.
– Running monthly “Crate Conversation” sessions whereby creatives are invited to respond to the month’s art activities.
– Representing the views and outlooks of diverse groups and communities.
– Providing opportunities for diverse practitioners and audiences.
– Creating projects where audiences feel like practitioners as well as visitors.
– Producing accessible digital content.
– Encouraging considered ecological and sustainable practices.
Programmes that illustrate Crate’s past content include:-
– “Teacher, Trickster, Chaos, Clay Digital Residency” which asked Black artists to create speculative futures for the “Parable Earthseed” work of Octavia E Butler;
– UCA/Crate Graduate residencies that have occurred for the past five years;
– “Ways of Making” series curated by Katie Fiore;
– Jeremy Deller and Fraser Muggeridge “English Magic” show;
– Our “Crate Conversations” series whereby we hosted an event each month that generated discourse on the activities that have occurred each month.
