CAMP (Contemporary Art Membership Plymouth) – is a new member-led network for the creative and visual arts community in Plymouth and the South West, including artists, producers, curators, and arts writers. Its key aim is to foster and sustain a strong visual arts sector by developing creative production through critical review, networking and the professional development of its membership. Recently awarded a grant by Arts Council England, CAMP’s inaugural programme will begin this autumn. More information about CAMP
Start your Saturday early with one of CAMP’s directors, Elena Brake, an artist based in the city whose practice uses interactive performances and installations to create playful moments of pause that enchant the ordinary. The Playground at Sunrise is an opportunity to join her for quiet reflection upon memories, play and childhood, and to be part of the launch of a new bookwork of the same name. A lovely, contemplative way to start the day. As a complete contrast, Dressing like a Seagull and Pinching People's Pasties is CAMP member Adam Coley’s urban narrative, in which ‘seagulls’ wreak havoc on the city centre and its crusty-goods loving inhabitants. Coley describes himself as a fanatical performance artist who anxiously curates awkward public occurrences, and this event promises to fulfil on all those levels. Watch out for your pasties in the centre, on Saturday at 12:00pm! For a friendlier encounter with the local wildlife, join CAMP member Laura Hopes at 11:00am on Saturday, in collaboration with Take a Part at the National Marine Aquarium for a workshop making creative soundscapes of the sea using underwater microphones. Hopes has developed a body of work based around site-specific explorations of the sublime Anthropocene, and is interested in the use of stories to activate place. A great activity for all ages, and a completely different way to encounter the aquarium’s huge range of sealife.On Saturday evening, head over to Ocean Studios for Plymouth Social Club presents Fully Automated Luxury Communism with CAMP member Marcy Saude, Plymouth Social Club, RIO, Aaron Bastani and Jack Witek. Saude’s practice involves subjects such as marginal histories, counterculture and radical politics. This promises to be a critically engaged, forward-looking event, with themes of utopia and sci-fi, music, food and a bar.Other CAMP member events are open all weekend, so on Sunday head over to Armada Way for Laura Denning’s Go Rewild Yourself. Denning’s work is site-responsive, with water as a constant motif, and crosses disciplines to explore natural, social and creative ecologies. Her temporary ice installation highlights the drastic changes currently happening around us. To keep with the ecological theme, go to the cellar of Cawfee on Union Street for Kate Paxman’s Dimetrodon: Threshold Ecologies | Phantom Cave Assemblages (tufa+algae). Will you be more successful than me? Paxman is an artist member of CAMP who builds unfixed narratives exploring the precarity of our current ecological moment. This installation of projections and sound evoking speculative biospheres has been made in response to littoral zone sea caves found around the South West coastline. While on Union Street, look out for The Truth Tree by CAMP member Alan Qualtrough and Joanna Shepherd outside Plymouth Scrapstore. Qualtrough is a journalist, editor, graphic designer and letterpress printer concerned with truth, language and technology. This installation of letterpress posters has been commissioned by Nudge Community Builders, one of CAMP’s partner organisations, as part of the Creative Civic Change art project. On Sunday afternoon, head to Ocean Studios to see CAMP member Klara Łucznik, with Silvia Carderelli-Gronau and Asher Levin, improvising Six Short Pieces of Dance with physical relatedness and the poetry of being off balance. Łucznik is a dance artist and improviser interested in designing participatory experiences for a wide range of audiences. In her improvisation, she is deeply dedicated to the practice of listening with all the senses and finding connections with others, in physical contact and through the space. The improvisation is between 1:00pm – 4:00pm.