MLitt Curatorial Practice School of Fine Art
Martel Ollerenshaw
Martel Ollerenshaw is a curator and creative producer. She leads her own producing house Arts & Parts which has offices in the UK and Australia, and curates and/or produces acclaimed pioneering and genre blurring work with and for a diverse array of international artists and organisations. Her interests include sound, music, visual and interdisciplinary art that has an environmental focus, and the development of creative artists at all stages of careers.
Martel has curated, produced and toured acclaimed artists, artworks and projects in a variety of indoor and outdoor contexts. Recent activities include Raise the Alarm (a day of deep listening and deep viewing of time-based works made in response to the natural world), Breathing Space (a rewilding in sound — an award winning permanent sound installation for the National Museum of Australia), Finding Our Voice (hybrid live and digital festival that celebrates Australia in sound), Pleasure Garden (listening garden — touring sound installation for outdoor spaces), Time for One More? (a concert celebrating the life of John Cumming, director of the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican), Sound Out (international artist development platform involving sound makers who defy categorisation), and Mind On the Run: The Basil Kirchin Story (retrospective interdisciplinary festival) for Hull 2017 UK City of Culture and Serious International Music Producers.
Raise the Alarm
Raise the Alarm is a day-long deep listening and deep viewing programme of time-based art made in response to the natural world and the climate emergency.
Illustrating that artists are in a unique position to reflect and contextualise the world and to make us think deeply about its wonders and its fragility — the programme presents moving image works by Mella Shaw (Sounding Line), Hanna Tuulikki (Seals’kin), DarkQuiet collective Madeleine Flynn, Jenny Hector & Tim Humphrey (DarkQuiet), Ross Little (Mìle Dorcha | The Dark Mile), Diana Chester, Damien Ricketson & Fausto Brusamolino (Listening to Earth), and David Harradine (It’s the Skin You’re Living In).
Audio only works include those by Susan Stenger (Sound Strata of Coastal Northumberland), Alaya Ang, Hussein Mitha & Cindy Islam (Plotting (Against) The Garden), Claudia Molitor & Jessica J Lee (A Thousand Words for Weather) and Genevieve Lacey (Breathing Space).
Curated by Martel Ollerenshaw, the programme presents our environmental and cultural engagements and predicaments and demonstrates the ways in which artists are developing and extending the application of these concepts in their practices, to respond to and reflect one of the major concerns of our time.
Raise the Alarm
24 July 2024
Reid Auditorium, Glasgow School of Art (UK)
11:00 – 18:00hrs (includes a conversation with visual artist Mella Shaw — audiences can stay all day or part of the day)
This project is produced by Arts & Parts, supported by @gsasustainability and is part of The Dear Green Bothy, a programme of creative and critical responses to sustainability and the climate crisis, supported by the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Glasgow.
Raise the Alarm Printed Matter
Exploring the work of artists who create sound, moving image and interdisciplinary art with an environmental focus, Raise the Alarm is based on deep listening — a premise coined by US musician Pauline Oliveros. Deep Listening outlines how consciousness may be affected by profound attention to the sonic environment — and applies it, not only to sound, but to other forms of stimuli, as a way of leading audiences to engage with the natural world, and to provoke engagement with the climate emergency.
Audio, visual and audio-visual works made by artists who work across disciplines from sound art to music, moving image, lighting, sculpture, theatre, movement and poetry, are at the core of this project. Their individual responses to the natural world invite us to open our ears, eyes, and minds, to actively understand what our world is communicating to us.
Audiences are invited to listen, watch and think deeply about ice sheets, oceans and rivers, marine life, echolocation, light pollution, the crepuscular and the nocturnal, gardens, rewilding, wayfinding, weather, bird calls, language and music, sound and silence, embodied knowledge, migration, anti-colonial uprising, ecological grief, dreaming and The Dreamtime, and to meditate on loss, longing, transformation, and kinship.
The Reid Auditorium welcome audiences to stay all day for total immersion in a longform, deep listening experience or to linger to experience an excerpt of the programme, which includes a conversation with visual artist Mella Shaw.
Raise the Alarm is devised as a space for awakening, reflection, conversation and provocation, and ultimately as a call to action, around one of the greatest concerns of our time.
—Martel Ollerenshaw, Curatorial Statement, July 2024
