About     Projects     Artists     Engagement     Watch | Read | Listen

Worth’s Folly & The Secret Caves


Bridgette Ashton
Plymouth Art Weekender, 2018
Photos: Rod Gonzalez

Plymouth Art Weekender is a three-day city-wide festival that celebrates Plymouth, its people and the visual arts, promoting the city as an exciting contemporary art destination. Under our leadership as Programme Coordinators in 2018, The Weekender hosted 140 projects, events and exhibitions across 63 venues, 22 of which actively engaged local communities in the development or delivery of the projects, and showcased the work of 300+ artists to an audience of over 24,000. For the fourth iteration of the festival, we commissioned three temporary public art works, a writing commission and supported a small number of artists’ projects realised during The Weekender.

Model for the Cattedown Caves Experience, Bridgette Ashton, 2018
Mixed media sculpture, billboards, publication, guided secret tour, childrens exhibition

Bridgette was awarded the History Commission for The Weekender, in partnership with The Box Plymouth. She produced a five-part commission inspired by the discovery of Plymouth’s Cattedown Caves and their connection to the destruction and further reconstruction of the city. She was interested in highlighting the connections between the (rebuilt) Atheneum, the old Television South West (TSW) studios and the Palaeolithic Worth’s Bone Caves, whose exact location is not widely known. The five parts of the project Bridgette presented for PAW 2018 were: a temporary sculpture in the public realm, an exhibition of drawings in collaboration with the Athenaeum Art Club, a series of billboard designs, a semi-fictional historical guided walk/bus tour and a short publication.

The mixed media sculpture is a model of the interior of the caves, depicting the two main cavities. Bridgette also utilised the worn-out panels on the exterior of the surrounding walls of the TSW site which had held out-of-date, faded signage. The panels were replaced with images, diagrams and text contextualising aspects of the caves, the Athenaeum and the TSW building; activating the site’s existing characteristics and transforming it into something entirely different. The billboards remained in place after The Weekender.


Excavations & Equivocations was a series of clandestine minibus excursions during The Weekender that transported participants to the secret site of the Cattedown Caves for a rambling tour of its unsettled history. Bridgette was fascinated by the fact that despite the cave’s location being kept ‘secret’ by a local archaeological group, for fear of ransacking by fossil hunters, its location is in fact cited in its Historic England List Entry. She came up with the idea for covert trips, where participants were blindfolded and sworn to secrecy- if in fact they recognised where they were once they disembarked. Led by Bridgette herself, the 60-minute tour combined both facts and fictions surrounding the mysterious caves, with topics ranging from the Smurfs and St Christopher to marshmallows and tar distilling!

During development of the work Bridgette held two workshops with young school children, the first with 20 members of the Athenaeum Art Club and the second with 20 pupils at Prince Rock school. At Prince Rock school she also gave a talk and held tutorials with small groups of children at the end of the summer term.

On the Friday of The Weekender she talked the children through the sculpture and billboards, as well as speaking to them about the models they had created in the workshop. The children’s work was displayed in the foyer of The Plymouth Athenaeum during the festival; where the bones were first displayed after their discovery in 1886. There were also sculptures, information boards and drawings by The Athenaeum Art Society exhibited in and around the building.

Drawings by The Athenaeum Art Society, photo Field Notes / Models and drawings by children from the Athenaeum Art Club and pupils from Prince Rock school, photo Field Notes

FUNDERS AND PARTNERS

Plymouth Art Weekender was coordinated by Visual Arts Plymouth and funded through the city wide Horizon project, a collaborative programme developed between Visual Arts Plymouth, KARST, Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth College of Art, Plymouth City Council and University of Plymouth. The two-year programme of visual contemporary arts was funded through Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence fund and supported by Plymouth Culture.

GET IN TOUCH:

info@fieldnotes.org.uk
                     
The development of this website was supported by Cultivator Cornwall