Residency reflections: Coleman and Hodges
MIDDLE TWEED: we look back on the multi-stranded (un)trodden paths residency undertaken between Kelso and Innerleithen by artist duo Coleman and Hodges.
Moments of flow.
Moments of pause.
Moments of stop.
A slow night-time procession marks the turning of the seasons – a gentle, barely perceptible shift from a time of abundant activity towards a time of rest. We wind our way through the woods in darkness, becoming attuned to the flitting of bats, the call-and-response of the tawny owls, and the tread of our footsteps gradually shifting with the terrain. We form a line, evenly spaced, walking in loose slow rhythm, each carrying a lantern with an illuminated image of a riverside flower in bloom. We are immersed together in our own thoughts and visions. Each sudden splash off to our right is a reminder of the perpetual presence of the river.
A gentle ascent, a bend in the path, gradually and suddenly we come to two huge discs of light, like portals or planets in the darkness of a forest clearing. Vivid microscopic images of flowers phase in and out across these discs, redolent of other worlds but in fact produced just a little further upstream. An ambient soundscape and voiceover cross the seasons, from the promise of a summer morning to autumnal evenings and the floating dreams of all that the river might carry (away).
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Kat Gollock
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Coinciding with the Celtic festival of Samhain, Glimpses of Utopia took place over two nights (1st and 2nd November) in the grounds of Abbotsford House. These ceremonial evenings marked the culmination of artists Robbie Coleman and Jo Hodges’ Middle Tweed residency with Connecting Threads. The events wove together themes of connection and care at different scales. The river was offered as a liminal space and carrier of stories; stories of human and nonhuman worlds and other pathways that intersect with our own.
Glimpses of Utopia threaded together multiple strands that Coleman and Hodges had been exploring by, with and within the river throughout the summer months. They started with the concept of ‘asking as we walk’ (Caminando preguntamos), a process of listening and dialogue. Throughout this responsive approach, different conceptions of the River Tweed emerged: sometimes as a library of its own riverine journey (an archive of geological fragments, minerals, pollen, spores, leaves and fragments of human life); at other times, as a liminal space of imaginative possibilities.
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Coleman and Hodges, Glimpses of Utopia at Abbotsford, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Coleman and Hodges, Pollinator Pathways, 2024
Pollinator Pathways
Pollinator Pathways explored the pathways that pollinating insects take across our shared spaces. These field trips asked a multiplicity of questions: how do pollinators navigate? How do they see the world? What are they attracted to? And what might the future hold for both pollinators and humans? Involving microscopic photography, these walking workshops resulted in the gorgeous images that, for Glimpses of Utopia, filled the woods at Abbotsford with light.
Coleman and Hodges, Micro-Utopias, 2024. Photo credit: Kerry Jones
Micro-Utopias
Micro-Utopias offered multisensory field trips that explored and extended our perceptions of the world and opened up spaces for new encounters and imaginings. These events explored the idea of the river as a threshold or liminal zone in order to reimagine the future using the river as a site and guide.
Both these strands came together for Glimpses of Utopia. The events combined a whole host of elements – ideas, words and images from participants woven together with those of the artists, material fragments, seeds, phials of Tweed water and more. In so doing, Glimpses of Utopia marked the end of the 2024 programme for Connecting Threads in the form of a collective culmination, a necessary pause in the continuing flow of time and life.
While Glimpses of Utopia was the culmination event of the residency, other outputs involved a site-specific installation in response to an unexpected riverside find and an exhibition, Laden, which connected the source of the Tweed to the estuary at Berwick.
Coleman and Hodges, Babe: Lost Letters, Kelso 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Babe (Lost Letters)
On one walk by the river, Coleman and Hodges found an intriguing object: an old envelope addressed simply ‘Babe’. They picked it up, only to discover that it was empty. This easily overlooked little mystery prompted a host of questions: why was it left just there by the edge of the River Tweed? What did the envelope contain? Who wrote it? And of course, who is ‘Babe’?
Inspired by this chance discovery, Coleman and Hodges initiated the ‘Lost Letters’ project inviting members of the public and writers’ groups to contribute a letter addressed to ‘Babe’. As the letters came in, the pair created a pop-up riverside installation where passers-by could sit and enjoy the illicit thrill of opening the many envelopes and reading the personal messages within.
Coleman and Hodges, Laden, Little Art Hub, Galashiels, 2024. Photo credit: Jo Hodges
Laden
An evolving exhibition at Little Art Hub, Galashiels, Laden explored the fugitive elements carried by the River Tweed on its journey from the hills to the sea. The river collects and reflects all the environments and ecologies it passes through, and by the time the Tweed reaches the coast, it carries abundant amounts of materials within its waters, only to leave them in an ever-changing library of the river’s life in the rich mud of the Berwick estuary. The exhibition invited participants to combine water from the source with silt from the estuary and to contribute a fragment of a story to be incorporated into the exhibition’s evolving poetic form.