“I enjoy working with all sorts of artists in different fields but there was something very special about Dovetailing: as well as the high quality of the core art, it routinely transformed its audience into artists themselves, something I knew happened at its Farfield installation and which I witnessed throughout my involvement with it at Ilkley. People will be taking away lifelong memories from this experience and I will be among them...

...There is no word for “nature” in Old English, we learn from Hana Videen, only “sceaft“, creation, in which we are all one and the world of this new venture seemed very like that.

I felt integrated into the Dovetail collective from the beginning, both through their welcome and their sense that a company poet could offer another dimension to their Ilkley project; I came to learn their work generated these new dimensions constantly, a strange and generous physics hosting multiple universes of creation.

These were worlds of the heart as well as of the mind. A critical ecological consciousness permeated everything being done.”

— Ian Duhig

Simon East designed a smartphone app called Movuku which allowed visitors to create a movement sensitive soundtrack to the installation as they walked around it. It can be downloaded for free at the App Store or from Google Play.

Visitors chose between five different tracks. The playback of the tracks is sensitive to motion, changing which elements of sound are played depending on how you move your phone. This allowed visitors to create a soundtrack which was totally unique to them.

Kerry McMullen

Improvisation with fiddle

Les Goldman

Improvisation with bass clarinet

A Tree Remembered - Keely Hodgson

My first visit to the Dovetailing Exhibition at Farfield Meeting House in June was with my fellow string trio members. We played our instruments, improvising and enjoying the sounds of the violin, viola and cello in the resonant space as Juliet’s sculptures quietly danced around us.

On my second visit I returned with my husband and my cello. He recorded the improvisations I played. I was mesmerised by the stillness and the movement of Juliet's sculptures, the colour and light of the film, the green and yellow, and the interplay between the silhouettes cast by the sculptures onto this backdrop. Some of the silhouettes were intertwining in a graceful dance. I was absorbed in the sounds I began to draw from my cello. I was conscious of coaxing different timbres from it. Without very much thought I found myself playing long, low resonant notes, high, keening phrases, short brutal sounds, and otherworldly noises made by playing near the cello bridge. I played short, dancing rhythmic motifs.

I listened to the recordings of my improvisations many times. I thought about the strength of a tree, the texture of bark, the twining and twisting of branches, the burgeoning leaves, and the slow unfurling of each leaf. I thought about the brutality of a tree’s felling. 

Several weeks later I had an irresistible urge to write a poem. I called it A Tree Remembered partly because I was remembering a tree, but partly because I realised that the tree was remembering herself. The tree's wood, fashioned into a stringed instrument, was resonating with memories. The life of the tree was being summoned into another incarnation by the music. Once personified, the tree's voice became personalised, and I was able to start to fashion my original cello improvisations into a piece of music for violin, viola and cello.

A Tree Remembered

“It was such a positive and creative series of ‘happenings’ and I was pleased to be part of it. It would be great to think that other things could happen in the future in a similar way. It really felt like a mini festival, with the rich mix of visual art, installation, music, dance, poetry… layers of conversation between the different elements with a feeling that things could continue to grow out of those exchanges. I also enjoyed the fact that some of what happened was improvisatory and seemed as much about a creative experience for those involved as creating some sort of performance.”

— Alice Fox