Trip Mission Statement:
My interest is in the architecture and culture of people living close to the landscape in the Southwest and West of the USA. I will focus on people who, now and in earlier times, have worked with the earth as a material to sculpt, paint or manipulate into pottery or organic buildings. I will visit contemporary environmental art works by internationally recognized artists.
Article about Wren Miller - May 2009
A Mile in Her Shoes, By Sarah Lea
Question: What do you get when you put together 300 books, 250 pairs of shoes, 2 mud paintings, a giant TV screen, shredded banknotes and a handful of beheaded Barbies?
Answer: A Wren Miller exhibit.
In our society today we are challenged with living a life that is breaking down the very ecosystem in which we live. Climate change is creating questions in our well worn beliefs and there are those that are providing answers and asking us to reconsider our Western values and comparative lifestyles, challenging us to compare our cavalier attitudes to perceived redundant articles and natural resources with the non-developed world’s value base, which attaches great worth to those same objects.
Wren Miller is an Arts Council funded 'visionary' artist; a lead environmental, contemporary public artist bringing together communities, artists and their artworks within public art, trails, exhibitions, community projects and performances. In September 2009 Wren commenced an eighteen month project experimenting with combining earth and recycled waste materials. She will be looking at the challenges that artists, architects and builders face in designing and producing large scale, long lasting, carbon neutral work. She has started her journey across three continents to find new ways of combining materials to create sculptures and buildings; meeting pioneers, ecological trainers and talking to people who live in close relationship with the earth. Looking back at her own ancestor’s history; centuries of using mud for building materials such as cob and unfired bricks - her itinerary takes her across the Americas, Africa and Europe as she begins a range of experiments and eco-encounters that she shares with anyone willing to tag along. (You can read her blog at http.//meetingsinthemiddleofsomewhere.wordpress.com) Wren reinforces to people the importance of using natural and recyclable materials. "We have to be so careful not to continue creating art using new and unnecessarily carbon unfriendly materials. There are more than enough components already out there to use up."
Wren's CV is engaging. She studied a Design BA Honours Degree at Middlesex University before joining her first peace camp at Greenham Common, followed by pursuing a journey across Europe, cycling alongside major rivers whilst highlighting river pollution for Greenpeace. Since this gloriously colourful start she has been the lead artist for large scale community arts projects, creating outdoor performances, films, sculptures and eco-spaces. Perhaps the most enlightening of Wren's work is her post as consultant designer at Birmingham's Children's Hospital, where her permanent 'Giant Star Trail', an 18m long wall-mounted ceramic and mirror sculpture adorns one corridor and the installation in 2002 of the entrancing 'Rainbow Tunnel'; a glass corridor installed with coloured window film creating a 20m rainbow light intervention, linking the eye department with the Rainbow Room; a sanctuary where children are laid to rest. This allowed her fascination with space, light and colour to enhance and benefit the children residing there.
A developer of initiatives, she has a way of involving people in the arts and encouraging them to look at the world and environment in which they live. She invites interaction with an art work through community involvement in conception, the construction of public art and later, reflection. Wren's practise is deeply meditative and ecological, incorporating inner and outer natural landscapes. She entices visual aesthetics, movement, art and photography together to create extraordinary moments and spaces.
Wren's art has been selected for international exhibitions and celebrations, and recently this involves the Giant Remembrance Labyrinth, collaborated with movement artist Ray Jacobs and exhibited at the Darwin-based Shift Time Festival in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in July 2009. To provide an insight of Wren's philosophy of work combining public intervention with understanding and engagement with global environmental issues, this 120m long sculpture was created and constructed with 7000 publicly donated used books. "The breeze flapping open the covers of books, so that the structure fluttered and changed constantly, and a huge sense of community, belonging and ownership." Recalled Julia Dean-Richards, a labyrinth volunteer. More than a thousand people came to walk the pathways, leaving messages inside books in remembrance of loved ones, taking time out to reflect at the 'thinking space', a 6 foot high spiral book sculpture at the centre, cocooned within the beautiful surroundings of Shrewsbury's park. "Using old books for the labyrinth walls were influenced by a description Aminatta Forna made (in the BBCs The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu) of thousands of manuscripts literally being built into the homes of local people in an attempt to hide them from colonial invaders." Wren explains. Once the installation was dismantled, all the books used went directly to charities including Oxfam, The Severn Hospice and The Princes Trust.
Wren's first solo exhibition, 'Meetings in the Middle of Somewhere' at Walsall's Chameleon Art Gallery in October 2009 were works in response to travelling to Mali in 2008, a Sub-Saharan country in West Africa, "where resources are scarce and climate change is evident in creeping desertification". This was an eclectic mix of sculpture and installation created from cob, recycled artefacts, painting and photography; materials chosen to do as little damage as possible, made with donated undesirable clutter and metamorphosed into contemporary art.
'A Mile in Their Shoes'; 300 pairs of shoes snaking a path down the centre of the gallery's space was reviewed by A. Fusek Peters, "like Andy Goldsworthy, but at a deeper level." This central installation inspired consideration of the Native American quote about not judging people until we understand them. 'The Five Pillars'; a piece made in response to the foundations of Islamic religion, questioned what we may identify our western cultural five pillars to be. 'Drink Deep'; a water well with its giant cylindrical wall built by books borrowed from Oxfam, and 'Bricked Money', cob bricks prepared with recycled brick clay and shredded American dollar bills, focusing on the marked contrast between continents regarding the value of money.
"I work with speed and direct energy, working from my heart. Often I do this while meditating on a problem and a solution, like a form of prayer. I want to ensure I retain a quality in my work which conveys that a pair of hands fashioned it, just as the shape and future of the world is fashioned by hands. The forms I have used are directly influenced by those I saw in Mali, and the subjects too refer to some of the issues of poverty and climate change that I witnessed there.
Wren's most recent exhibition was held in Segou, Mali, in January 2010 during her Mali residency whilst working alongside Amahiguéré Dolo, one of Mali's most respected contemporary artists. ‘Letters de L’eau et du Feu’ (Letters of Water and Fire) exhibited in the Festival sur le Niger and included the art piece 'Letter to the World', a painting forged by earth mixed with kaolin, semi dissolved into a Wall Street journal then baked in the Malian sun.
'You painted with her mud-blood and now the earth sings loud.
Her song drowns the Wall Street tables into torn and irrelevant fragments.
This is the news. The earth speaks her headline.
Listen to me she whispers – as quietly as a drawing lesson with a child.
This is the world told in the words of the earth.
This is the word spoken by the world.'
An excerpt from ‘Wren ‘10’ by Sal Tonge, Writer and Storyteller
This exhibit, visited by diplomats and fellow artists has created endless possibilities for Wren to ponder upon. "After visiting the incredible mud architecture of Mali, I believe that we can learn from Africa and adapt techniques to our climate and situation, minimising heat loss, saving money and reducing carbon emission." writes Wren.
Whilst researching, Wren spent one week with the Master Masons of UNESCO mud town, Djenne in Mali and incredibly became the first ever woman accepted into the association of Master Masons – a real honour.
So, what's next for this revolutionary artist?
There's the biggest project yet! The Olympic Mile Project, a giant and temporary sculpture celebrating the birth of the modern Olympics and the Games return to the UK in 2012. This will be installed in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, where William Penny Brookes, the father of the modern Olympics lived, to coincide with the Games. The project comprises of two chapters. There will be an installation made with celebrity sports shoes to be exhibited and auctioned to raise the profile and funding of the project within the year. Then Wren aims to collect 100,000 pairs of sports shoes to create a sculpture one mile long. After exhibiting ‘The Mile’, in Wenlock, there is every possibility of the shoes travelling to London in 2012, increasing in numbers and being displayed again. This recycled sports shoe sculpture will then be shipped for European touring before being dispersed to Mali for the opening of the African Eco Art Biennale and be distributed. "The shoes are in transition, on a journey of their own to find new owners via their respective installations." to use Wren's own words.
During her last stay in Mali, Wren was fortunate to meet and become friends with musician Salif Keita, who has donated all the profits from his latest award winning album, La Différence, to the foundation in his name; set up to highlight the plight of Albinos in Africa and give them practical support. The foundation will be involved in the very last showing of ‘The Mile’ in Mali, and will help to disperse the shoes to people who need them. Keita has already donated a beautiful pair of his sports shoes for the celebrity shoe auction that will assist in funding ‘The Mile’ project. Any celebrities and noted thinkers that would like to donate their signed sports shoes reading this, please get in touch with Wren through the links below.
Wren Miller is an inspiration and to walk a mile in her shoes would be a privilege indeed. By creating installations of beauty and reflection from our society’s waste materials and unwanted manmade artefacts she asks society to consider our own accountability to the planet that supports us. During this process of creating carbon neutral artworks she draws our attention to those very resources which we are using up and damaging to our own detriment. She inspires and involves people, thus building communities and making them think about their future roles and the future of our shared planet.
Wren Miller currently resides in Shropshire where she continually exhibits and creates workshops.
She is a founding member of the Cloud Gallery Artists Collective; whose vision is to create an ecological art gallery and education centre.
