About What Matters
What Matters has been commissioned by Kettle’s Yard for the exhibition Paint What Matters! and generously supported by Arts Council England.
What Matters is a 16mm video and series of collaborative texts made by children in Year 4 at Arbury Primary School in North Cambridge. Through six nature-themed workshops devised by artist Josh Bilton along with choreographer Daisy May Kemp, the pupils have responded to two conservation sites in Norfolk – Holme Bird Observatory along the East coastline of England and the River Nar, a globally rare chalk-stream that flows through the Downs and Fenland of north-west Norfolk.
The children have expressed what people, places, colours, words, feelings and environment’s matter to them today through painting and storytelling. Their hand-painted journeys are layered with 16mm footage of the River Nar, Holme Bird Observatory and the hands and gestures of female ornithologists; scientists who specialise in studying birds.
Transforming into birds, rivers, seeds, seasons, weather and characters they met along the way, their texts include themes of care for self, community and the increasingly fragile balance of our ecologies. Each text is carried by a bird that has rested at Holme Bird Observatory in Norfolk along its migratory journey from places as far as Syria, Nigeria and Israel.
Texts Written by the Students
