Practice in Place - Oren Shoesmith
Oren Shoesmith shares his experience of living between Cornwall and Scotland.
Tell us about you & your practice:
I am an artist, poet, organiser and mystic living between Cornwall and Scotland. My work involves a clay based sculptural practice, performance, moving image and poetics, often with all four occurring in a messy entanglement. I’m also devoted to artist-led and collective organising as an approach, with its possibilities for political and social resistance. Currently this is taking the form of a committeeship at Transmission Gallery in Glasgow, and previously it looked more like queer experimental cabarets in dark and sticky clubs.
Recently I’ve been in residence at Glasgow Ceramics Studio as part of SaltSpace’s Uncertain Futures programme, where I’ve been making ceramic cairns and thinking through collective land monuments and artefacts of grief. Last year I was an invited contributor to Clay Commons at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, where I shared research as a part of commoning knowledge around clay and ceramic practices. This took the form of a deep dive into the unlikely links between trans archive Susan’s Place, industrial clay mining in Cornwall, DIY prosthetics and folk healing practices. This summer I will be performing in a bog for Glasgow International Festival with the collaborative project Corpores Infames: Disreputable Bodies, and showing a tender film on queer Cornish landscapes at Tremenheere Gallery (Penzance, Cornwall).
The past few years I’ve made a commitment to coming back to Cornwall and the Westcountry in general as a familial and ancestral home. Within this return, I’ve also come to a tense truth that my artistic and devotional practice are inseparable from a Cornish landscape and an ever-elusive and slippery Cornish identity. This journey home is rooted in a decolonial un-learning which comes from the wisdom of change makers and liberation workers of the global majority to whom I’m indebted. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer describes becoming indigenous to place as: “to live as if we'll be here for the long haul, to take care of the land as if our lives, both spiritual and material, depended on it.”
This practice of becoming indigenous to place has brought me back home to Cornwall to think through the moment at which I could no longer be held by the land. This was a result of a deep rooted economic precarity in the early millennium as well as a hostile superstition of the “other”. In 2012 I left Cornwall. The move felt like a necessary exile with the rise of a Tory government and UKIP fascism as the reactionary recourse. In 2020, I moved to Glasgow to be with my partner at the same time as my grandmother became ill. While caring for her at the end of her life and travelling between Scotland and the Westcountry I found peace in the idea of a dispersed home, belonging to more than one land and making community in the in-between. I made a commitment to return to Cornwall as a home and become local to both places. In the film One World in Relation by Manthia Diawara , Edouard Glissant describes archipelagic thinking as knitting together local “island” communities through the sharing of resources and how this is the answer to disrupting centralised systems of power. He says “Every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity’ encouraging us to expand our idea of the local as well as a singular identity.”Where can we find multiplicity in a Cornish identity? As a national minority whose main histories have been eroded by time and displacement, our minor and multiple histories are even harder to place. Coupled with a god-fearing rural context, the Cornish personhood, like many others, has often been limited by a somewhat singular and puritanical inheritance.
In the past few years there’s been a stunning effort to archive the queer and gender dissident lives of Cornwall’s art colonies, charting the ways in which moneyed incomers found a tender and fierce retreat in coastal borderlands where they could manifest their most integral selves.
Whilst reading Ithell Colquhoun’s memoir The Living Stones, I encountered the Cornish word “galliwo” meaning hermaphrodite or sexual aberration in livestock. This indicated to me that a folk knowledge of trans and queer bodies existed historically in the Cornish imagination, even if conceived of as monstrous or unnatural. This trembling history of gender and sexual dissidence also flickers across the tradition of the Pellar (Cornish folk healer) whose multi-gendered witches lumps blessed field harvests, healed sickness and brought lovers together. The faint hints of alternative Cornish lives requires us to do what Anjali Arondeker describes as “reading without a trace,” reaching through the erasing logics of colonial archives to understand the hidden folk histories that lie beneath.
Maybe reading without a trace could also be understood as a kind of speculative channelling, tuning in to the subtle vestiges of those who have come before us like the ancient monuments which litter West Penwith or the Zennor Mermaid who mysteriously seems to bear the scars of Top Surgery.
What are the great art spaces and organisations you love to visit?
A non-exhaustive list of my favourite places in Cornwall and the places I’d like to connect with most are:
The Museum of Witchcraft as an exciting repository of Westcountry folk practices
Artist-led space Auction House in Redruth for its exceptional programme by Liam Jolly
Wheal Martyn, Goonhilly and Porthcurno Museum of Global Communications as sites that document the ways in which the Cornish landscape has been shaped by extraction and opportunism.
CAST for its history in bringing sensitive and thoughtful programmes, as well as its connection to the experimental ceramics projects brickworks by Rosanna Martin.
And Troy Books, an independent publisher in Penzance focused on the traditional magical systems of the Westcountry.
For those making the journey up to Scotland, Transmission, Market Gallery and Listen Gallery are my home away from homes. Rosie’s Disobedient Press is an independent press run by artists Lisette May Monroe and Adrien Howard focused on queer, working class and feminist writing. For anyone paying a visit to Shetland, Scotland’s most remote archipelago, I would strongly recommend artist-led print studio Gaada for the warmest of welcomes.
What resources or facilities are there that you (can) access?
Here in Scotland, my favourite making place is Aberdeenshire-based Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW). For anyone interested in sculptural practice, especially clay, SSW is an amazing repository of knowledge as well as a beautiful place to experiment with alternative processes. There’s an onsite artist-built wood fired sauna, and one of my favourite memories is a raku sauna session under the full moon, rolling around in freshly fallen snow to cool off. I also spend a lot of time in the Glasgow Ceramics Studio (GCS) which is cooperatively run by a bunch of amazingly talented and kind clay geeks.
This year I’ve been visiting Newlyn School of Art which is a studio running teaching programmes. Through my time there I’ve got to know Anchor Studio, a beautiful residency and studio space also based in Newlyn, tended by the Borlase Smart John Wells Trust, as well as my friend Wendy Rolt’s residency retreat space in her magical home in Luxulyan.
Cheerlead for your peers! - Who would you like to shout loudly about?
I want to kick off this list with my collaborator in love, life and art making Rabindranath X Bhose; and my dear friend, Shetland-based Westcountry witch Belladonna Paloma. The three of us are currently working on a project all about our love for bogs and peaty, swampy wetlands. Disreputable Bodies, named after the bodies ritually sacrificed to the bog, looks at the links between bogland, trans experiences, crip time and deep time.
Clay AD and Zinzi Buchanan are my Glasgow family and comrades who show me beautiful examples of recovery, rest, somatic practice and community resilience. Daniella Valz Gen is a fellow heart-pilgrim who has taught me so much about oracular practice and integrity.
Recently I’ve had the chance to meet Wendy Rolt and briefly, Liam Jolly who’ve both left a lasting impression about how to make a home in Cornwall which draws from the energies of the land. I’ve also received guidance from Kate Walters, Marie-Claire Hamon and Faye Dobinson thank you all for your support and your commitment to the subtle world.
The artists who I would love to meet and whose practices I’ve been following for a long time are Sovay Berriman, Libita Sibungu, Ro Robertson, SHARP, Simon Bayliss, Georgia Gendall, as well as projects Queer Kernow and The Stone Club.
Where do you make your work?
As a disabled artist I make a lot of my work from bed! Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha's book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice has been an essential text for me thinking through what they call "dream time", which is the generative and creative space that knits all disabled people together in the radical act of necessary rest.
I also have a studio in Govan, Glasgow at Gather which has a vibrant artist community. Residencies have been especially important to breakthrough moments in my work, especially the Caregivers Residency run by SSW in collaboration with Counterflows.
Pilgrimage to special, charged places are also important to me. Currently I make work between Cornwall, Glasgow and Shetland through boglands, holy lands and queer lands (honourable mentions to Sancreed holy well and the cruising grounds of Queens Park in Glasgow)
What opportunities are there for artists in your area?
I feel indebted to the Newlyn School of Art where I’ve been a part of this year's Mentorship programme. It’s been a humbling experience and I feel grateful to all my peers who have engaged so sincerely with my work as well as Jesse Leroy Smith for his vision and support. I wouldn’t have been able to do the course without the Toby O’Brien Foundation, who sponsored my place, and Artist Newsletter (A-N), who sponsored my travel through the Time Space Money bursary. I would highly recommend both opportunities, especially younger artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds.
For anyone wanting a wee trip to Scotland I would recommend the funded and subsidised residencies at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, the Bothy Project, Cove Park and Hospitalfield. There is also the annual residency exchange From One To Another Cornwall x Scotland, which is run in collaboration with Visual Arts Cornwall and partners Wilhelmina Barns Graham Trust, Borlase Smart John Wells Trust and Pier Arts Centre.
What or who helps you maintain your practice?
My practice wouldn’t be possible without my partner, my loved ones and friends who help me with care and support work; the art world is still a mostly able bodied context and care work is such important and often undervalued labour. Also my spiritual community! I help run a monthly online meditation evening for disabled, neurodiverse and chronically ill folk called Earthworm Sangha. The Sangha is also run by Fen Kerrison, Daniella Valz Gen, emiko yoshikami and Rabindranath X Bhose. We operate through Portsmouth based Southsea Sangha, which is also one of my spiritual homes and the UK link for Lama Rod Owens whose teachings on liberation and freedom have been incredibly important to me.
The work of writers, poets and activists are core to my practice with dearly departed Édouard Glissant currently stoking my resilience.
What else would you love VASW's audiences to know about where you live and work as an artist?
I’ll be showing a new film, What is a Cave if not an Opening into a Body, from 22nd to 24th of June at Tremenheere Gallery, just outside of Penzance, as part of the Newlyn School of Art’s Mentorship group show EPOCH. Just in time for Golowan, the film will be an exploration of Cornish land histories, the links between mine shafts, ancient holy wells, divinity and queer subversion. It would be great to see you there :).
How can people find out more about your work?
Citations:
Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 2013
Manthia Diawara, Édouard Glissant: One World in Relation, 2009Ithell Colquhoun, The Living Stones, 2017
Anjali Arondekar, Without a Trace: Sexuality and the Colonial Archive, Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 14, No. 1/2, Special Issue: Studying the History of Sexuality: Theory, Methods, Praxis (Jan. - Apr., 2005)
