Fenwomen
Welcome to FENWOMEN: an event series and longer-term project that gathers women, non-binary and trans voices from across East Anglia, and invites others in. The following recording introduces the FENWOMEN committee: Rose Higham Stainton (founder), Deirdre Canavan, Hannah Levene, Katie J Barlow and Milly Reilly.
Through experimental literary forms, and a live event series, FENWOMEN seeks to occupy space and hold space for voices at the periphery and frayed edges of language. FENWOMEN borrows its name from Mary Chamberlain’s Fenwomen: A Portrait of Women in an English Village first published by Virago Press in 1975. In Fenwomen, Chamberlain chronicled the lives of several generations of women from one village in the Cambridgeshire fens, — their sense of belonging (or not), community, labour and social isolation — as well as their relationship to their surroundings. Shrouded in a mythology of remoteness, this region is perceived to be on the fringes of society and culture; fringes, which owing to coastal erosion, are in a constant state of flux.
© This is an original eels production.
Nose Blind and Humming
NOSE BLIND AND HUMMING is an event hosted by artist and writer Benjamin Arthur Brown that provides a space for people to practice and perform words. It is an open platform for more performative practices to have a space to try and, if necessary, fail.
This chapter of NBAH was presented on Friday 6th March at OUTPOST Gallery in Norwich.
Radio Ballad 003: Field Work in the Fens
Beginning with the over-cultivation of the fenland landscape in the wake of the Second World War, Radio Ballad 003: Field Work in the Fens tells a story of friction, resistance and an ongoing struggle for power, taking the audience on a journey through peasantry society, crop science, countercultural obsession with houseplants and 1970s pulp and folk horror to challenge and transform our understanding of human’s place in natural society.
Presented in a live listening format, Radio Ballad 003 is an exploration of the collision between humans and the natural world of plants that takes place within the Anthropocene.
“No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life
in this stricken world, the people had done it themselves”
— Rachel Carson, Silent Springs
Featuring contributions from Dr Aoife O’Driscoll and Dr Emily Bourke, and music from the Shackleton Trio.
An original eels production (2022)