Art Work Exeter presents: Pile Up! Worlds of Stuff

What is falling off and out of our modern day trading systems – the big pieces and the tiny molecules? How do we know what’s useful and valuable and what is waste? What has our wastefulness to do with how we have historically traded across cultures and between nations, and how is our productive discarding re-making us and everything else on the planet?

For over 300 years Exeter Custom House was a place for the weighing, measuring, counting and assessing of goods and materials from across the globe. Join us at the Custom House throughout April, May and June for programme of art, talks and activities that creatively measure and value our contemporary worlds of stuff and explore how they are piling up!

EXHIBITION

Exhibition of new artwork by Louise Ashcroft & Farmer Glitch, and Freya Gabie
10 June – 29 June (10am – 4.30pm). Free

On research trips to Exeter City Council’s Materials Reclamation Facility, artists Louise Ashcroft & Farmer Glitch were transfixed by the enormous green sorting machine, with its juddering, bouncy chutes and conveyors, and the turbulent ‘weather’ of sensation it brings to the warehouse. Their multimedia sculpture takes you to the centre of the machine’s darkly sublime storm – a sculptural entanglement of e-waste and audio-visuals, with a soundscape made with participants of ‘storm machine’ sound workshops using electronics and trash. Dive into the deluge of packaging as it surfs the commodity currents, oscillating between as ominous, thrashy, upbeat and almost-slapstick.

Freya’s artworks conceptually and sculpturally address ideas of imbalance and worth. They approach Exeter Custom House’s role in the systems of commerce within the British Empire, reflecting how historic practices persist in impacting how value is attributed in western society today. The work uses material aspects of our environment that are consciously overlooked or edited out – wastewater, weeds, used plastic – to speak about different forms of worth. They also playfully address the circularity of stuff, highlighting that there is no such thing as ‘waste’ or ‘resource:’ it is all matter, what changes is our own relationship with this material, shifting it out of place. 

The Pile Up! Research process has been generously supported by the staff team at Exeter City Council’s Materials Reclamation Facility and Recycle Devon.

PILE UP! EVENTS

Community Swap with Recycle Devon
Tuesday 10 June (11.30am – 4.30pm).

Join Recycle Devon to celebrate the opening of the Pile Up! exhibition and The Great Big Green Week! Community Swap is a free event where you can donate, rehome or swap pre-loved clothes and books, helping to stop perfectly good items from going to waste. Head on down to the quay with any donations and a bag and update your wardrobe or bookshelf; sustainably and completely free! We welcome donations of books/clothes for any age, size or style but ask that they are in good, reusable condition. Anyone is welcome to participate, with or without a donation. 
The Transit Shed
Find out more

TerraForma – film screening & conversation
Thursday 12 June (7pm – 9pm).

TerraForma is the story of the remote volcanic island of Ascension, which sat smouldering for a million years largely devoid of life, until its radical transformation by process of ‘terraforming’ into a tropical paradise. TerraForma explores the lessons we could learn from Ascension Island and what its story may mean for our planet.
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

Button Making with Precious Plastic
Saturday 14 June (11am – 5pm).

Join Precious Plastic Plymouth to make your own buttons from plastic bottle tops! Bring along your clean plastic milk bottle tops (or any HDPE – it’s marked with a triangle with the number 2 inside) or use the ones that we have from Exeter Scrapstore. Our peddle-powered bike shredder will help you to make the plastic into smaller pieces. This goes into our injection moulder, where the plastic gets heated up to around 200 degrees celsius, the molten plastic gets injected into a button mould. It cools very quickly and you can take away your new buttons in about 20 minutes! FREE (suggested donation £2). Suitable for children age 11+ and adults.
The Transit Shed
Find out more

Quay Words presents Philip Marsden: ‘Under a Metal Sky’
Wednesday 18 June (6.30pm – 7.30pm).

Award winning author Philip Marsden joins the Quay Words team for an evening discussing his latest novel. Rich with revelations, Under A Metal Sky traces the dazzling achievements and dark consequences of our ability to extract what we want from the earth, and presents a fascinating new perspective on European history and on our troubled relationship with the natural world. £6/£4 (concs).
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

Atmospheric Forces with Sue Palmer and Sheila Ghelani
Thursday 19 June (7pm – 9pm).

A long table. Underneath, an archaeology of sorts. Objects are assembled, time and space fold. The sea rises, the sea falls. Vapour.
Join artists Sue Palmer and Sheila Ghelani as they turn over the interconnections between climate and geology, fuel and feelings, the strata and layers of atmospheres through performance and action. Everything we make is from the earth and will go back to it.
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

Pile Up! Artists talk rubbish
Friday 27 June (5.30pm – 7pm).

Join Pile Up! artists Louise Ashcroft, Farmer Glitch and Freya Gabie from 4pm at the Custom House where they will be on hand in the exhibition to answer questions about their artworks. After a short performance action by Louise at 5.30pm, the artists will be in conversation with Matt Hulland, Resource Recovery Manager at Exeter City Council about the materials and processes involved in making Pile Up! and wider issues of resource exhaustion and circular economies. There will be a paid bar at this event.
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

ARTIST-LED WORKSHOPS

Workshop: Storm Machine 1
Saturday 12 April (11am – 1pm and 1.30pm – 3.30pm)
Using junk to make improvised instruments, you’ll create and record sonic landscapes about the world of waste and weather. With Louise Ashcroft and Farmer Glitch.
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

Workshop: Thicket
Sunday 13 April (10.30am – 1pm and 1.30pm – 4.00pm)
Print a plant with Freya Gable. Uncover some of the overlooked indicator plants growing around Exeter’s historic quayside and make eco-friendly prints.
Exeter Custom House
Book your place

Workshop: Storm Machine 2
Saturday 10 May (10am – 12.30pm and 1pm – 3.30pm)
Bring scrap materials to life with electronics and give old devices a new life as storm bringers. With Louise Ashcroft and Farmer Glitch.
Co-Create, Haven Banks.
Book your place