PRESS RELEASE

 

Wirksworth Festival 11-26 September

Wirksworth Festival’s Art & Architecture Trail this weekend (12 & 13 September) brings an ambitious and exhilarating mix of cutting edge contemporary art, music, crafts and performance to fill every space in the town.

 

Modernism and Architecture, Illumination and Animation are the focus for visual arts. Using traditional and new media, there is an emphasis on contemporary art in public spaces. As dusk falls lightworks and illuminated work in shop windows will bring work excitingly to life. Derbyshire artist Charles Monkhouse makes spectacular lightworks, and his Market Square Horizon installation consists of 360 lights fixed to buildings surrounding the square. Video work includes the vibrantly colourful Spatial Weaves video by Martyn Blundell, which will be projected onto a gable end in the Market Place, alternating with video work by Lorenzo Madge.

An illuminated shed of lightworks by Nottingham based artist Raphael Daden will occupy the Memorial Gardens, and shop windows all over town will be displaying new illuminated works specially commissioned by the Festival from rising young East Midlands artists. Michael Branthwaite has made a radical Modernist intervention to a field barn at the National Stone Centre.

 

With over 100 artists exhibiting, there will be new and exciting things to see in every corner of the town this weekend. Private homes of every shape and size, churches, gardens, and streets will be filled with art.

 

Main Galleries will be open throughout the Festival period, showing new, specially commisioned or curated work. They include the large gallery space of Newbridge Works where Matthew Houlding will be exhibiting architectural models of imaginary Modernist Utopian buildings, alongside work from emerging new artists, the best of the Fine Art graduates from across the region. Also in Newbridge will be a retrospective of work by local artist Peter Hoon, who died last year. The new Carpet Shop Gallery on St John’s Street will show Alec Finlay’s ongoing project word-mapping the Peak District alongside Maxine Hall’s photos of local people taken last year. In the Parish Room Ben Cove will be showing recent work ranging through sculpture and painting to video installation, and new graduates from Nottingham Trent University Decorative Arts programme will be exhibiting work that includes millinery, glass, porcelain, ceramics, fabrics and wall-coverings.

 

St Mary’s Church has Glossop-artist Ghislaine Howard’s powerful paintings, while at the Heritage Centre Kate Genver celebrates the skill and ingenuity of Derbyshire farmers with a body of work investigating homemade tools and technologies.

 

The Makers’ Market crammed with lucious covetable craftworks returns to the Town Hall and the Memorial Hall, accompanied this year by a specially-selected exhibition of contemporary ironworks.

 

There’s a performance programme to rock your socks off running throughout the Festival, and a second weekend of guided art walks and artist talks.

 

Full programme and online box office on the Festival website www.wirksworthfestival.co.uk, or enquiries to the office on 01629 824003

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