Helen Ottaway

It’s been 18 months since I wrote on this blog. Its been a very busy and productive period and I’m still in the middle of it. But time to stop briefly, take a breath and look around.

Six years ago I was about to embark on a trip to Sri Lanka to take part in the Sura Medura artists residency. While there I started sketching ideas for a requiem, prompted by the death of my mother earlier in the year. I was sponsored by Activate Performing Arts who have continued to support my work towards the requiem. This year the work comes to fruition at Activate’s festival Inside Out Dorset.

Saeflod, a walking requiem has become about more than the loss of one person or even many people in my life. We are suffering environmental losses as well. We live on an island, we see cliff falls and coastal erosion and, in Sri Lanka, I was in a place that was very badly affected by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The photos taken by Lorna Rees (see above) of me in the ocean, with a driftwood keyboard she had made, illustrate my feeling at the time and often since, of being ‘all at sea’.

I have been working with poet Rosie Jackson for over a year now. The word seaflood, Saeflod in old English, was arrived at together. Rosie has been writing and collecting text and stories and combining words and syllables to create new words and phrases. This echoes the way that Alastair Goolden and I have often created installations – mixing and arranging composed and found material to create ever new combinations and meanings.

Saeflod is a ‘walking requiem’. Artmusic’s work has increasingly been created for and presented outdoors as music and image for the environment. The work will be installed in Moors Valley Country Park (Forestry England) as one of a series of thought provoking and enchanting installations. There will be opportunities to interact with the work and occassional choir performances.

For anyone who hasn’t experienced Artmusic’s oldest installation, Lachrymae, this will also be installed in the woods.

Collaborators include singer Melanie Pappenheim and sound designer Alastair Goolden who I have worked with over many years. I’ve admired Rosie Jackson’s poetry, but this is the first time we’ve worked together. Activate and Inside Out Dorset have close ties with the Arts University Bournemouth. We are lucky to have Anya Hobson and Maise Perkins, with other student helpers, working on the design elements of the piece.

The idea of the requiem has always been to create a work that can be reimagined and adapted for many different venues and spaces. The presentation of the work at Inside Out Dorset is a first step – a work in progress – a toe in the water. Members of the Orchestra for the Earth will be recorded for the installation this year. I look forward to future iterations of the requiem where they may perform live.

I am eternally grateful to Activate Performing Arts for their support. As well as commissioning the work they have been beside me through all the stages of development. I am also thrilled to have received a grant from the PRS Foundation’s Open Fund.