Metal

2012 saw the return of Metal's hugely popular Salon series - literary evenings held at Chalkwell Hall, hosted by acclaimed local writer Rachel Lichtenstein, with guest speakers, food, wine and debate.

This year, the Salon is dedicated to exploring a sense of place as expressed in literature.

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ARCHIVE:

18 July 2012 - A Sense of Place: Creative Responses to the Estuary

Internationally renowned artist Stephen Turner discussed his extraordinary project, Seafort, where he spent a month living on one of the abandoned Shivering Sands Seaforts off the Kent coast. Germander Speedwell told us about her poetic collection, Soundings From the Estuary, which charts the language, history and natural landscape of the river, and curator and writer Frances Lord presented her Four Shores Project, a sequence of artist-led walks on the Isle of Sheppey. Leigh-based Simon Fowler showed us some of his recent studies of the Estuary featured in the Leigh Art Trail 2012, and members of The Estuary Project, a group of creative individuals who took a five day experimental trip along the Estuary last year in an 80ft Dutch barge, shared some of their experiences.

Here is our videopodcast from the evening:

PART I:

PART II:

Photos by Niki Cornish:

5 June 2012 - London in Literature

The second salon event of the series saw some of the best contemporary chroniclers of the city in discussion about their recent projects.

Our host, Rachel Lichtenstein launched her latest book, Diamond Street: the Hidden World of Hatton Garden (Hamish Hamilton), which includes tales of diamond dealers, medieval monks and a trip to the sewers to explore the lost River Fleet.

Joining her was the highly regarded New York based writer and film critic for the Telegraph, Sukhdev Sandhu, who discussed his extraordinary Artangel project, Night Haunts – a nocturnal journey through the London night, along with Craig Taylor, talking about his recently released bestselling oral history of the city, Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now, As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It and Long for It, during which he interviewed over 200 ordinary people who live and work in London now.

Video from Salon - 5 June - Part I - Sukhdev Sandhu and Craig Taylor:

Video from Salon - 5 June - Part II - Rachel Lichtenstein:

Photos by Simon Fowler:

9 May 2012 - Southend in Literature

During this first event of the series, writers and historians discussed how Southend and its environs had been represented in literature through examining the works of Jane Austen, H.G.Wells, Sebastian Faulks and Simon Schama amongst others. The White Bus screened an archive film of Southend on 1950s.

The evening also included a dramatic reading by award-winning Radio 4 presenter and oral historian Alan Dein from a novel set in Southend in 1930s.

Video of SALON: Southend in Literature - part I & II:

ARCHIVE 2011:

Friday 15 July 2011

PART OF OUR SHORELINES: LITERATURE FESTIVAL OF THE SEA.

Including reading from and discussing the award winning novella Beside the Sea by Veronique Olmi (Periene Press).  A dramatic reading from the book by actress Lisa Dwan followed by a panel discussion with Suzi Feay (literary critic) and Adriana Hunter (author and translator)

This special festival Salon took place in Metal's temporary, pop-up, venue in Chalkwell Park - Solomon Monk's Pump House - so named after the C18th tenant farmer of Chalkwell Hall who was responsible for putting a pump in to tap the water well of 'Chalkwell' fame.

2011 saw the return of our hugely popular Salon series - four literary evenings with guest speakers at Chalkwell Hall over the summer of 2011.  Developed in collaboration with acclaimed Southend-based author Rachel Lichtenstein, the evenings are reminiscent of the informal gatherings once held in Rachel’s grandparents house on the nearby Chalkwell Hall Estate when they would invite the poets, writers and artists of the pre-war Jewish East End into their tiny front room to talk and debate.The Georgian Grade II listed manor house, Chalkwell Hall, renovated into a low carbon space for art and ideas in 2009 is brought to life as we pack out the former drawing room and its new extensions.

Salon:  Friday 17 June 2011

Guest speakers:  Sarah Wise and Jerry White.  Jerry White is visiting Professor in London History at Birbeck and has been writing about London for thirty years.   He started with London in the Twentieth Century: a City and its People (winner Wolfson History Prize), moved on to the Nineteenth Century and is now completing a history of the capital in the Eighteenth Century.  Sarah Wise is author of The Italian Boy; Murder and Grave Robbery in 1830's London (winner Crime Writers Gold Dagger Award) and The Blackest Streets: The Life and Death of a Victorian Slum.  Both books are set in the same small quarter of London.

Salon, 20 May 2011
Guest Speaker - Ken Worpole
Ken Worpole is one of the UK's most influential writers on landscape, architecture and public policy issues.  He talked about his recent publication 350 miles: An Essex Journey, created with photographer Jason Orton, that documents their journeys into the landscape, history, coast, rivers and estuary of Essex.

2010

Metal's 2010 Salon series included the following speakers:-

Robert MacFarlane
Iain Sinclair
Phil Maxwell and Hazuan Hashim
Alan Dein
Stephen Watts
Oreet Ashery
Samantha Ellis
Naomi Alderman

Speakers Biogs

Robert MacFarlane is a British travel writer and literary critic.  Macfarlane's first book, Mountains of the Mind, was published in 2003 and won the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize.  His second book, Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature, was published in March 2007.  The Wild Places was published in September 2007. In it he embarks on a series of journeys in search of the wildness that remains in Britain and Ireland.  The book explores wildness both geographically and intellectually, testing different ideas of the wild against different landscapes, and describes Macfarlane's explorations of forests, moors, salt marshes, mudflats, islands, sea-caves and city fringes.  A condensed version of the book was broadcast as Book of the Week on BBC Radio 4 in September 2007. In November 2007, the book won the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature, and in June 2008 it won the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book Of The Year Award.

Rachel Lichtenstein will host each evening.  She is an artist, writer, oral historian and curator.  She is author of Rodinsky's Whitechapel (1999), Keeping Pace (2003), A Little Dust Whispered (2004) and the co-author with Iain Sinclair of the highly praised Rodinsky's Room (1999).  Her latest book, On Brick Lane, was published in 2008 to much critical acclaim.  On Brick Lane was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize last year and is the first of a trilogy of books on London Streets for publishers Hamish Hamilton.  Volumes on Hatton Garden and Portobello Road will follow.  She has also written essays, short stories and book reviews for periodicals, newspapers and radio.  Lichtenstein has exhibited her artwork internationally, including venues such as The Whitechapel Gallery, The Tate Modern, The Barbican Art Gallery and The Jerusalem Theatre.  Her public artwork is on permanent display in Brick Lane and The Holocaust Museum in Nottingham.

Iain Sinclair’s non-fiction works inlude Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997); London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (2002); and Edge of the Orison (2005), a reconstruction of the poet John Clare's walk from Epping Forest to Helpston, near Peterborough. His novels include Downriver (1991), which tells of a UK under the rule of 'The Widow', a grotesque version of Margaret Thatcher; Landor's Tower (2001); White Goods (2002); and Dining on Stones (2004). His latest book is Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (2009). Iain Sinclair lives in Hackney, East London.

Phil Maxwell and Hazuan Hashim
Hazuan Hashim is  a filmmaker and video artist. Phil Maxwell is a photojournalist, filmmaker, visual artist and writer.  Exhibited all over the world including the Middle East, their work covers documentary and experimental film. They have collaborated with composers Michael Nyman, Lola Perrin, Deirdre Gribbin and Simon Rowland-Jones, theatre director Lou Stein, dancers Mavin Khoo, Seeta Patel and Kamala Devam and painter Alice Sielle. Their recent documentary, Not in Our Name explores the response of artists to war. Featuring the President of Stop the War Coalition, Tony Benn, the film was shot in 14 countries including Iraq. Both are currently artists in residence at the Wilton’s music Hall. Their latest film Moon Love, will see its world premiere at the 24th BFI London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on 25th March 2010.

Alan Dein has worked as a freelance oral historian and broadcaster for over 15 years. He has presented documentaries for BBC Radio 4 and has conducted interviews for museums, galleries and the British Library National Sound Archive, including a major oral history of the British Steel Industry.  Alan is also tour guide and social historian of London's East End and for the last four years has been living with his family in Kentish Town.

Stephen Watts was born in London in 1952:  his father’s family came from Stoke-on-Trent, his mother’s from the Swiss-Italian Alps and he has cultural roots there and in Scotland. In the early 70’s he lived on North Uist working as a shepherd and since 1976 has been in Whitechapel in the East End of London.  He has published three books of poetry—The Lava’s Curl (Grimaldi Press, 1990), Gramsci & Caruso (Periplum, 2003), The Blue Bag (Aark Arts, 2004) and edited several anthologies—Houses & Fish (a book of drawings with writing by 4 & 5 year olds, Parrot Press, 1991), Voices of Conscience (an international anthology of censored poets, Iron Press, 1995), Mother Tongues (a special issue of Modern Poetry in Translation, 2001), and Music While Drowning (an anthology of German Expressionist poems that accompanied an exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, Tate Publishing, 2003).

Oreet Ashery is a London based, interdisciplinary visual artist. Ashery’s practice engages with socio-political paradigms and tends to include participatory and delegated elements. Interested in notions of subjectivity and authenticity, Ashery will frequently produce work as a male character. Those have included; an orthodox Jewish man, an Arab man, a black man, a Norwegian postman, a large farmer and most recently a false messiah.  Ashery exhibits, performs, intervenes and screens her work extensively in an international context, both in highly established art contexts, as well as in highly experimental public spaces or situations.  Ashery has published three books in 2009; The Novel of Nonel and Vovel, a joint graphic novel and an expanded project with the artist Larissa Sansour (Charta), Dancing with Men; interactive performances, interactions and other artworks (Live Art Development Agency), and Staying; Dream, Bin, Soft Stud and Other Stories (Artangel), a participatory project with women seeking asylum in the UK due to their sexual orientation. www.oreetashery.net

Naomi Alderman grew up in London and attended Oxford University and UEA. Her first novel, Disobedience, was published in ten languages; it was read on BBC radio's Book at Bedtime and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. She has published prize-winning short fiction in a number of anthologies. From 2004 to 2007 Naomi was lead writer on the award-winning alternate reality game Perplex City and in 2008 she wrote the Alice in Storyland game for Penguin's online We Tell Stories project. She has written columns for the Guardian.  Her latest novel, The Lessons, was published by Penguin earlier this year. www.naomialderman.nfshost.com

Samantha Ellis
http://www.blogcatalog.com/blog/samantha-ellis