Cornish-born painter and Outsid'er Festival rtist-in-residence Tony Plant is best known for creating whole beach sand drawings
Next month St Agnes’s Outdoor Festival - known as the Outsid’er - will feature artist-in-residence Tony Plant best known for creating whole beach sand drawings.
The Cornish-born painter will create work on Porthtowan and Chapel Porth over the festival weekend. There will be an opportunity for people to join Tony in creating a sand drawing on Trevaunance Cove in St Agnes.
As well as create his stunning, site-specific, sand drawings Tony will also be inviting people to join his new Creative Colony Project, as virtual mapmakers.
'The festival residency is a great opportunity for me as an artist, as it’s a natural extension of the work I make,' he says. 'I’m interested in the idea that landscape is not a 'passive' or 'fixed' thing, just to be looked at. It is an interactive, ever changing space, full of memories and connections, intimate encounters, shared experiences, with private and secret meanings. The Creative Colony Project is an opportunity to use digital technology, cameras and GPS to record and document movements of un-named individuals and groups, locals, holiday-makers, art lovers, dog walkers, life guards, delivery drivers, post men & women, visitors and everything in between, as they move through and engage with a common landscape. We will capture their pathways; noticing, recording and documenting where they go, when, for how long, seeing whether they intersect.'
Tony’s work takes him across the globe - he is currently creating sand drawings in Bermuda and after the festival he us off to draw in Iceland on a Crowdfunded trip with adventure photographer Tim Nunn, where he’ll create large scale, temporary drawings under the Northern Lights. Next year he has a solo show at the Royal Cornwall Museum, showcasing recent work created in Cornwall, that will include the results of the Creative Colony Project.
This year’s Outsid’er Festival takes place from the 10 – 12th April and the programme includes an assorted mix of events to get people outside’ doing weird and wonderful things in the St Agnes landscape. It includes an opening Beach Feast with storytelling and live music; sand sculpture and rock balancing competitions, with Surfers Against Sewage; Salt Roads Theatre with Anna Maria Murphy of Kneehigh; a pop-up skate park; the launch of the Get Active Project; a photography competition; the Washed Up Orchestra Project; beach cleans; Cornish language walks; foraging; life boat demonstrations; a boot camp; a pop-up outdoor surf cinema; kayaking tours; Pimp my Ride Bike’ Trails from the new launched Aggie Cycles, and a Wacky Machine Beach Race.
