Absolute Elsewhere at Shelley Manor

 

Tomorrow night at Absolute Elsewhere, I'll be performing a new piece called Scire for the first time.

The Absolute Elsewhere event has been planned and programmed by Dominic Shepherd and myself. I met Dominic after a show Tom D Moon had invited me to play st Six project space a small art gallery in Bournemouth, Dominic explained he was involved with a new project called Black Mirror which sounded integrating.
As a result of subsequent conversations Absolute Elsewhere began to form as a multimedia art event, exploring the esoteric and occult in art.

A little information about Shelley Manor "The house, built for Mr Philip Norris in 1801, and two hundred acres of land were bought in 1849 by Sir Percy Florence Shelley, the only surviving child of the romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the writer, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. He had originally intended it for his ailing mother, but she was too ill to move from London and died in 1851. Sir Percy and his wife, Jane, were seduced by the benign climate and wild beauty of the location and decided to move there themselves. By some accounts, Sir Percy was attracted to the area because of its likeness to the Italian shores of the Gulf of Spezzia, where he had lived as a young child and where his father died sailing at the age of twenty-nine.
The couple had a passion for theatricals and entertainment and Percy built a theatre in the house and set about establishing Boscombe Manor (as it was officially known by 1873) as a place of renown for culture and the arts. The theatre was described as the most splendid private theatre in England. Its red velvet curtains, realistic and colourful painted scenery and ornate furnishings were the very epitome of Victorian grandeur. But the shows staged there were about far more than ostentation. Percy’s plays were very close to his heart, to the extent that he often wrote, performed in and produced them, as well as painting the scenery and composing the music. Impressively, two of Percy’s plays are held in the British Museum.
After Sir Percy’s death in 1889, his widow continued with the charity work and allowed the grounds to be used for a variety of local functions, including picnics, fetes, carnivals and football games. She herself died there in 1899, well-respected. Her estate was valued at £16,000 gross, some of which was bequeathed to family, but much was given to acquaintances and the clergy. Three servants each received £250, and another a life annuity of £30. Six acres of land went to the public and were developed into the Boscombe Cliff Gardens, which are still enjoyed today. The gardens were opened in 1900 to great celebrations and fireworks. The mansion was left to Jane’s great-nephew, Captain Shelley Leopold Lawrence Scarlett, who later became Lord Abinger. Like their predecessors, he and Lady Abinger were much involved in charitable work, supporting local hospitals and continuing to make the park available as a venue for fetes. Lady Abinger regularly gave flowers and grapes grown in the grounds to hospitals, and he gave pheasants during the festive season. But the Abingers’ stay at Boscombe Manor was a relatively short one. In June 1911 the Bournemouth Beach Committee bought the mansion for £69,500 and it was left unoccupied for some time. Then in 1918 it was re-invented as a school for girls and re-named Grovely Manor. Yet this, too, proved an ephemeral role: the doors were bolted shut once again in the late 1930s and the property returned to the ownership of the council. Its past glories were by now distant and largely forgotten and the theatre was in a state of serious neglect. During the last thirty years Boscombe Manor, by now re-named Shelley Manor, was home to the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, which used the theatre as a canteen and lecture room, and to a museum specifically devoted to Percy Bysshe Shelley. The only one of its kind, the museum had visitors from all over the world. However, it closed after the death of its curator, Miss Margaret Brown, in 1992 and the college left shortly after. Has the house’s romantic grandeur been lost to the ravages of time and modern sensibilities?"

From the New Forest to the Purbecks, the zone in between has acted as a locus to the other side; from Gerald Gardner and his perspective on modern witchcraft to the end place of Paul Nash, W.B Yeats, A.E, Aleister Crowley’s 777 and a seemingly never ending procession of esoteric artists and occult thinkers are an intrinsic part of Bournemouth history. In honor of this Absolute Elsewhere brings a night of esoteric immersion that will manifest itself in Shelley Manor. A multi-sensory experience spread over the interior bringing together artists, performers, filmmakers and musicians for a night that promises to electrify and enchant the soul. It will take the form of specially curated rooms, installations and a rolling stage program, contributors include English Heretic, The Cult of Rammellzee, Alexander Tucker & Mark Titchner, Heather Leigh, Jennie Savage and Graham Gussin, Matthew Shaw, Peter Symons & David Munns, Gorilla perfumes, Richard Waring and Seer Dirge presents Knifedoutofexistence, Upward, Watt Tyler and Urthona.

Together with Tom we started to scope out the event, visited our chosen venue at Shelley Manor and began to design the event.

Tom has programmed the Seers Dirge room which is also the name of an ongoing night he runs both from his art gallery and other venues. This space will host a number of artists working with music and ritual, both local to Dorset and from further afield. All have a unique take on the subject from Urthona's rural power drone to Knifedoutofexistence and the banishing ritual through a power noise aesthetic.

In the Shelley theatre we have a wonderful array of artists, Heather Leigh performing Termas (Moaning on Linda) for the last time, "Seven. A closet in foxfire, a fisher-price cassette recorder. Darkly tanned. Pink Linda. I look backward to you. You look forward to me. Our younger selves are our older selves are our current selves. You take my self. You take my self control."

I myself will present my Scire piece, a film and sound art piece investigating gerald Gardner's initiation into the witch cult in the new forset and subsequent popularisation of the Wica through books such as "Witchcraft today" and multiple encounters with the daily newspapers, initially in England and then across the world.

Any Sharp brings his fascinating English Heretic project and in his own words "I’ll performing the genesis of a new piece of Inner cinema at Shelley Manor. Music from a pulp esoteric Spaghetti Western, starring Pazuzu, Choronzon, Abdul Alhazred, Charles Manson, Charley Varrick, the muses of Vermilion Sands and host of other chimeras from The Crimson Desert, I’ve long been interested in the correspondences between various visionaries reading of the red/mauve/vermilion zones as a place of pestilential imagination. In response to Matthew Shaw’s ideas for the event, most pertinently Crowley’s authoring of 777 in darkest Bournemouth, I’ll be riffing on the triplicity 333 in the typical mauve tinted polaroid spectacles of my Grantian lens."

Then Cult of RAMM:ΣLL:ZΣΣ (Iconic recently deceased rapper/graffiti-philosopher~also known as the Equation and for his freestyle nasal rap style- RIP 1960-2010) is a collective of graffiti addicts, b-boys/b-girls, rappers, and electronica artists including Tex Royale, Dead Steppa, Nuke Eden, Lu Ma Itri Oi, Zig Tek 3, Meganski, Chooc Ly Tan, Nitro and Butchers Corner.

Elsewhere in the Mulberry room Alexander Tucker will perform a live piece to a Mark Titchner video art piece, Gorilla perfumes will re-enact "Dead Meadow" an olfactory and crop circle instillation, along with visual art from alexander Tucker, sound from Mark Pilkington and the design of the circle itself by Leila Dear, all inspired by the perfume created by Mark and Simon Constantine.

Also in the Mulberry room Mark and Paul Cummings will present their sculptures, "The deer and the goat are common motifs in the foundational mythologies and cosmologies throughout Eurasia and North America. Both deer and goat have both nurtured powerful mythological heroes in their infancy. The totemic value of these creatures aided shamans to seek knowledge and transformed spiritual experiences into non-ordinary reality by identifying with the spirit of these creatures."

Througout the rest of Shelley Manor there will be visual art including work by Peter Symons and Dave Munns with a collaborative work is about place and traces of time. The layers of subtle clues that do not tell the truth but might give you access to a truth. This will sit along with works by Graham Gussin, Jennie Savage and also current students from Bournemouth Arts University.