Pond(er)

With Alivia Goldhill and Andy Leech

01/02/2024 - 01/03/2024

Pond(er) is an exhibition exploring the gallery as a site for shared & intimate experiences, examining how an arts space can encourage communal experience  and discourse through tactile and sonic interventions. 

This installation responds to the noted distance and oftentimes loneliness felt following on from a period of restricted human contact, and instead works to highlight the importance of togetherness, play and collective memory through soft installation and storytelling. Visitors are invited to touch, sit, lay down, play and ponder their thoughts as they interact with the gallery space. 

Pond(er) includes works by visual artist Alivia Goldhill and sonic artist Andy Leech (Le Boom), and has been developed by Catalyst Arts co-director Rachael Melvin.

Pond(er) will launch Thursday 1st February 6pm-9pm.

All are welcome!

PS wear your best socks!

Pond(er)

A bath, a dam, a pond of thoughts, 

Enclosed to keep in the ferns, the life and the guts.

Bricks laid one by one insulate the pond,

Resembling cupped hands fortifying the membrane.

Overflowing is a rarity, 

Levels are managed year on year.

Without indication, the pools seize up.

Suppose that was the cold snap, 

The one that’s kept at bay.

But was it a cold snap,

A shock to the system without warning?

Or something, that grew slowly,

That should have been grabbed and interrupted before now?

Paths lay overgrown, untouched, unnoticed, deathly slippery 

This body of water is stunned

Under the surface there are thoughts, there is life, 

The current remains underneath, the grasses move

But still the thick frost keeps out the softness of conversation 

Is this Winter? Winter has never lasted this long before

Eternally stodgy 

Then a crack, 

The first flickering light catches this bath,

The mosses, and the mist.

Ever so slowly, and hardly noticeable, all begins to thaw.

Solstice breaks the solace.

Then, that sound, the wheaters call.

Migration has come to an end.

And finally, an extended hand is a welcomed thought.

By Rachael Melvin