Ellie Robinson- Carter | Sam Machell | Jodie Saunders | Kingsbridge Community College | Kingsbridge Primary School | Kingsbridge Community Members

The Bird and the Rhino is an exhibition that brings together and celebrates artworks from Harbour House’s community engagement programme; showcasing artworks made by community groups, alongside artworks by the artists who facilitate those projects. 

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the mutually beneficial relationship between Oxpecker birds and rhinos. Oxpeckers' main source of food are insects and bugs, and are often seen sitting on rhino’s back, eating the insects that live on the rhino, helping them keep clean; the rhino offers a constant supply of food. The birds also work to help protect rhinos from predators like lions or hyenas, as rhinos have bad eye sight, the Oxpeckers cause a commotion making lots of noise to warn the rhinos.

This exhibition celebrates the symbiotic relationship between artists and community groups in socially-engaged projects programmed by Harbour House. These socially engaged projects are a collaborative way to make art, which involves community members taking part in activities and sharing their ideas and interests which then informs the next few sessions.

In the first room of the gallery are photobooks and prints by local families who took part in workshops as part of 2024’s Love Your Park event in Kingsbridge Recreation Ground, alongside dry-point etchings by the workshop lead artist Ellie Robinson-Carter. Ellie runs The Photobook Project, which invites people living with dementia and their wider communities to document their experiences via a single-use camera. The participants select themes for the photography, which could be anything from a season to a significant object. They are also invited to take part in creative activities which link to the theme, such as writing poems or making cyanotypes. 

At Love Your Park, community members selected themes of Close-Up Colours, Flowers, Animals, and Leaves and Trees, and also created pressed flowers from fallen petals and leaves in the park. Ellie chose the two images to etch as she noticed that many of the participants were either “looking up” or “looking down” throughout the workshop; reflecting on the idea of being part of something bigger. Etching also acts as a counterpoint to photography: it is a slower, more meditative process compared to the immediacy of photography. 

Ellie will be continuing to work with us in Kingsbridge next year, partnering with Activities 115 and Learn Devon (local community-serving organisations working with adults with disabilities and learning differences) and the community members they work with.

There is also a self led activity in this room, where you are invited to take photos on the instant camera and use the flower press from fallen leaves and petals outside of the gallery.

In the middle room of the gallery is an artwork by students from Kingsbridge Community College and an artwork by artist Jodie Saunders. The videowork Crepuscular Creatures is the result of ten month’s work by a group of year twelve students: Vitalina Bilous, Martha Freeston, Matilda Harris, and Emily Hoar. They worked with Harbour House as part of their sixth form enrichment programme, exploring how art can engage with the community and the world around them. 

The film work celebrates the diversity of local nature which is active at dawn and dusk: species which are known as ‘crepuscular’. They worked with artist Jodie Saunders to create audio field recordings of local nature spots, and of animals and birds at local sanctuaries. They used these, and recordings from the BBC Natural History Collection Unit sound archives, to create a soundscape for the moving image piece on the monitor. The images come from local trail cam footage, some of which the young people sourced, and some which Kingsbridge Natural History Society members generously shared with the group. 

Jodie’s work is titled Foggintor, and comprises creative writing and a sound piece, which uses field recordings from a disused quarry on Dartmoor. 

In the back section of the gallery are two artworks on a projection screen, shown on a loop: The Creative Common: The Fateful Feast at Castle Froglington by children from years five and six from Kingsbridge Community Primary School, and Dinner Machine: Depictions of an Altered Beast by artist Sam Machell. Sam led twelve after school workshops exploring narrative and storytelling, in which the students collaborated to create the finished artwork. An improvisational, collective approach to the production showcases storytelling as warmly anarchic, and demonstrates the limitlessness of children's imaginations. 

Sam's own film, somewhere between a puppet show and a videogame, follows three knights and a zoologist as they leave their home castle for the first time. The world they discover is unlike anything they have prepared for, and challenges their ideas of nature and their place in it.