April 2-5, 2026
Locator is a suite of residential workshops that happen annually, each in a different season. Beginning in autumn 1993 on the Llyn peninsula in north Wales locator has since largely played out in Tycanol, a sessile oak woodland and SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) in north Pembrokeshire. An artist-led workshop created by Simon Whitehead, locator is an ongoing forum for deep ecology explored through movement practice. Facilitated through a process of moving, dancing, walking and drifting, witnessing, howling, drawing, writing, fasting & eating, making and resting. These workshops offer a means through which we might experience and learn from the complex, lived materiality of a location, its diurnal and nocturnal lifeworlds, all within the intensities of collective experimentation and living.
For SUBSTRATE we return to the ancient wooded and rocky landscape of Tycanol in north Pembrokeshire, west Wales. Join us for creative community; made through walking scores, moving and dreaming with Ordovician dolerite, with multiple species of rock and tree lichen, sessile oaks, whilst touching into deep time, ‘niching’ with outcrops & navigating a nighttime landscape.
A substrate describes a physical surface or medium—such as rock, or plant—upon which organisms attach, grow, or intra-act, providing essential support for biological processes, movement and touch.
Spending time with the material and imaginal properties of rock; the surface ‘underneath-ness’, the under-lying, the between of body and matter, we will proceed to experiment with slow movement, the intra-active possibilities of temporal and embodied relations with the more than human surface dwellers of this place. Tycanol woods and nearby Carnedd Meibion Owen contain outcrops/ intrusions of dolerite and rhyolite from the Ordovician period, scattered with subsequent glacial erratics and boulders, some evidencing Neolithic activity. These formations are covered with a continuum of lichen colonies, invertebrates and surrounded by plant life, they offer bases for listening, noticing, moving with and myth making.
Working from the premise that it is through touch and sensate relationship that we understand that we belong to a moving earth, SUBSTRATE offers time and opportunity for being together, and becoming with, the dynamic weathering processes of bed rock and bodies.
Costs:
£320 including shared accommodation & first ‘welcome’ meal
One bursary place is available for a Wales-based participant @ £250, please send 2 sentences, or a short voice note describing how this opportunity will benefit you and your practice…
Please write to register your interest; first come, first served basis, your place secured by a £150 deposit, balance paid 2 March 20260. (Instalments are possible).
(For SUBSTRATE we will be joined by ecologist Yusef Samari.)
Accommodation is in a 15th Century gatehouse ( Y Porthdy) on the edge of the woods; with shared bedrooms, a beautiful studio, kitchen and showers.