Come Over
Come Over consists of two light installations, one on Stokkøya and one on Linesøya, which illuminate periodically based on local people’s memory of the original ferry timetable that once served the two islands. This work preserves and archives local history and memory, connecting present-day spaces of interaction with the journeys that once linked the islands. In doing so, the work reflects on how movement, timing, and rhythm shape community life. After hearing stories at Coop about the time before the bridge, we were inspired by the lengths people went to in order to stay connected. We heard of late-night journeys home, of rowing across the sea after infamous parties where lasting relationships were formed. Thoughts of coexistence led us to an interest in
knock-on effects, impacts, chains, sequences, signals, and receivers - how stuff gets around.
This connection does not linger in the past. Just as those parties once brought people together, there are still inclusive social hubs on the islands. Come Over unites two of parallel locations - Coop and Rorbua Café og Pub - reminding us that community continues to thrive in moments of chance encounter and shared conversation. Importantly, they are libraries of knowledge, generous places of sharing, storytelling and laughter, demonstrating how social spaces evolve yet remain vital to collective well-being.
Light is closely intertwined with life here. Light both enables, requires and carries connection: it can travel, it can be a signal and it can guide to safety. With dark winters and bright summers, local routines and livelihoods are directly shaped by light. A binding force - both natural and human - that shapes ecological cycles, local practices and social ties.
Once belonging to old boats, the lights themselves bear their own stories of efforts, passage, travel and transfer. Newly revived, and operating to a schedule of a time gone by, they ask what it means to lie dormant only to later be reignited. The lights will go off at 7 am, 11:30am, 5pm, 9pm, for 25 minutes at a time. These are the times locals recited from their memories of the ferry times that stood out and the duration of the journey between each port.
Fittingly, this project has been made possible by a connection of people. A network of support. Favours, generosity, sharing time, the passing on of telephone numbers, the giving of directions, the borrowing of equipment, and many many more. The project not only considers connection in its form but has been made entirely possible by the web of connections it relied upon.
Come Over is an artwork by Tom Freestone, Mareiwa Miller and Emma Ogawa Todd.
During the Opening of Come Over, we ran boat trips from Coop, Stokkøya to Rorbua Café og Pub Linesøya, where visitors could see both light installations on the neighbouring islands.
Ogawa
Cotton, wadding, natural dye, thread, 2023
71 x 56 x 3 cm
5,936 miles
Japanese stamps, 2023, 2 x (23 x 23 x 1 cm)
Group Exhibtion at APT Gallery - This is the House that Jack Built
Curated by No Man's Land
“We work towards an alternative vision by creating a tongue of our own.”
Curated by No Man’s Land, a community founded by artists and curators Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ, This is the House that Jack Built offers a live interrogation of what Britain and Britishness mean to conflicting notions of identity, race and love for those living in the diaspora.
The English folk tale ‘The House that Jack Built’ is reimagined, dismantled and rebuilt to complicate the imaging and codification of mixed identities throughout history. New possibilities for seeing and understanding are opened to question how bodies can be remixed, speech dissolved, and precarious structures reclaimed for restoration and repair as the artists form representative rifts, inserting postcolonial stories into nationalistic ones.
Through a plethora of portable relics, artefacts and both ‘functioning’ and ‘function-less’ objects, the exhibition forms ‘Jack’s House’ filled with an inventory of memorabilia and collectibles of tangible and intangible narratives that create a dialogue for contemporary British life. Working through traditional markers of material culture and the domestic, the exhibition confronts modes of ‘Ornamentalism’ and assumed definitions of “exhibition”, “curator”, “artist”, “audience”, “community” and “home”, reconfiguring the space through a variety of mediums.
‘This is the House that Jack Built’ is a vivid retelling of those stories, myths, legacies and folklores from the official voice that fail and exclude the diverse voices that make up Britain today. Storytelling here is self-defence, is disorder, is radical disobedience.
If Britain is the House and Jack its proprietor, we must ask how we can tear down and mend its walls, restructuring the frameworks of institutions that keep us below the threshold of being heard.
Photographs by Emily Seagrove, Eleanor Sanghara and Natalie Sasiprapa Organ
