Jason Gathorne-Hardy has now added to his successful Alde Valley Spring Festival (see blog 29 April 2015) with Cornucopia, a broadly similar event but in the autumn, based on art, food and landscape at and around White House Farm, Great Glenham, Suffolk. I went to the Spring Festival this year several times and meant to write about it, but didn’t. Here are a few words about an excellent occasion going on at the moment. I concentrate on the art alone, and very selectively.

The event looked broadly similar to the Spring Festival, with old friends such as furniture locally-crafted from Glemham timber, here represented by a stool (and a basket, also of local materials):

 

Two ‘old friends’ dominated the great barn with what I thought was a stunning exhibition, brilliantly lit and dramatically filling the atmospheric space. Roger Morris hung large works at either end of the barn, respectively ‘Fisher Man’ and ‘Reflective Figure’: their religious aura shone in this setting:

 

 

Among the many smaller works, I was particularly taken (naturally!) by ‘Figure in the landscape’:

Freddy Morris also showed some striking sculptures. I particularly liked his ‘Ivy V’, a unique bronze tucked away in a small lean-to at the side of the barn:

 

Another adjunct to the old barn contains an exhibit buzzing with vitality, and an important spin-off from the Festivals. Lily Hunter Green exhibits ‘Bee composed’, an intriguing tandem of video and sound, both bee-like. In fact, as this still shows, the video is of a hive:

 

The ‘spin-off’, an educational programme for 6-11-year-olds, is best illustrated for present purposes by its poster.  Not least because I was lucky enough to be taught about these things by a headmistress in a two-class village school who took us round her garden weekly many decades ago, I am delighted to see this aspect of the Festivals developing, and wonder whether, in the long run, it may well prove to be their most-long-lasting legacy. Pity about the ‘mindfulness’ though – surely just a buzz-word?