Young Creatives celebrate West Wight Culture!

Articles about West Wight cultural connections

• john Swindells: Jimi Hendrix Bronze Statue at Dimbola

  Bronze statue of Jimi Hendrix - from his performance at the Afton Down Isle of Wight mega-festival in 1970

• Dance Macabre

  Idea for a West Wight Culture Danse Macabre - design and choreograph a danse macabre celerbrating West Wight culture from Jurassic thru Neolithic to Victorian and 20th century

• Long Stone Brighstone

  Make a celebratory walk linking the Neolithic sites - the tumuli, underwater archaeology, the Longstone and Downland tumuli and ditches of the West Wight - how do you link archaeology and current surface landscape and geological terrain layers link with our ideas of the Neolithic Culture - what do we think we know, and what do we actually know?

• Christopher Logue and the biggest-ever poetry-reading

  Christopher Logue reading poems on-stage at the IOW Festival in 1969, with the biggest PA system in the World at this time...

• Robert Hooke from Freshwater - the guy who notated the Scientific Method

  Robert Hooke: from lowly Freshwater youth to the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, the experimental engineer for both Isaac Newton and Sir Christopher Wren, helped in the planning and rebuilding of London after the Great Fire and was the first to document the Scientific Method,

• Virginia Woolf - the play Freshwater 1935

  A kindly satire on her Victorian ancestors, this family play - from 1935 - illustrates the importance of the Tennyson Circle and Julia Margaret Cameron's eccentric influence on Virginia and Vanessa and by extension the Bloomsbury and Charleston Groups...

• Roz Parker and me on the Aldermaston March 1963

  Me and Roz Parker, with Suzy Lewis (now Oldershaw) and Ray Carroll all from West Wight CND a branch of IWCND

• Cultural Heroes acquired growing-up in Freshwater

  There were dozens of them - how you discover them is part of how you learn about your own culture

• Emma Swift at Freshwater Bay and Blonde on the Tracks

  Emma and Robyn Hitchcock were deep in a love affair when they rented the flat above us at Redoubt House, Freshwater Bay. And a year or so later she found her metier with an LP of Dylan love-song covers she called Blonde on the Tracks

• The Lady of Shallot by Holman Hunt

  The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's William Holman Hunt made several illustrations of Tennyson's famous poem The Lady of Shallot but this is his definitive painting of 1905.

• Maurice Owen and reinterpreting Giorgio de Chirico's Il Grand Metafesico

  I was at Portsmouth Art School with Maurice Owen and other lifelong friends when Maurice began his ground-breaking art-research on Il Grand Metafisico.

• Charles Darwin at Freshwater Bay 1868

  Darwin stayed at Redoubt House, Terrace Lane in 1868, meeting Tennyson, investigating bivalves at Freshwater Bay, and being photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron.

• Maurice Owen & Il Grande Metafisico

  At Portsmouth Art College in the mid-Sixties, the sculptor-research artist Maurice Owen became fascinated with the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, and especially the series of his paintings labelled Il Grande Metafisico (The Great Metaphysician) - he developed 3-dimensional interpretations of these flat paintings, depending upon whether the set-square in the painting was 45/45/90 or 90/ 30/60. His finished constructions were bought by Le Centre Pompidou in the 1990s

• Indiana Jones and Golden Hill Fort

  Here, the issue is celebrating the film producer Robert Watts and his projects at Golden Hill Fort + my experiences with the Edutainment Centre there.

• Oskar Gustav Rejlander and Julia Cameron - inventing Pictorialism in Freshwater Bay

  In the early 1860s Oskar Rejlander was mentoring Julia Cameron in the art of photography, experimenting with photo-montage and composite photography - that soon became known as Pictorialism.

• Bob Seely: New Total War 2025

  Seely's ancestor General Jack Seely created the Freshwater 'County Seely Library' in Victorian times - Bob is a doctor of philosophy in Military History, and his new book covers the varieties of Hybrid Warfare in the 21st century

• Katherine Birbalsingh and student-centred-learning

  Birbalsingh is a strong advocate of child-centred learning - this is a technique totally familiar to art and design creatives - it is how we encourage hands-on learning in most art colleges and universities, and it stemmed from Government Design Schools and the famous Bauhaus and Russian Vhkutemas schools. There are strong arguments in favour of student-centred, project-based learning... explore them with us!