Creative & dance journal – By Andrew Wood

Colourfields Gallery 3

The photographic art presented here is part of the Colourfields series, made from September to December 2025.

Colourfields Gallery 2

The photographic art presented here is part of the Colourfields series, made from September to December 2025.

Colourfields Gallery 1

The photographic art presented here is part of the Colourfields series, made from September to December 2025.

Colourfields is a series of photographic artworks which create expanses of colour, light and dark: usurping the conventional photographic notions of foreground and background such that there is only surface. Or simply put ‘abstract photography’.

Crop trials with biochar and the residuals art series

The residuals series of art works/performances used biochar granules that were re-purposed as artists charcoal for drawing. The series ran parallel to crop trials of potatoes with biochar – which acts as a plant fertiliser. The abstract for a scientific paper about these trials in 2024 is presented here which was developed with my collaborator Karl Wallendszus in 2025.

Dance & Movement Research 2024: dance and poetry workshop

The poet Francis Boua join me, dancer Jo Dyer and photographer Hugh Pryor at the Old Fire Station dance studio in Oxford on Friday 19 January 2024 for a dance and poetry workshop. Here’s a film clip from it. And yes, it took me more than a year to obtain the permissions for the use of the film so I might create this post!

Residuals #10 Light

In January 2025 – a year after starting the Residuals series, I used performance and long exposure photography to record light – its reflection from the surfaces of moving bodies, as a residual – including darkness and shadow too! Here are presented these ‘light graphs’ from the session at Goldsmiths CI at Goldsmiths, University of London on Saturday 18 January.

Residuals #9 Circle in the Hayslip

On 24 September 2024, I returned to Schumacher College, Dartington to harvest the potatoes from the crop trial which I started there in summer 2024. It was part of my Integrated Research Practice. After the performance, a circle of charcoal remained in the soil: an archaeological art work and residuals in my body as memory.

Residuals #8 Apple picking

The apple harvest of 2024 was one of the most prodigious I’ve known. Dancer Jo Dyer and I performed a dance to celebrate the apple harvest on 12 September 2024 . We picked apples using them as a movement and drawing construct. Not unlike the dancing/dance drawing with potatoes in Residuals #4, and Residuals #7 but now apples. (Pomme rather than pomme de terre!)

Residuals #7 Draw Potato Harvest

In 2024, I conducted a crop trial of potatoes and bio-char (charcoal) in my allotment garden in Oxford, UK. In September, it was time to harvest the potatoes and entact a performance: drawing the produce from the soil through dance and movement; and creating a drawing – a potato drawing. The performance was with the Unknown Performer – a person who prefers not to be named, from 19 August 2024 and other days in August/September 2024.