What Matters: A Celebration. Film screening & Family Workshop
Engagement and awareness of our waterways and their pivotal role in our global ecology has featured significantly in a recent creative project with artist Josh Bilton and pupils from Arbury Primary School in Cambridge.
What Matters was project and collaboration taking place in 2024/2025. The resulting artworks were displayed at Kettle’s Yard as part of the exhibition, Paint What Matters, in February 2025.
What Matters: A Celebration, will be just that, a one day celebration of both the work created throughout the project and an opportunity to share the thoughts, reflections and creative responses of these young people with our wider community.
The event will run as follows:
- 12.30pm (doors open 12:15): A panel discussion and screening of short film What Matters and publication launch. The panel will include artist Josh Bilton with other guests. The discussion will also launch the resulting publication I Felt I was a Bird, created by Josh Bilton in response to the collaboration. Free, but booking required
- 1.15pm: Looped screening of the film What Matters in the Ede Room at Kettle’s Yard for the public to experience. Free drop-in event
- 2 – 4pm: A free, drop-in workshop for Arbury Primary families in the Clore Learning Studio. Free drop-in event
About the film What Matters
What Matters is a film created by artist Josh Bilton and commissioned by Kettle’s Yard for the community exhibition Paint What Matters, generously supported by Arts Council England and High House Residency Programme.
What Matters is a 16mm video and series of collaborative texts made by children in Year 4 at Arbury Primary School in North Cambridge. Through six ecologically focused workshops devised with choreographer Daisy May Kemp, the children have responded to two conservation sites in Norfolk - Holme Bird Observatory along the East coastline of England and the River Nar, a globally rare chalk-stream that flows through the Downs and Fenland of Northwest Norfolk.
Returning to traditions of folklore, the children have expressed their thoughts and feelings about the people, places, colours, words, and environments that matter to them today through painting and storytelling. Their hand-painted journeys are layered with 16mm footage of the River Nar, Holme Bird Observatory and the hands and gestures of female ornithologists.
This event is hosted by Kettles Yard Gallery as part of the Cambridge 'Rivers of Film' Festival
Image credit: Text written by the students as part of 'Paint What Matters' by artist Josh Bilton
Access information for the venue
Accessibility guide for Kettles Yard (AccessAble)
The approach to the building is step-free via slight slopes. The doors at the main entrance are automatic. The Learning Studio can be accessed by a lift. There are accessible toilets.
If you have any questions about access to the space, support or companion tickets, please contact us by email events@watersencam.co.uk.