The Neverending Glen is an extension of The Kelburn Garden Party that takes guests on a surreal, enchanting and stimulating multi-media adventure, where contemporary art meets ancient landscape and pop-up parties in the historic Kelburn glen. Artists and art collectives are invited to create site-specific installations, sculptures, performances and events which enhances your experience of the amazing Kelburn glen with its magical and ancient forestry, mysterious pathways and mesmerizing views over the Atlantic. All festival-goers are free to explore the glen and the delights within at their leisure, during daylight hours at the Kelburn Garden Party.
We ask all visitors to the Neverending Glen to bring with them enough water and supplies, and leave no trace of their visit behind them, except perhaps a dash of their magical essence.
The Neverending Glen: 2023
After three years of sleep, the glen is once again awake and writhing with art, performances and happenings. Kelburn Garden Party 2023 will see nine new artworks join the existing cohort…
As you walk through the glen, you will spot craggy sculptures inspired by our planet’s geological deposits, which elicit reflections on natural resource depletion (Katie Hallam). An ancient yew tree conceals a secret colony of birds, while further up the glen, the Hart of Kelburn gazes out over the valley and invites revellers to dine by his copper-wrought bust (David Cemmick).
In Coppice, take a moment to sketch out your outline on soft felt inside a woollen pupa, which cocoons all who enter to enable expansive metamorphosis (Máté Géhberger and Elle Colverson). Remode Renfrewshire encourages a new relationship with our textiles through workshops that teach participants tactile skills like natural dyeing, printing and sewing – all valuable crafts in the era of fast fashion, helping to counteract the fashion industry’s unsustainable practices with good garment care.
Natural dyes sourced from the land itself colour the Pupae, burrowed throughout the glen’s branches and burn and hanging frozen by the festival’s atemporal sense of time (Annie Flora Watson Donaldson). Pupa becomes butterfly in The Body Is Home, an interactive sculpture that invites participants to stretch their bodies in mimicry of the three stages of metamorphosis (Sophie Blee). And just as insects undergo fantastic transformations, so lizards can make themselves anew by shedding their skins – Oceanallover guides the glen’s guests on a pilgrimage through landscape and words inspired reptiles that live wild in the UK.
A gentle breeze rustles through the forest, momentarily disturbing a flock of mechanical birds that adjust their flight according to movements in the wind (Natasha Russell and Dan Kingston). The minutiae of the glen reveals itself to its visitors in Strange Loop, where participants gather treasures from the woodland before transforming them into a co-created cosmocentric audio-visual masterpiece (Sita Iona Pieraccini & Jamie Wardrop).
Glimpse the glen of previous years below…
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