Counterpoints and Flamm have been working together since the first edition of the Festival in 2023, when the organisations co-commissioned projects as part of Flamm and Counterpoints’ Platforma Festival in South West in 2023.
For Flamm 2026, we have co-commissioned SHARP’s project Once We Were Held and are working together on an artist exchange to explore the Flamm 2026 theme of [Dis]Location.
Facilitated by artist Sovay Berriman, one of the co-commissioned artists in 2023, three Flamm artists are paired with three Counterpoints artists.
The artist pairs are:
Each pair exchanges on their socially engaged work, ideas and interests through a series of conversations in the run up to Flamm 2026. These exchanges will be documented and shared online, and the group will come together for a special episode in Sovay’s Meskla Podcast post Festival.
We are also holding a live podcast event during the festival to highlight the conversations around [Dis]Location, with Sovay Berriman & Liverpool Biennial 2025 Curator Marie-Anne McQuay, hosted by Jelena Sofronijevic of EMPIRE LINES podcast.
About Sovay Berriman
Sovay Berriman is an artist working for 25+ years, based in Cornwall with a practice spanning sculpture, drawing, film, broadcasting, research and social learning situations. Sovay’s work reviews and questions systems and structures of power, challenging us to claim agency and responsibility for the roles we play in the ecosystems we occupy.
Sovay was the Clore Visual Art Fellow 2023-24, with a secondment with National Theatre Scotland and a published outcome, ‘ReWilding Arts Leadership’. In 2023 Sovay was commissioned by Hospital Rooms to make a new permanent commission for Longreach House, Cornwall Hospitals Trust. Between 2022-25, Sovay delivered ‘MESKLA | Brewyon Drudh’ a multi-platform project that explored contemporary Cornish cultural identity and its relationship with heritage, land, and extraction industries. ‘MESKLA’ was funded by Arts Council England, Feast and Historic England and encompassed new sculpture and film, workshops and podcasts and culminated in the 2025 exhibition ‘Catching Copper’ at East Pool Mine in partnership with The National Trust.
Sovay has a long standing commitment to artist-led activity, including via co-running ‘Agile Structures’ (2020 – 2025) with artist Sara Bowler, and as consultant and co-director for ALIAS (Artist Led Initiative Advisory Service) 2009-2018.
sovayberriman.co.uk
@sovayberriman
The Artist Pairs
Katie Ethridge with Boseda Olawoye
Katie Etheridge is an artist, performer and community engagement practitioner with 25 years experience connecting people and places through playful, inventive and interactive performances and artworks. With her company Small Acts, Katie creates and produces a diverse range of socially engaged projects working with communities in Cornwall and nationally. Small Acts specialise in connecting people face-to-face to create participatory live art that brings individuals and communities together through small acts that make a big difference.
Find out more about Katie’s Flamm 2026 Project
Boseda Olawoye (known as Bo) is a Nottingham based independent creative producer/ consultant who is dedicated to making innovative arts projects in collaboration with diverse communities, young people (13+), marginalised groups, artists and public partners. Her work explores race, identity, place and social justice issues. Bo has worked with Beam- Arts for people & places (North), INIVA (London), Edinburgh Art Festival, The Imperial War Museum (UK) Counterpoints Arts (London), The Evans Foundation(EU), idle women (Lancashire) and artist/activist Emory Douglas (USA).
Boseda was awarded a research grant from the Churchill Fellowship (2023-24) to find out how grassroots black-led arts organisations in Chicago (USA) use creativity as a tool for social change and similar models internationally.
Rachael Jones and Anca Dimofte
Rachael Jones is an artist-filmmaker and researcher whose practice often extends to involve others in the filmmaking process. Sometimes participants are objects with their own agency, and as a result her films are made up of multiple interacting assemblages. Often working with archive images, she blends old photographs with newly created visuals, incorporating both analogue and digital formats that create playful tension in her films. Interested in what can come out of research, embodiment and participation, Rachael’s films retain traces of process-driven interactions, using experimental filmmaking, sound and animation techniques to creatively connect participants with place. She is involved in land-based, alternative and sustainable practices, using found materials and handmade processes where possible.
Find out more about Rachael’s Flamm 2026 Project
Anca Dimofte is a Romanian-born artist living in London, working across video, mixed media, and performance. With a background in documentary filmmaking, her practice is informed by feminist and social justice struggle, embodied histories, and lived experiences of migration. Her work explores how memory, stories and trauma are carried in the body, shaping individual and collective doorways for transformation, solidarity, and political resistance.
Alice Mahoney and Kaajal Modi
Alice Mahoney is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates the entangled relationships between materiality, place, and human and non-human systems. Her work is grounded in an exploration of ecological and socio-historical interconnectedness, with particular attention to the layered geographies of post-industrial landscapes and their associated watercourses.
Working with clay, sound, and found or waste materials, Mahoney engages with environments understood as cyclical, impermanent, and continually shifting. Her sculptural, research-led processes examine the residues of extractive industry alongside organic, cultural, and ecological regeneration, situating her practice within wider conversations around land use, memory, and repair. Through embodied experience, speculative enquiry, and collective memory, she seeks to reimagine how we might reconnect with these places, foregrounding the potential of art to act as a conduit for relational, restorative, and re-enchanted engagements with landscape.
Find out more about Alice’s Flamm 2026 Project
Kaajal Modi is a multidisciplinary artist-educator mediating material engagements with food, land and water to explore the politics of how humans relate to the world through our bodies and our imaginations. Kaajal works with communities (social, cultural, microbial, technological, ecological) to explore knowledges on how we live well together in the present, in ways that can inform speculations about resilient and abundant futures. Her practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates listening, recording, fermenting and foraging to create lively and situated encounters between people, organisms and ecosystems in ways that invite critical reflection and action.
Flamm is funded by Experience Bodmin through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund; Cornwall Council and Arts Council England, with Artists Exchange co-supported by Counterpoints and Flamm.
About FLAMM
flamm noun; plural noun: flammow
1. flame
2. also used in flamm nowedh adj. meaning brand new
Flamm is a visual art-led event that brings internationally and nationally important work to Cornwall, enables ambitious new work by locally-based artists and engages communities and visitors in its multi-layered programme. Flamm is part of Creative Kernow.
For its pilot year, Flamm was based in Redruth and took place over the weekend of 21-22 October 2023. The event used a variety of spaces throughout the town for screenings, exhibitions, activities, talks and performances. For 2023, Festival team worked with the theme of Change, you can see some highlights of the festival here.
The vision is for Flamm to continue as an annual or biennial event, moving across Cornwall, with a new location and theme for each iteration.
This year, the Festival will be in Bodmin on 28 Feb and 1 Mar 2026, with a festival theme of [Dis]Location.
