NVA

NVA is one of the UK’s foremost environmental arts charities with a strong reputation for cutting edge, innovative work that has consistently drawn large audiences to specific destinations, often in geographically remote locations.

NVA’s mission is to take people on journeys whether physical, emotional or intellectual and to create environments in which people feel inspired to let go of the familiar and open up to new ways of seeing. The land works which NVA have produced have broken rare ground, from environmental animations, to public art, to permanent installation.

Current Works
NVA has recently received an award from the Scottish Arts Council’s National Lottery Public Art Fund. The award is for the development of a commission plan for the creation of significant temporary and permanent artworks at the renowned St Peter’s Seminary and Kilmahew Woodlands, Cardross. The building is listed by the World Monument Fund as one of the greatest existing modernist structures left in the UK.
NVA has been working closely with property developers Urban Splash, over the last year. Together they have been exploring a variety of options for the transformation of the buildings and 120 acres of semi-ancient woodlands.

SAGE (Sow and grow everywhere) launched in May 2009 is a visionary initiative hoping to generate a massive change in community food growing in the Glasgow Metropolitan region. A joint venture by NVA and ERZ landscape architects, SAGE will transform derelict and vacant land into vibrant, stimulating, visually attractive spaces for people to grow their own food. It will be designed as a mobile initiative – when any land is required for development the infrastructure can move to a new site.

Speed of Light. 
‘The Speed of Light’ partnered by United Visual Artists (UVA) and Edinburgh International Festival http is one of five proposals from Scotland to be shortlisted for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad,  a programme of 12 major artistic events to take place around the UK at the same time as the Olympic and Paralympic Games . The work builds on the incredible response to NVA’s groundbreaking environmental artwork The Storr: Unfolding Landscape.

The event is a celebration of human potential through dramatically capturing the phenomenal energy of sporting effort within an animation of one of Scotland’s best known natural assets, Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh. The work aims to create iconic imagery of physical interaction with the landscape on an immense scale through the invention of a new human powered lighting system with a moving audience ascending a set route to the summit of the hill. Athletes young and old, professional and amateur, on foot, in wheelchairs and on bikes, will be viewable from various points each lit in their own colour coding, moving at the differing speeds of their physical discipline across and around the hill creating flowing animated light patterns. Imagine red bursts of light as sprinters bring a central track to life, while on the night horizon there are green horizontal trails as marathon runners move, silhouetted above the Salisbury crags…

Past works
NVA is acclaimed nationally and internationally for the quality of its work and vision. Its capital project The Hidden Gardens, established in 2003 within Glasgow’s diverse religious and secular communities won The Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum Award, The Civic Trust Award, The Dynamic Place Award, Scottish Design Award and the Biffa Award for Investment in the Environment.

NVA’s 2005 The Storr: Unfolding Landscape, a night time exploration of the 1,400 feet Trotternish ridge on Skye, seen on 80 news programmes worldwide, has been hailed as one of the most original art events of this generation. The Storr: Unfolding Landscape won the prestigious UK Lighting Design of the Year and the Scottish Thistle Award.

HALF LIFE, NVA’s 2007 collaboration with National Theatre of Scotland, set in Kilmartin Glen, Argyll combined a unique mix of theatre, visual art, and orienteering over 100 square miles and has led to a series of permanent land works being created in the forests of Kintyre.
These enigmatic interventions are accessible throughout the year and allow both first time visitors and those wishing to revisit the area an opportunity to explore the landscape and the themes of the project at their own pace. This approach is centered on extending a concentrated period of live production work when many people come over a short period of time, to a creative resource that brings value to an area over a longer period. For more information on how to visit the sites please see the website http://www.halflife.org.uk.

The charity is well established and with longterm funding through the Scottish Arts Council.

For more information please visit http://www.nva.org.uk

Personal
NVA creative director Angus Farquhar, gained a degree in English and Drama at Goldsmith’s College, University of London, going on to perform for 10 years as a core member of Test Dept, a radical music collective based in South London.  Returning to Scotland in 1989, he re-initiated the Beltane Fire Festival in Edinburgh, the largest fire festival in Europe and now in its 22st year and has produced or directed NVA’s temporary and permanent public artworks and events since its inception in 1992.
Recently nominated as a fellow of the RSA, he garnered the prestigious Creative Scotland award in 2003 and Scotsman Director of the Year 2000; with the recent landscape works often being quoted as among the most ambitious and awe-inspiring artworks created in recent times in the UK. He sat on the Arts Advisory board for the British Council and been involved with numerous public art initiatives, lectures and conferences throughout the UK and Europe. Publications include The Storr: unfolding landscape and Half Life.

Click here for Angus Farquhar’s CV