Rob La Frenais Art and rowing don’t often come together but in this new aquatic performance specially commissioned by ArtBomb, artist, curator and rower Rob La Frenais will balance a lightweight single sculling boat (a very fast boat, rowed by Steve Redgrave in the Olympics) in the middle of the River Don and simultaneously take the audience on a journey through the history of rowing, class war, decolonisation, speed, gender, rowing and religion, and indigenous technology while trying very hard not to fall in. As a rower with 25 years experience he has been trying to bring together artists who also row in his Wild Rowing social media group and through this he met the renowned artist Ingrid Pollard (shortlisted for the Turner Prize) who is not only a rower but has also made a new video work ‘Rhythm In Hand’, with her rowing club, being shown around the UK in various galleries. Pollard recently spoke about her experiences as a black rower in a Guardian interview. A rare experience of a keynote lecture by Pollard, at the Unitarian Church on Thursday August 11, moderated by La Frenais, will precede his performance on the surface of the Rover Don on Sunday August 14 which can be seen and heard from the shore at Doncaster Rowing Club. Close To the Water was first performed on the River Aura to open the New Performance Turku Festival, where the audience viewed the performance in high winds from a moving floating bridge. It has then been done virtually during the pandemic at festivals in Linz, Austria and Bergen, Norway. ‘Close To The Water - Let The Boat Sing’ will be the first time it has been performed on a UK river. It will include elements of Northern rowing history, be part of a water-based event following the clean-up of the River Don (rowers are very conscious of water quality) organised by the Don Catchment Rivers Trust and be followed by a coracle/crayfish-catching action by Japanese artist Inari .

Rosie Gibbens ArtBomb'25 | 11am-4.30pm | Sat 16 & Sun 17 August Free • drop-in • suitable for all ages Create your own bizarre “labour-saving” robot using domestic appliances, fabric limbs and found objects! ‘Unimate’ is a drop-in workshop inviting visitors to design and build their own ‘labour-saving’ domestic devices inspired by an absurd interpretation of the future of robotics in the home. The more pointless the invention, the better! The humanoid ‘machines’ will be assembled using found household appliances alongside fabric body parts. Visitors will have the chance to pose with their inventions in a pop-up photo-booth, and their creations will be exhibited in the ArtBomb windows until mid-September! Argos Robots by Rosie Gibbens

Karolina Żyniewicz Most Delicious Poison: From Spices to Vices – The Story of Nature’s Toxins Noah Whiteman ArtBomb'25 | 11am-3pm | Sat 16 & Sun 17 August Free • limited spaces • age 16+ ​ Join us for a 2-day foraging and embroidery workshop exploring how Doncaster’s toxic plants can be used and misused by humans. To book your place or for more details, please email: info@artbombuk.com The inspiration for the Self Defense project is Noah Whiteman’s book Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins―From Spices to Vices , which shows how many organisms are capable of developing defensive strategies that we humans can use  as poisonous safeguards.  I believe that in the current atmosphere of global threat and war, it is worth initiating a discussion about defence practices through the use of knowledge about nature. This kind of knowledge is not exempt from ethical considerations—like any other knowledge, it requires responsibility and caution. As Paracelsus said, only the dose makes the poison .  In the Self Defense project, I’m interested in how plants considered poisonous use their toxins in their life cycles (in interspecies relationships), and how these toxins can be used—or misused—by humans. My research will focus on doses, thresholds, and limitations of using certain plant-derived  substances, beyond which they become dangerous—not just one of the components of  a plant, but a potential tool that can harm or take away health or life.

Miranda Whall When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Gassy Bubbly Ensemble (Part Two) Composer and singer-songwriter Isa Suarez, a custom-built robot – the ‘Talkie Box’, a turf of peat and visual artist Miranda Whall will form an ensemble. The Talkie Box will sonify remote data from a soil sensor network installed on a degraded ‘Cinderella’ peatland in the Cambrian Mountains, West Wales, as well as from a probe embedded in a turf of peat cut from the site. It will also sonify real-time carbon dioxide and methane readings taken from within a 3.5metre white inflatable bubble. Inside the bubble, Suarez will improvise in response to the numerical data readings on the fluctuations of the peat's temperature and moisture levels, the gas readings, the degraded peatland landscape, and the peat ecosystem. Outside the bubble, Whall will transcribe the live sonified data onto its exterior surface using a Rotring isograph pen. Whall will respond in real time to the shifting sonic outputs of the Talkie Box and to Suarez’s vocal and instrumental improvisations, rendering the dynamic interplay of ecological data and human expression as a kind of visual score on the bubble’s surface. As the drawing gradually drifts across the bubble’s midline, the acoustics and the voice of the bog will converge. This Performance will invite audiences to witness a multisensory, posthuman event where peat, air, time, and breath will form the elemental score: peat will speak through centuries of carbon, decay, and memory; air will move invisibly within the bubble; time will be drawn in ink across the bubble’s surface; and breath will be shared, held, and exchanged. Funded by @co2rehub – the UK’s national Green House Gas Removal Research Hub, led by the University of Oxford. Previous ArtBomb Project: When Peat Speaks: A Boggy Gassy Chorus (Part One) Inside a large white inflatable cloud, visual artist Miranda Whall, avant-garde violinist and composer Benedict Taylor , and a turve of talking peat form an invisible ensemble. As sonified sensor data from the peat fills the cloud, alongside oxygen, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other gases, Whall writes the datapoints onto the inner surface of the cloud. The violinist improvises in response, while a custom-built robot — the ‘Talkie Box’, transforms the data into a composite, disembodied voice. Audiences will see the data drawing slowly emerge as it spreads across the cloud’s interior, and they will hear the violin and the voice of the bog converge. The cloud will inflate and deflate as the performers enter and exit - becoming a breathing, living entity. Grounded in climate science and deep listening, A Boggy Gassy Chorus  invites audiences into a multisensory, posthuman performance. Peat, weather, time, and breath form the elemental score: peat speaks through centuries of carbon, decay, and memory; weather drifts through the cloud - visible and invisible, a shifting pressure system inside and out; time is drawn across the cloud’s skin in ink; and breath is shared, held, exchanged, an ensemble of matter, memory, and air.

Yu-Chen Wang Full Circle Forum, 26th March 2022 at Danum Gallery, Library and Museum, Doncaster Yu-Chen Wang is a Taiwanese-British artist who lives and works in London. Her work asks fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history, where eco-systems and techno-systems have become inextricably intertwined. At the same time, her Taiwanese origins, combined with a London-based career, have created a vision that is personal and autobiographical. She has exhibited internationally, including at Science Gallery London, Manchester Art Gallery, FACT (Liverpool), CCCB (Barcelona) and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and recently received the Honorary Mention Collide International Award, CERN (Geneva). ​ Creating an immersive cinematic video installation, Yu-Chen Wang took railwayana as a starting point for exploring Doncaster’s relationship to coal. With the support of local historians, geologists and environmentalists, this collaborative inquiry into regeneration and rewilding looks at the landscape surrounding South Yorkshire in the context of two major crises we are facing: inequality and environment. This poetic work dwells on our relationship to place, peat bogs, water, coal are dominant features within the local landscape formed through the layering of time and compression of matter. Pitheads, slag heaps, mining subsidence and flooding, the edgelands are still full of post-industrial scars and traces. All of which are revealed through evocative moving images and a soundscape, which portray and reflect on these problems within a global condition to re-imagine new routes into the future. The artist’s research focuses on how technologies enable movement of people, goods and information, as well as exploitation of natural resources and labour; how the land and ecologies, even our planet, have been altered and transformed through these activities. In this anthropogenic environment, a new version of nature is emerging—wildlife and modernity clash, human and non-human worlds entangle—a coevolution of human communities and their landscapes. Full Circle , although composed of images and places captured locally, asks us how Doncaster sits within a broader international landscape as we did once before.                  Yu-Chen Wang says: “My work is largely informed by the history of places, collective memories, individuals’ stories, and the relationships I have established with these places and people. Various methods, including undertaking artist in residencies, conducting field research, developing collaborations and site-responsive projects across the UK and internationally have served as important processes for connecting places and people, whilst exploring and reconfiguring my own evolving cultural identity.” ​Speakers included: Yu-Chen Wang, Mike Stubbs, Liz McIvor, Louise Hill, Simon Pickles, Michael Oliver and Damien Allen. Sound design: Kristian Craig Robinson aka Capitol K Cinematography: James Lockey, Tyrone Braithwaite Technical installation: Andrew Quinn Equipment: ArtAV ​Research support: Dave Rogerson, Chris Barron and Simon Ward of Doncaster Grammar School Rail Collection; Bob Gwynne and Thomas Spain of National Railway Museum, York; Warren Draper of Bentley Urban Farm/Doncopolitan; Sasha Gray; Simon Pickles of North & East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre; Michael Oliver of The Lindholme Old Moor Management Group; Paulette Benjamin of Gomde UK Buddhist Centre; Nicola Fox of Doncaster Museum. Curated by Mike Stubbs, specially commissioned by Doncaster Creates for DGLAM. With financial support from Doncaster Culture and Leisure Trust (DCLT).

Isa Suarez Isa Suarez by Paskal Clerc A Living Songbook of Doncaster A solo live-set combining song, rap and performance art — Time Well Sung  is an exploration of freedom, nature, and the elusive fabric of time that holds them both. Through voice, percussion, and electronics, Suarez will perform up-beat songs and intricate soundscapes where time isn’t linear — it stretches and curves, like rivers in wild terrain. Part provocation and part performance, Time Well Sung  invites us to consider freedom not just as escape, but as presence: a way of being connected to the world. Nature becomes both metaphor and medium for this kind of deliverance. What if the most meaningful use of time isn't to fill it — but to feel it? To let it open us to a deeper connection with the land, with each other and with our inner wildness?

(2019) Rob Gawthrop  | 6m | QT Movie ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Tailings are the material left after separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction of an ore. Such material is pumped into a water reservoir. The interaction of the metal wastes with algae produces unusual colours. The Cornish Mars Filmed from a single position at Wheal Maid tailings lagoon, Gwennap, Cornwall, April 2018, using 16mm colour negative film scanned and edited digitally. Audio, including a football rattle played around the lagoon and two bowed bell cymbals, recorded in stereo digitally. Location sound, camera and text Rob Gawthrop. Audio recording and video editing Jo Millett.

(2021) John B Ledger  | 6m ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Compulsive Obedience  is one of a series of situational spoken word video-pieces I made during the 2020/21 pandemic. ​ Still from Compulsive Obedience   However, the motif of the plague doctor, holding the chancellor’s briefcase precedes the pandemic, and was actually an avatar through which I brought together elements of my own psyche, with what I saw as the contemporary English psyche, or what I prefer to call ‘a specifically English kind of trauma’. In light of this, Compulsive Obedience , is about self-hatred, people-pleasing, and an inability to stand up for oneself both personally and politically, and this leads to misdirected frustrations and contempt and ‘punching downwards’, either on a personal or collective level. WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE & REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE.

(2023) Spence  & Irvine  | 4m ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Chairs Falling Getting okay with not being ok, that things are not okay represents an exploration into ideas of precarity and collapse, moments of the not yet happening as well as irreversible destruction. How do we learn to live in uncertainty when the future holds promise of breakdown? We embrace absurdity, the moments of lightness and humour. We are actively trying to get OK with not being OK, that things are not OK . Screened at The Nickelodeon Theatre, Columbia, South Carolina, USA. Part of The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) traveling tour.

(2024) Aisling Phelan  | 5m27s ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Goodbye Body  is a journey of becoming digital. An initiation. A story of mind uploading, and the subsequent degradation of the physical body. Through an intimate and reflective letter addressed to her physical form, the artist conveys her ultimate decision to transcend the confines of flesh and blood, choosing instead to explore the limitless potential of digital existence. Goodbye Body by Aisling Phelan This piece invites viewers to contemplate the evolving relationship between human experience and technological advancement, challenging conventional notions of identity, existence, and the essence of what it means to be human. Through evocative visuals and a deeply personal narrative, the artist offers a meditation on the future of humanity in an age where the digital and physical worlds increasingly converge. Goodbye Body has been named a Semi-Finalist in the AI Shorts category at Reel Intelligence 2025, a festival celebrating innovative explorations of artificial intelligence in moving image. Selected from hundreds of international submissions, the work stood out for its poetic meditation on identity, embodiment, and the shifting boundaries between human and machine.