Dog roses blush, honeysuckle trails and elderflower powders the air in East and West Coker. Dressed in May abundance, the sandy Somerset villages radiate genteel nothing-doing respectability. Yet culture, of an invigorating and experimental kind, has penetrated these sun-slowed lanes. Where TS Eliot once meditated on ageing, death and modernisation, the south-west has its very own bite-sized biennale, the Od art festival.
Od isn’t really odd, at least by West Country standards (it’s the name of a crooked stream that runs through the villages). The theme of this fourth edition is Thinking in Circles, evoking seasons, migration and life cycles. There is a link, too, to the starts and failures, death and dung of Eliot’s 1940 poem East Coker (encircling lines from which are inscribed on village signage.) Cumulatively, the 24 artists in the festival raise timely questions about the intersection of the rural and the industrial, the invention of traditions, and the global networks of people and goods through which England is sustained.
