Site Festival, established in 1997, is an artist-led festival encompassing high calibre events, exhibitions, talks and Open Studios in the Stroud district.
This June, 61 artists open their studio doors in 38 locations in the Stroud Valleys over 2 weekends: Saturday 13th – Sunday 14th June 11am – 5pm and Saturday 20th – Sunday 21st June 11am – 5pm. Plus SITE brings over 200 artists to exhibit and perform in exhibitions and events between 3rd – 30th June.
Each year the festival programme seeks to challenge boundaries, bring high calibre exhibitions and installations to Stroud, and raise awareness of the incredible diversity in the arts.
Mechanical sculptor Nik Ramage brings Double Take to SVA John St Gallery (13th – 21st June) – a show of moving oddities and everyday objects having unexpected encounters, with performative sculpture walks across both Open Studio weekends.
Street artist Sickboy occupies a vacant George Street premises (11th – 21st June) with a site-specific installation exploring impermanence, cycles of use and renewal, centred around his signature symbol, The Temple.
Sophie Ferrier and Zerodig Farm invite families and young creatives to explore soil, science and storytelling through participatory art across both Open Studio weekends at Oakbrook Farm.
Composer and percussionist Bex Burch takes up residency at the Brunel Goods Shed (23rd–25th June), culminating in a performance exploring deep listening, rhythm and her signature “messy minimalism.”
Artist Nick Grellier presents Gravity at Stroud Cemetery’s Chapels of Rest (5th–28th June) – drawing, sculpture, textile and film works that blend material playfulness with humour and social inquiry.
Some events are ticketed, but most are free – visit sitefestival.org.uk for the full programme.
Site Festival Programme Highlight : Double Take – Nik Ramage
Mechanical sculptor Nik Ramage brings Double Take to SVA John St Gallery from 13th – 21st June, a two-week show of moving oddities and everyday objects having unexpected encounters. You may find clocks misbehaving, fruit being caressed, wooden hands scratching unseen itches and shoes walking themselves – contraptions that prompt the question: what are the sculptures getting up to whilst we are not looking?
Nik Ramage has been making useless machines and absurd devices for over thirty years, with commissions including a mechanical ceiling for a private dining room, a chain reaction machine in a 60,000 square foot warehouse and moving decorations for Paul Smith’s Christmas tree at Claridge’s. He is an academician at the RWA, Bristol and a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Throughout both Open Studio weekends, Nik will take his contraptions out into the streets of Stroud to mingle with everyday life – and perhaps elicit a few double takes.
Site Festival Programme Highlight : Sickboy
Occupying a vacant premises at 16 George Street from 11th–21st June, Sickboy’s site-specific installation activates a space shaped by absence and transition in Stroud’s post-industrial town centre. At its centre is The Temple – the artist’s recurring symbol – reimagined here not as a monument to permanence, but as a provisional, transient form visible from the street.
Through material and spatial intervention, the work reflects on cycles of use, abandonment and renewal, inviting viewers to consider how meaning, identity and place are continually constructed and eroded.
Site Festival Programme Highlight : Cultivating Connections – Sophie Ferrier and Zerodig
SVA is working with Zerodig Farm and Curriculum For Life to bring together young creatives, families and artists to explore the intersection of science, farming and global stories through participatory art. Taking place across both Open Studio weekends (13th – 14th and 21st – 22nd June) at Oakbrook Farm on Old Painswick Road, the project invites participants to learn about soil culture through creative practice and develop a more imaginative connection to the local landscape. The project is funded by the European Union through the Soil Tribes programme.
Resident artist Sophie Ferrier is a multi-media, interdisciplinary ecological artist based near Hay on Wye, whose land-based, ecologically restorative practice is rooted in artistic research, materiality and local environments. She is engaging with young creatives to inspire them to lead their own soil explorations. Young people aged 16 – 25 interested in taking part can get in touch at office@sva.org.uk.
Site Festival Programme Highlight : Bex Burch
Composer, percussionist and instrument maker Bex Burch joins Site Festival for a residency at the Brunel Goods Shed from 23rd – 25th June, culminating in a performance on Thursday 25th June at 8pm. Taking apart her techniques and instruments through deep listening, Bex will use her time in Stroud to expand her practice in what she describes as a dive into the unknown – “the deepest part of this invitation is the trust and permission to ‘not know’ and share this creative experience with your open-hearted community in Stroud.”
Whether combining the rhythmic timbres of wood, metal and audience claps or duetting with echoed sounds of water dripping into a metal basin, Bex’s approach – which she calls “messy minimalism” – emphasises space, repetition and chaos. Her 2023 debut album There is only love and fear, released via International Anthem, was named The Guardian’s Contemporary Album of the Month and nominated for the Deutscher Jazzpreis. Tickets £10–£15, bookable at sitefestival.org.uk.
Site Festival Programme Highlight : Gravity – Nick Grellier
Nick Grellier’s solo exhibition Gravity takes place across both Chapels of Rest at Stroud Cemetery from 5th–28th June, bringing together drawing, sculpture, text, textile works and experimental film made in collaboration with Anna Cady. While the title suggests weighty seriousness – a tethering to the earth and its pull – there is a material and linguistic playfulness throughout, as Nick works with non-art materials including blankets, upholstery hessian, builders’ gloves and human hair to interrogate personal experience, social structures and bodily life, underpinned throughout by humour.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring texts by Paul Harper and Emily Lucas, and there will be a walk and conversation with Angela Findlay on 23rd June. Gravity is open Wednesdays to Sundays throughout June, 11am – 5pm weekdays and 11am – 6pm at weekends.
More about SITE Festival
The wider festival reaches from contemporary galleries to participatory community projects.
Ann-Margreth Bohl’s Rock Ecologies opens the festival at SVA from 29th May, bringing together photography, performance, 16mm film, embroidery and drawing to imagine rock strata as an active, living materiality.
The SITE Exhibition at Lansdown Gallery offers a unique opportunity to preview work from all Open Studios artists across the festival fortnight.
Elsewhere, the Stroud collective PaintPrintClay – Maggie Howe, Mandy Scott and Elizabeth Lee – present new paintings, printmaking and ceramics, while Stroud Sensation at Gallery Pangolin brings together twelve Stroud-based sculptors working across mediums from bronze to feathers, including work by Daniel Chadwick, Abigail Fallis, Rachel Howard and Polly Morgan.
Photographer and multidisciplinary artist Saskia Hall presents Black Sheep, reflecting on the alienating experience of growing up Black in the Cotswolds, and Angela Findlay’s Conversations Across Time traces forgotten lives and chapters in the spaces between what is known.
As Bex Burch reflects: “The deepest part of this invitation is the trust and permission to ‘not know’ and share this creative experience with your open-hearted community in Stroud.”
Some events for Site Festival are ticketed, but most are free – visit sitefestival.org.uk for the full programme.
