Gwyneth Herbert

Event information

The multi award-winning Gwyneth Herbert is an artist who continues to redefine (and defy) our expectations. A singer-songwriter with one foot in the jazz world and one somewhere in the future, with pierrot-dotted eyes, polka-spotted shoes and swanny whistle in hand she may appear as whimsical as a Bonzo Dog, but writes beautiful melodies and has a poet’s grasp of the world around her.

Every day, a woman walks the beach alone. She collects each discarded or washed up object she finds and takes it home, cataloguing it with the care and rigour of a scientist. These objects are placed in “The Sea Cabinet”, and each one sings with the memory of a secret sea-set story - the victory of a Fishguard cobbler's wife, a jaded seaside hotel, a sunken chapel, the shifting sands of wartime Alderney, the dangerous allure of the King's Shilling, the loves and the losses and the stars and the whores and the drink and the drowning and the drip, drip, drip...

The Sea Cabinet, a unique multi-sensory, multi-layered song-cycle, is the latest project from musical adventurer Gwyneth Herbert. Working with musicians from her own world-class band, members of folk trio ‘The Rubber Wellies’, Herbert presents an imaginative fusion of music, film, art and storytelling that explores stories from inshore and out.

Also at Bridport Arts Centre.