Festival Theme for 2012 ~ Food, Gardening & the Land The Alde Valley Spring Festival is a four week celebration of food, farming, landscape and the arts that takes place just after Easter each Spring. Its home is a small livestock farm in the village of Great Glemham in the Upper Alde Valley, a few miles upstream of Snape Maltings, the home of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, and Aldeburgh. The Alde Valley Spring Festival first came into existence in 2009, having grown out of the annual Easter Retreat art exhibitions. These started in 2003 in a small cottage next to the church in the village of Great Glemham. The Festival welcomes small numbers of regional, British and international artists for both informal and formal residencies. It also celebrates the remarkable food scene of the beautiful Alde Valley in East Suffolk – one of the few river valley systems in England that is still superstore-free from source to sea. The Festival Programme brings together a major art exhibition with walks, talks, Knowledge Fairs and other arts, food and community-based projects. It is twinned with its sister Festival Pesta Nukenen in the Kelabit Highlands of Central Borneo and supports community work in the UK and abroad. The Alde Valley Spring Festival 2012 celebrates the importance of Food, Gardening & the Land with the launch of a new book An Artist in the Garden by Full Circle Editions and a collection of new paintings, drawings, sculptures and traditional arts by local, national and international artists. One highlight of the Festival Exhibition is a series of more than 35 paintings and drawings by the renowned Suffolk artist Tessa Newcomb. These represent the output of an informal four year residency in the kitchen garden of Great Glemham House – an intact mid-Regency period walled garden that has been in continuous production since 1823. Many of the works feature in her new book with Jason Gathorne-Hardy An Artist in the Garden. The Exhibition also includes new works by many other outstanding painters, potters, sculptors, printmakers and chairmakers. For more details, please go to the Festival Programme and the Festival Artists sections of the website. Following on from Back to the Land Part I with Justin Partyka in October 2011, we are also very excited to welcome the photographer Eamonn McCabe as Photographer in Residence for Back to the Land Part II. During the lead-up to the Festival and its four week run, Eamonn will be recording land work at the farm, including the preparations for the Big Spring Picnic on the 19th May 2012. We hope you will be able to join us in the Upper Alde Valley for some of the Festival’s food and art events ! With best wishes for the spring and summer of 2012. Jason Gathorne-Hardy ~ Festival founder | 
