Art | Highlights | Kendal Mountain Festival

Digital Arts Competition - SUBMISSIONS NOW OPEN

Entry Guidelines

Kendal Mountain Festival is delighted to invite submissions for its Digital Arts Programme — a dedicated strand that celebrates digital, experimental, and film-based art rooted in the themes of the outdoors, nature, environment, and adventure.

We are particularly interested in works that reflect movement within the landscape, nature-based performance (such as poetry or dance in outdoor settings), visual captures of environmental change, or abstract expressions of human connection to nature and wild places.

We welcome work from both emerging and established artists who push the boundaries of form and storytelling through digital media, and whose practice aligns with the ethos of Kendal Mountain Festival.

Programme Overview

The Digital Arts Programme will take place at the Brewery Arts during the Festival and will be presented as a continuous, on-site installation. Selected works will be displayed on digital screens located in the lobby spaces both upstairs and downstairs at the venue.All artworks will be played on a loop throughout the festival weekend, providing ongoing access for audiences.

Headphones will be available for audience members, offering a high-quality and accessible viewing experience.

The exhibition will be free to attend, encouraging spontaneous and inclusive engagement from all festival visitors.

Each selected work will be highlighted in a dedicated section of the printed and online festival programme, including artist and project information.

Submission and Competition Structure

Submissions are open to artists and filmmakers working across digital, experimental, or non-traditional visual formats.

Works may include but are not limited to: video art, digital animation, abstract narrative pieces, and experimental films.

All works must be suitable for exhibition in a looped digital format, with a maximum running time of 10 minutes per piece.

Submitted works will be curated by the Festival programming team.

The Digital Arts Programme operates as a standalone strand and is not part of the Kendal Mountain Festival International Film Competition.

Please note that works generated by or created through AI tools will not be eligible for submission to the competition.

This new initiative offers an innovative space for digital artists to share their work in a high-profile festival environment. We look forward to receiving submissions that push boundaries and explore landscapes and our relationships with the outdoors in diverse ways that reflect the ways we interact with the world we live in.

Submit here

Visual Art

Visual art comes alive at Kendal!

Come and enjoy the visual arts exhibitions at Kendal Mountain Festival, where we work to platform a incredible range of local and national artists. It's a privilege to showcase their incredible work — discover each artist’s contribution to the ‘Outdoor’ genre and their personal celebration of landscape, nature and place.

Jolynna Sinanan - Infrastructuring Everest

Infrastructuring Everest: 30 Years of Development and Change on the Roof of the World

Mount Everest has been the pinnacle of fantasy and desire for conquest, adventure and achievement for 100 years. This exhibition showcases the uneasy relationship between development and tourism in the Khumbu (Mount Everest) region, Nepal over the past three decades. Through collaboration with high altitude trekking and mountaineering guides, 80 images have been captured through research, tourist and smartphone photography in destinations along the trek to Everest Base Camp and on commercial mountaineering expeditions. The exhibition offers perspectives of changes to everyday life, aspirations and environmental knowledge.

This exhibition is FREE and runs from the 6th November to the 30th November 2024.

Location - Brewery Arts Centre, 122a Highgate, Kendal, Cumbria LA9 4HE.

About Jolynna Sinanan

Jolynna is a lecturer of social and digital anthropology at The University of Manchester. With an interdisciplinary background in anthropology and development studies her research focuses on digital technologies in relation to regionally comparative mobilities, family relationships, work and gender. Her current region of focus is Nepal and she has previously conducted ethnographic studies on Trinidad, Australia and Cambodia.

Jolynna is currently working on The Everest Economy: 50 years of tourism in the Khumbu.

MONICA METSERS

‘SUCH GREAT HEIGHTS’ - Lake District Mountain Paintings

Monica is a prize winning Painter. Working from her Kendal studio in layers of oil paint to build up a dreamy and sculptural effect, she depicts the landscapes she regularly walks in, exploring the place between seeing, feeling, experience and memory.

These large-scale mountain paintings have been produced specifically for this exhibition with Kendal Mountain Festival, hoping to capture something of the otherworldliness and majesty of these stunning places.