The Ox Way, deel 3: Garden of Thornless Roses | artist-in-residence & rehearsals

1 – 10 september: artist-in-residence & repetities | 14 september: premiere in de Pandhof, Utrecht tijdens het Gaudeamus festival 2025

Kate Moore’s new composition Garden of Thornless Roses (2025) – the third part The Ox Way – premiered at the Pandhof in Utrecht at 14 September during the Gaudemaus Festival 2025. Garden of Thornless Roses was performed by Herz Medieval. For this occasion Kate Moore invited musicians Susanna Borsch (recorder), Arnout Lems (voice), Michela Amici (midievel harp), Meiyi Lee (percussion) and performed the viella herself. Prior to live performances in Utrecht and Amsterdam, Moore started as artist-in-residence at MEGS and rehearsed with Herz Medieval at the top floor.

The Ox Way

The Ox Way is a composition where the walking track is the score and walking the track is the performance. The Ox Way springs from The Oxford Parallel, the line of latitude that runs through the heart of Oxford through the hospital complex where the composer was born, running east to west from The Netherlands where it crosses the Vorstengraf in Gemeente Oss and goes all the way to Skellig Michael on the west coast of Ireland in a perfectly straight line. Being fascinated by this phenomenon, especially because it links her ancestral heritage in The Netherlands and Ireland, the composer set out to design a long-distance walking route that follows this line. The track is not exactly straight like the line of latitude but follows it as closely as possible along ancient tracks and rivers where physical journey is simultaneously an inner journey where the exterior and interior worlds meet. Upon walking the track, the composer set about writing a song cycle that captures the experience that is an expression for the dialogue between walker and environment. Originally conceived as Song of the Ox, the song cycle features a series of songs and instrumental pieces written in the open air whilst walking, exploring the notion of the physical vulnerability and transcendence of both walker and environment. In 2023 and 2024 the composer walked the route in sections, naming the experience A Beautiful Path, inviting the photographer Isabelle Vigier to join her on fragments of the journey to make a photographic documentary under the title Desire Lines that was exhibited at the Movement Exposed Gallery during Gaudeamus Festival 2024. 

Garden of Thornless Roses

Garden of Thornless Roses forms the next chapter of this ongoing series of enchanted pieces inspired by and written along this long-distance track. Emerging from the experience of being immersed in the environment, where the body of the walker and the land are at one, connected through the energies and cycles of nature and the way in which places resonate in the memory, the walker is the sounding board for the land and the narrative stems from tension between the changing elements, day and night, light and dark, the changing weather, the boundary between physicality of the body and spirituality of the soul. Garden of thornless Roses is an exploration of this boundary through the language and metaphor of the sea where the violent crashing of the waves on the coast, barrier between land and sea represents the crossing point from the physical to spiritual realm. The song depicts the moments of transition, land to sea, day to night, the firmament above and the deep sea below, the outer and inner worlds.

Kate Moore presented the ‘prologue’ of A Beautiful Path during and in collaboration with partner Gaudeamus Festival at MEGS in September 2023. This first public presentation has led to a recurring event at the gallery during the Gaudeamus Festival taking a new shape every year, following the progress and development of the various phases and parts of The Ox Way. MEGS hosted the first presentation of A Beautiful Path for a live audience, and in 2024, a duo exhibition of a sound installation (The Ox Way – Kate Moore) and a photo and video exhibition (Desire Lines – Isabelle Vigier).

Annually tuning into this project and providing space for artistic research, The Ox Way is another example of the interest of the gallery’s pursuit of interdisciplinary art. And as the projects changes shape and has grown over the years, a new form of collaboration with the artist was established in 2025. The gallery contributed to Moore’s residency in Kildare, Ireland where Garden of Thornless Roses was written during a six week residency. Furthermore, Moore started as artist-in-residence, working and rehearsing with Herz Medieval under there roof of MEGS in September 2025, before the premiere and live performances of Garden of Thornless Roses (2025) during the Gaudemaus Festival 2025.

Kildare, Ireland: performance St. Brigid’s Cathedral | hermitage Solas Bhride Centre | announcement concert, January & February 2025