From August 2020 – July 2022 I’ve been part of a team of creative practitioners (Maya Chowdhry and Alex Peckham) making an augmented reality walk in partnership with the National Oceanography Centre for the seafronts of Dawlish (pictured) and Penzance.
The walk incorporates data from a new NOC ‘wirewall’ and existing local monitoring sites on wave height and speed, water levels, tides, beach movement, wind and other weather info into a fictional narrative.
Stopping points along the seafront (and beach, tide permitting) offer people time and visuals to re-view the sea, beach and seawall. Through spoken word and videos the story explores coastal erosion, climate change and the oceanic ecology, asking what is coastal resilience, change and adaptation. In July 2022 we’ll be launching two immersive walks that illuminate the work of the NOC, and past and future changes in the coastal environments along the sea fronts of Penzance and Dawlish,
In Penzance Six Lessons in Walking a Tightrope leads you from from Newlyn Art Gallery to the Jubilee Pool. Using audio, augmented realities and weather and ocean data, it balances the line between celebrating our world as it is now and accepting its changes.
Dive in Dawlish takes you from the railway station along the seawall to Coryton Cove on a magical underwater walk. Blending science fiction with immersive visuals, you will descend into the ocean while never actually getting your feet wet. Exploring themes of coastal erosion and climate change, ‘Walk With Us’ is for everybody interested in the sea, what lives in it, and how it affects us. An armchair version of Dive can be watched here
This is an incomplete book of the sea. Felted and decorated with tinnie yolks, which I’ve had in my plastic collection for a long long time, and fastened with the plastic shaft of a cotton bud, which used to be the most commonly found marine plastic on local shores before they were replaced with paper shafts in 2019. I’m taking it with me on the ferry from Liverpool to Douglas to invite other passengers to fill it. It’s part of the AHRC funded project alinging the work of Malcolm Lowry with contemporary concerns for the ocean, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, with Leeds Beckett and Liverpool John Moore’s Universities.
At the moment it is full of blank interleaved pages that will, hopefully, by the time we reach Douglas, thoughts, feelings and memories of the sea from other passengers. Having made the book I was suddenly reminded of those autograph books we used to take to our last day of school to be filled with verses and signatures by people, which I loved: both writing in other people’s and collecting new verses.
I’ve got inks and brushes and stamps and pens and letraset for people to use to make marks, splodge and spill and write and draw their feelings and experiences and hopes and fears for the ocean. We’ll see what gets used, what gets written and how.
Having
made the book I was reminded of those autograph books we used to take
to our last day of school to be filled with verses and signatures by
people, which I loved: both writing in other people’s and collecting
new verses. This book might become an autograph book for the sea, I
thought, filled with people’s wishes and blessings for it. As soon as
we’d left the Mersey channel and turned into the Irish Sea, I
tucked it under my arm, stashed a pencil case in my coat pocket and
headed out on deck to find people with the time to spare to chat.
People
were surprisingly receptive when I bounded up to them and asked if I
could talk to them. Yes, they always said, with wariness to
enthusiasm.
About
the sea, I’d say. I’m making a book of the sea. And given the sea
has so many creatures in it I want to populate the book with as many
people as possible. At which point I’d wave the book, open it and
let the pages spill out between the covers.
Whoever
I’d approached would generally try to gather up the pages while I
asked what memories or feelings or thoughts they had about the sea.
It didn’t take long for them to open up: stories of holidays,
relaxation, family members, of refugees, things found, things lost,
strange sea creatures, the plastic and damage we’re doing to it.
Everyone had something to say about the sea.
One
group I approached I told there were as many organisms in a bucket of
sea water as stars in the milky way. ‘I doubt that,’ one of them
said. ‘I’m a physicist and there are trillions of stars in the
milky way.’ ‘Consider the viruses and bacteria as well as all the
plankton, I suggested. ‘And phages,’ he says. ‘Yes,’ I agree, ‘the
phages.’ Before asking what they are. The most common biological
entities in nature, he tells me. And writes the word greens
into the book. I wished he’d written ‘phages’. He explained he chose
‘greens’ because of all the variations in the sea. His friend, who’d
been listening, then told me how when he lived in Brighton he’d swim
home from work every Wednesday whatever the weather, his suit bobbing
in his dry bag behind him. And then kindly wrote the entire story out
into the book.
Many
people were happier talking than writing, so I decided it was perhaps
easier if they wrote one word down and then told me why they’d chosen
it and I’d write that around the word. My process changed over the
three hours of the voyage, how approached people, how I cajoled them
into writing in the book, how I wrote in it. And this feels central
to the intervention – adaptation to environment, to others in the
environment, to hold onto the aspiration for the book, but to be
loose enough with it, to want to be as inclusive as possible and
respond to who I spoke to rather than impose my method onto them.
Nobody abused their power of holding pen to paper. Nobody told me to f*** off. Everybody had something to say about the water through which we were crossing. And once they started they generally were away for minutes.
I
enjoyed all the takes on our ocean. How precious it is, how
dangerous, threatening, and under threat. The children amazed me with
their knowledge of the creatures. Their joy in the diversity of the
marine ecosystem I found poignant and hopeful. Someone insisted the
ocean would be fine, and doesn’t actually need saving. It’s us
we’re doing the damage to – our way of life. It’s us that needs
saving. The ocean, however it evolves, will be ocean.
What
is ocean if not transitory, fickle, connecting? The most visible
element of our hydrological cycle, its water wheels around our world
as cloud, rain, river, mud, ice, snow, sap, sweat, tears and on,
changing its composition, bringing people from one shore to another,
as we were being taken from Liverpool to Douglas.
The
pages began to fill up over the crossing. And I wondered how much we
also need to learn this ability to change from the ocean. If what we
love we love because of it reflecting something of us, I wonder if we
might learn to love our own mutability, develop our capacity to
adapt, trickle through the nooks and crannies of a sea wall. Can the
scrawls, crossings out, mixed up handwritings and splurges also be
seen as precious, threatening or under threat as the ocean the pages
seek to capture?
I didn’t have conversations about Malcolm Lowry or his stories with the people I met. Instead I felt I was following his voyages more obliquely, with my fellow crew adding marginalia to the pages of the book, all underlining Lowry’s conviction that close contact with the natural world provides nourishment, connection and enrichment.
The
book still has space for more. I like the idea of these spaces
remaining, of the sense of the sea remaining incomplete, not
overstuff with plastic or deadzones or trawlers or windfarms. We need
an ocean that hasn’t been totally scribbled all over by humans. An
ocean we can’t completely read, make use of, perceive as a resource
rather than a living being that houses trillions of other living
beings.
a commissioned artistbook for the Entangled Festival, Morecambe, run by Ensemble, Lancaster University
The term ‘hypercube’ was coined by a team of scientists from Lancaster University and consultants from JBA, Skipton, as a web-based model for blending various data streams in flood risk management. This flexigon is an artistic response to their work. Living near the mouth of the Conder river, I witnessed its 2015 and 2017 flooding and wanted to focus on it for this commission.
I wanted to approach this project with as much sensitivity as possible, given I am dealing with a real life situation rather just theoretical modelling
This hypercube blends data from
https://nrfa.ceh.ac.uk/data/station/info/72014
http://es-websupp.lancs.ac.uk/hazelrigg/
https://flood-warning-information.service.gov.uk/warnings
https://twitter.com/ #galgate #flooding #22-23November2017
and info from
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667010021000433
https://www.ensembleprojects.org/promoting-a-more-data-driven-approach-to-flood-risk-management-in-the-age-of-big-data/
https://luneriverstrust.org.uk/
It is made on 120gsm Accent Antique paper from GFSmith, acid free, FSC certified.
Other forms of data this paper hypercube doesn’t have the space for, that its digital counterpart will, are soil moisture and building impact. And therein lies conflict. This has been commissioned by Lancaster University I am aware of the potential pressures developments at Bailrigg and other new building projects near Ou and Burrow Becks as well as the Conder will exert on those rivers and existing communities, as well as the importance of natural flood management in the upper catchment area.
On
the morning I went flysampling with Allen Norris, at the Forrest
Hills sampling site (Monday 15th August 2021), he took in
vivo samples
of 163 beatis nymphs (agile darter upwing flies), 1 blue winged
olive, 2 heptagenid (flat stone clingers) almost too small to see
without a lens, 1 cased caddis, 21 caseless caddis, 7 stoneflies and
13 gammarus. This sample of the insects in this pool of the Conder
represents 7 of the 8 taxons which, according to Allen, means pretty
clean and biodiverse water.
These
creatures have been living on the riverways for millennia, since
before the dinosaurs. Let’s hope they continue to have a rich and
fruitful life to enable the rest of the planet to be as rich and
diverse.
Thanks are due to Nick Chappell; Claire Dean; Mandy Dike; Liz Edwards; Sarah James; Rob Lamb; Allen Norris; Vatsala Nundloll; Ben Rigby; Will Simm; Floris Tomasini
We commissioned Sarah to create an artistic response to flood modelling research for the Entangled Festival in Summer ‘22. She worked with scientists and project partners to respond to complex research and lived experiences of flooding. Sarah was a delight to work with as an artist. Her curiosity and commitment are infectious. She was communicative throughout the commission process and met every deadline, meaning we could just relax and trust that she would deliver an inspiring creative response. Sarah’s artistbook surpassed our expectations. She brought content and form together in an engaging, multi-layered way, to produce a work that appeals to a range of audiences and can be returned to again and again – each time revealing something new.
August 2019 I was part of a two week residency in Brighton with artists of various disciplines to explore how we might explore and communicate our feelings towards the climate crisis. This audio book was part of the accompanying exhibition, and holds the Towards a Strandingsoundscape. It was made in collaboration with sound artist Kathy Hinde, whose expertise in embedding the arduino transformed the oversized, tactile landscape of text and card into an intimate audio experience.
Here you’ll find all the offline provocations for our One Day Plus Imaginarium.
The recordings are designed for you to write alongside them, with recorded silence in which to write. You can, of course, switch off the audio at any time, and set your own alarm, repeat a provocation that works better than another, or make notes towards a thing rather than write the thing itself.
Each provocation is timed to give you space to faddle before and after it. If you need an early lunch then obviously slot it in to suit you. The sequence intends to grow and widen your thinking/dreaming.
1200-1230 Provocation One A New Music: hearing the music or rhythm in your project.
This provocation works out of the thought that each new piece of writing has a particular voice, or music, that will lead you though the making of it. You’ll need: a piece of writing from earlier, an influencer book, and sheets of blank A4. When you’re ready, press play.
1330-1400 Provocation Two Its Creatureliness: How does it feel?
This exercise approaches your idea / project / writing from a different angle: as another being, an embodied feeling thing. It asks you to identify moments that illuminate the larger feeling of the body of the project, and consider its shape or form through any changes that occur. You’ll need: whatever you use to write
1430-1500 Provocation Three The terrain: What is contained within your piece?
Press play and gather around you what you’ll need: all the bits and pieces of your project: the previous writings, photos, influencer books, the music – all the things that have brought you to this point, this piece / project – and spread them on the floor or table top.
1500-1530 Provocation Four A Tethering: The final writing session for now, discovering where your imagining, exploring and poking have brought you. Fifteen minutes to flesh out an aspect of the project. Write slowly, write carefully, write for the full fifteen minutes if you can.
She asked me if I’d be interested in making an artistbook to hold the work. I’ve really enjoyed making books to fit to other people’s work in the past and jumped at the chance to work with an extended piece of Helen’s work.
It was a series of fragmented prose pieces, prose poems and poems that entered into an eerie space of a field she walks in Liverpool. There is a sense of the hidden, the dark, the dying and glimmers of past threaded through the work. We discussed ways of coming to the work, how it might unfold, and how it would interact with the work it responded to, and what form might the structure take to best reveal or conceal the text. Our first work bench was a pool table which gave us the space and perhaps the playful eye to muck about and find a way of setting the work with remarkable ease. We seemed to have similar sensibilities towards the work which made the conversation and questions smooth and energising.
We decided on a drop down scroll that offered a neat, simple-to-read form, that could either be contained within a hand, or fall in a long cascade that the reader would have to follow, succumb to. It seemed elegant, surprising and uncluttered. In many ways, an echo of Helen’s work.
When Helen first approached me I was feeling rather overwhelmed by other projects so said I could design and mock up one then show her how to cut and paste the work. She embraced the job brilliantly, made 30 editions that are now out in various hideyholes in Liverpool for people to discover, like the world of the field, the footsteps of each panel that tread through it.
Earlier this summer, 2019, the National Oceanography Centre and Sefton Council approached me to work with them on creating a narrated coastal walk along Crosby’s shoreline, north of Liverpool. The plan was, through bringing together science and the arts, to raise awareness of shoreline change and coastal hazards, to actualize and make intimate the sense of movement and uncertainty that occurs along the coast. The poems capture changes in land use, coastal processes, shoreline management and observational techniques. They are located at five points along the Crosby shoreline, and can be heard in any order. By becoming more aware of changing coastal conditions, we hope people will act as advocates in shaping how communities better prepare future change.
