Lessons from the Lighthouse

The theme for the 2024 Being Human Festival – Landmarks –got Madzine researcher, Jill Anderson, thinking of how the landmark of a lighthouse might be a restorative object. From this point, she came upon my cabinet project, and  thoughts on Lancaster’s local Plover Scar lighthouse being hit (in 2016) and having to be restored . She approached me and fellow collaborator, visual artist and printer, Charlotte Done,  to see if we’d like to cook up a project idea for the 2024 festival.

Cue many emails and conversations and expanding then whittling of ideas and we came up with Lessons from the Lighthouse, a series of linked events funded by PACT at UCLAN, the Madzines Project to form part of the nationwide Being Human festival. Our focus was on the ways it means to be human, how we might explain and share those ways to a non human (the lighthouse), as well as other humans. We also decided to push the notion of humanity a bit further and explore what the lighthouse might have learnt from the experience. For this we needed a mobile version of the lighthouse, and commissioned Revamp Raccoon.

Our conversations revolved around the idea that lighthouses offered both comfort to the homeward bound sailor and warned of dangers in the vicinity. We were curious as to how the two sides of the metaphor would play out for in the conversations through the project.

As we discussed the plans, we realised Light up Lancaster coincided with the Being Human Festival. It seemed too good a coincidence to ignore. And added a second, drop-in workshop to the events, to solicit more ideas on what it means to be human – from the perspective of younger people. And so we had a five-staged project:

1. A walk to meet Plover Scar, the lighthouse at the mouth of the River Lune, in Morecambe Bay, to consider the elemental home of the lighthouse. How it felt being out on the limb, out of a human comfort zone.

In July we led a small group of hardy walkers out to Plover Scar, eight miles towards the bay from Lancaster. Incidentally this was towards the end of my 14 years of living in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. I didn’t go out to the light very often, not wanting to disturb the birds who fed and roosted there. It was a big deal. A saying goodbye to the light who I’ seen every day for the past fourteen years. To celebrate the occasion, I dressed as Beatrice Parkinson, the last keeper of the light, to channel her spirit to guide us out there

Low water was at 1015, which so happened to be between great squalls of rain. It was a springs low, which gave us plenty of time to get there, be there with no fear of being under threat. We made a slow walk out across the pebbled mud and muscle beds, befitting the pilgrimage it felt. Some silence some chat.

2. A zine-making workshop to process that experience, exploring the difference between being a lighthouse and being human.

That afternoon’s zine-making workshop, complete with seaweed bread, at the Good Things Collective in Morecambe, captured some of discoveries made during the morning.

3. A drop-in creative workshop, sharing what it means to be human with the lighthouse.

The next workshop had over 150 people dropping in as part of the Light Up Lancaster Explore Week. Wendy’s mobile version of Plover Scar drew plenty of people into the workshop.

Here we asked people to share their thoughts on what made them human rather than a light, writing them on pre-made illuminations to give to the lighthouse (who was now in town in readiness for their nighttime wanderings during the Light Up Festival). We were totally unprepared for the enthusiasm people brought to the task.

A short video of the event and more illuminations is here on Charlotte Done’s IG

Virtually everyone donated their wisdom to the lighthouse’s education rather than take their illuminations away with them. The giving of these illuminations to the lighthouse was definitely one of the highlights of the workshop.

4. Plover Scar distributed these illuminations from people with other people, discussing what they provoked in others

A week later during one night at the Light Up Festival, Plover Scar not only attracted much curiosity, but also conversations with a lighthouse keeper, a port authority manager and someone whose research was in metaphor. People delighted in receiving the messages from unknown others, taking them as either a comfort or a warning, depending on their perspective. It was reminiscent of the pleasure in penpals from childhood. This might also have been stirred in the obviously craftiness and nonplastic nature of the light, compared to much of what else was being handed out on the festival streets. The homespun, tactility, the evidence that it came from somone else’s hand into another added to the spirit of the evening.  

5. Conversations with Plover Scar on what they’d learnt from the whole experience, alongside more zine making.

To round the series off, we conducted conversations between one of the team and the lighthouse, talking through the whole experience, discussing with the workshop attendees what they made of lighthouses.

The project exceed our expectations for connection with others and for the unpacking of what people felt it was to be human, for people to open up with their dreams, challenges and joys to the lighthouse . The lighthouse as a beacon to make those connections was palpable – on the streets and in the drop-in workshops. It reminded me of the power of puppets, of how in animating  things we connect to their and our life force, the force that brings us all to life togther. 

It was a project that evolved and developed as we went through, from July to November. We took a leap of faith in how our ideas could connect and inspire others as they unfolded. The hybrid nature of the project – eco-phenomenological participation, madzine research, creative community workshopping, spontaneous interactions – was risky and at times nerve-wracking. Ultimately a wonderful collaboration that held, for me, many of the wonders of collaboration: uncertainty, connectivity, spontaneity, collective participation, trust, fun, joy and generosity.

© all pics Jill Anderson / Charlotte Done

Zen Crones

Some years ago a friend asked if I’d like her oracle cards of Zen Crones.
Oooh, I thought, they sound just the ticket, and said, Yes please thank you very much. Turned out, they were Zen Koans.
And rather wonderful.
However the mishearing stuck, and some time later, believing as strongly as ever that the world needs to hear from Zen Crones, I had the idea to make some to fit the original perhaps not so mistaken brief.

A Zen Crone, I suggested to those I emailed with the idea, is a piece of wisdom or thought or saying that encourages understanding, shares learnt experience and has that edge we know Crones have. (Zen, in this case, is a state of calm attentiveness. A koan is an often paradoxical statement that invites contemplation for possible insight.)

These Crones have come from that band of elder friends who replied to my request for contributions.

And are: Jill Anderson Lora Aziz Deb Barnard Sita Brand Rebecca Bilkau Maya Chowdhry Penny Collinson Collette Corcoran Mandy Dike Charlotte Done Jane Eagland Siri Ellis Naomi Foyle Susan Gibbs Chris Hardy Flo Headlam Pippa Hennessy Jude Ho Anne Holloway Endar Kaur Dorothy Lander Jo Lawrance Eleanor Levin Ally MacKenzie Di Mitchell Sally Slade Payne Caroline Pick Billie Riley Diane Sammons Stephanie Sandham Seni Seneviratne Sue Sherman Florisini Tomas Helen Tookey Catherine Williams and Katherine Zeserson

They’ve bent sayings to rejuvenate them, offered ones well-used by their families, others they’ve repeated over and over, conjured special phrases for us today or suggested ones they heard said in passing.

Reclaiming homespun wisdom, all of them serve to remind ourselves of our potential at times of need. They might be wise counsel, signposts to elsewhere, words of wisdom, a familiar proverb, an aphorism. Crone sense, rather than common sense. They might be funny, obvious, queer, serious, anything that a crone might have to share with another person.

I hope you enjoy them, ground yourself with them and be as free with them as those who gave them in the first place. They’ve been made with love, for love.

100 matchbox editions. £10 each, plus p&p
Each contains a unique mix of 18 Zen Crones, plus a blank card to add your own wisdom to the collective, an explanatory insert sheet and linen thread lever.




If you want these sent overseas, please email me directly on sehymas [at] gmail.com so I can double check postage costs. Thank you 🙂

 

Details
The cards have been made with Paperback recycled Context White 225gsm card, the wrapper is 110gsm Context White paper and the info slip is Context Yellow.
I used the Morecambe Riso Press to print their glorious colours, with the generous guidance of Charlotte, to whom I’m indebited
While cutting boxing wrapping and faddling the 100 editions, I listened to multiple episodes of For the Wild podcast 

Zen teacher Susan Murphy Roshi says a koan has the power to unfold us in much the same way crisis unfolds us; to bring us into greater intimacy with a reality in which we are seamless with all of creation.

Sea Shrine

I made this puppet almost twenty years ago. She was too heavy to use in a show and after some time became my muse for the hispering, then moved to my ancestral altar where she’s been sitting amongst family photos, an urchin, other sea finds and some ribbon for the past few years. 

When I was asked if I would contribute to the Aqueous Futures exhibition in the Midland Hotel Morecambe it seemed this was her time to shine. I was asked because of my artistbooks, but I’ve been wanting to stretch beyond books for a while, even beyond how artistbooks stretch the book form.

She rises from the top compartment of an old oak bureau made by my gandfather which I’ve carted from house to house not really liking for years, but kept because he gave it to me and some other less articulated reason. The cabinet was used in an outdoor exhibition last August  near Plover Scar light, and shared my love for the area with anyone interested, and asked for more info on theirs in return.

The Sea Shrine is a scaled down / shrined up / simplified / less linguistical version of that iteration. She takes centre stage amongst waxed thread and eroded limpet shells. She crowns a mountain of periwinkle shells gathered from the bay. She aims to capture the collaborative sense that is ocean, the weedy, frondy, easily overlooked, less than explicit, absolutely hereness of the body of water that covers two thirds of our plants, just as the flow of waater occupies two thirds of our body. 

I wanted to make something that invited others to contribute to the making. I wanted there to be space for others to consider what the sea means to them. If we are to think of aqueous futures, how might we think beyond the disastrous? It’s too easy to swing to doom scenarios rather than sitting in the uncertainty of what is to come. What we know is where we are, now. The future is seeded in our present actions – actions being our speech, thoughts and behaviours. Our intentions, our aspirations are the scaffold for those actions. We all have the agency to shape the futre, our future, a future. And perhap no being more so than the ocean, upon whom all life depends.

I’m increasingly interested in the value of collective wisdom and in making pieces that rise from that collaboration which crosses time and space. After all, we are here as a result of that collectivity. 

And because I’m also becoming more interested in silence as much as words I wanted there to be an option to share a silent wish, not to put pressure on people to artciulare their feelings. When our hopes, aspirations, emotions and sensations are at their most raw they are pre-verbal. It could be said that in articulating them they lose power. When the finger points to the moon, we can become distracted by the finger rather than see the moon

This particular incarnation of the spirit of the ocean explains the value of the sea in text that runs up and down her legs. This text was printed at the new Morecambe Riso Press during an exploratory workshop that was my first time with the machine. I’ll be back. This scan of the pink does not do its glorious brightness justice.

The invitation to make silent wishes on the hag shells or word wishes on paper can be for her or for us. There is, ultimately, no difference. What we wish for ourselves is what we wish for the world.

She was in the exhibition space, as the tide came in and out over three unseasonably hot days and accrued some touching wishes. With windows either side of her I’m hoping the sense of the sea was evident for those who did make wishes, or just spent some time with her. 

and plenty of wishes that are not so pinned down

I hope she’ll continue to gather wishes we have for the ocean and all the beings who live in and from her. And welcome invitations from other venues who’d like to host her. 

Meanwhile, if you’d like to email a wish, then you can here: seashrine.ofthebay [at] gmail.com and I’ll make sure it catches the air and send you a picture of it in place.

If you’re curious, her measurements are: width: 530mm; depth, closed: 160mm;  open: 520 mm; height, full: 1230mm;  to the desk: 720mm. 

Walk with Us

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

An armchair version of Six Lessons can be watched here

More info here  and here 

 

Hear Us O

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.

In December 2023, Leeds Beckett University hosted an exhibition of the works arising from this project

image taken by Alan Dunn

a Hypercube for the Conder

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.

Claire Dean for the Ensemble Network

Forces of Nature

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 Stranding soundscape. 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.

More info on what we got up to in the residency is here

One Day Plus

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.

Sudley Field

As part of Almanac Arts and RISE Festival, Liverpool-based poet Helen Tookey was commissioned to write some work in response to an exhibition. She chose Shanghai Sacred (photographs by Liz Hingley, with Cheng Hangfeng) showing at the Victoria Gallery & Museum, Liverpool, 7 June – 28 September 2019. Once written she thought it would be an opportunity to show or present the work in a way that somehow spoke further to the exhibition.

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. 

 

Changing shores

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.

You can  download the GPS waypoints and MP3s here  or watch them here, accompanied by pics if you can’t get to the beach.

The project, Building coastal community resilience: preparedness through poetry, was funded by AGU Celebrate 100 grants.

The rest of the team can be found on twitter:  @Wirewall_NOC  @GreenSefton_