Notes from the So Festival 'Let's Talk' performance
June 2024
How can we create a more sustainable human presence on Earth?
It isn’t whether this is the right question but why everyone else isn’t asking it. I don’t have answers but it seems clear that:
Sustainability is a dynamic process rather than a static site, dependent on an entire web of relationships rather than a characteristic of a single individual, company, country or species.
Typically my search for understanding manifests as transience, fragility and precarity. On-the-point-of-collapse installations, performances and constructions using found and recycled materials, ephemeral materials from the wetlands and the in-between sites in our surroundings that are unseen and overlooked.
These beautifully organic forms, harvested from edge lands on the limestone cliff of Lincolnshire Heights bravely resist gravity and gently twitch in the drafty north aisle of x church in Gainsborough.
At its most effective, the work quietly interrupts, rather than disrupts viewers’ passage through space - and because of the fragile and delicately balanced nature of the work, viewers’ movements, speed and behaviour, have to change. To avoid damage (to themselves and the work) the viewer is quickly obliged to pay closer attention to themselves, others and their surroundings. And, although orchestrated to draw the viewer into an active physical and complicit experience, the work is offered as an invitation to slow down: to step out of the day-to-day business as usual and to linger. Viewers become more spatially, physiologically and socially aware of themselves, each other and their surroundings.
Each component of the work plays a role in its ongoing existence, including the amended behaviour of the audience. I wonder if I am trying to choreograph cooperation: a practising of mutuality and inclusivity (human and not human) as possible strategies for ongoing survival.
I want to create the sense of stillness that we feel when looking at drone shots of local floods, to create a space in which everything seems to have slowed down or stopped. I wonder, how wide and how deep can a moment of now be stretched out and can this help to heighten the process of sensing.
Sustainability
It is probably through my choice and use of materials and processes that most people would associate my work with environmental sustainability. I choose found, recycled and ephemeral materials often without monetary value, and I like to work with them by hand. Typically, these materials are unnoticed or unseen in the world. They often bring with them important qualities and messages about society’s values.
Here I am using found, diseased willow which had been ‘cut out’ and was destined for long-term composting. The metal frame is up-cycled - I am also keen to reduce landfill.
My commitment to using found, ephemeral and repurposed materials and to working with them by hand helps protect and conserve natural resources. The work I produce is often transient and the materials used are recycled from one work to another. Making art in this way has contributed significantly to my being able to sustain a practice without access to large premises or funding. At the same time, it puts sustainability at the centre of the work for all to experience. It quickly communicates the overarching theme of environmental sustainability - I don’t need to explain anything.
Influencing my use of found objects and materials too, is the understanding that paying attention to, and with, all of our senses is how we make sense of the world. And, that this is a prerequisite to meaning-making, understanding and imagining.
Consciously - and unconsciously, I realise - I am on the lookout for everyday materials and objects, that have the potential to generate intrigue, and, if I am lucky…even surprise or anticipation.
Curiosity and anticipation, are both powerful feelings and
behaviours key to survival.
The potential for significance is also important. The materials I collect are mostly gathered from familiar everyday locations, edge-land and the no-land between the beach and car park, roadsides or the shortcut across an unused piece of land by the pub or the bus stop. These are unseen and unnoticed sites. And, that viewers might vaguely recognise ‘something’ which generates memories, speculating or imagining…is important.
Examples of current materials in my work include:
- marram grass roots, from the dunes at Rimac;
- dried wetlands’ weeds from the banks of the River Witham and Lincoln Cliff
- harvested willow from the holt at Snitterby Carr; and,
- tap roots from cow parsley on the roadsides.
On show - assembled, ‘up-close and under the spotlight, I want their ‘invisible voice’ - their characteristics and behaviours (their nature) to become ‘visible’.
Willow bark sharing some of its sculptural properties.
By examining and exploring the qualities of materials and sites and by seeking out coalitions and connections with them something new and unexpected always emerges. And, thinking this through in terms of my preoccupations and overarching themes:
Ongoing environmental sustainability (and by that I mean human and nonhuman ecologies) relies increasingly on a commitment to cooperation and exchange: sharing knowledge, fostering new relationships and being open to ‘others’.
On reflection too, I see that the materials I work with communicate or express, my careful and slow handling of them. A commitment to the ongoing care of delicate and fragile materials and on-the-point-of-collapse structures is intrinsic to my thinking and my propositions for a better, ‘not quite familiar’ future. A future in which mutuality matters.
Care and kindness can be seen as an expression of the very best of
human nature, vital to our collective flourishing.
Care can also involve the laborious, repetitive and futile actions of monitoring, maintenance and rebuilding. I often wonder if I am performing this role as a strategy for managing anxiety about the future.
These are part of a series of unexplained mutating non-life forms slowly evolving in the studio.
Adapting and Migrating to survive are two strategies we are all very familiar with.
The issue of ‘environmental sustainability’ can also be seen in the content of my work.
The wetlands and marshland across the region contribute significantly to helping combat the climate crisis. This land has a tremendous role to play locally in protecting and sustaining our coastline environments and ecologies: storm protection, vital feeding grounds for migrating birds and fish nurseries, for example. In addition to this, globally, salt marsh is highly effective at taking in and storing carbon dioxide and ‘pound for pound’, these BLUE CARBON ecosystems can store up to 10x more carbon at a much faster rate than mature tropical forests. Ongoing loss of wetlands globally is estimated at between 1-2% and - when an established wetlands habitat is damaged the carbon it has held onto in its soils often for thousands of years, is emitted back into the atmosphere.
Wetlands and marshlands landscapes are quick to move - our coastline in Lincolnshire is measured, tracked and mapped - its shifting contours visible within our lifetimes.
This land is self-organising and able to survive by moving quickly in response to environmental stress - like rising or falling waterlines.
The story of THIS land is that 'you don’t have to live close to a marsh to benefit from its superpowers'.
There are many stories in my work. For me, it is the story of:
- the superpowers of ancient wetlands landscapes‘ self-organising capacity to adapt to climate stresses and capture and hold onto carbon dioxide;
- the ongoing loss of biodiversity;
- my own tale of being permanently damaged by local flooding;
- and the unspoken biological processes that shape us all.
Everyone and everything has their own story to tell I realise…and if this work can prompt, provoke, nudge, shift, and initiate others to be moved enough to share theirs, then it has played its part well.
Weaving information and ideas into my work from across humanities/post-humanities, science and art fuels my practice. I am looking for insights and a more sophisticated appreciation of the complexity of today’s environmental concerns. This ongoing process folds into and feeds my creative decision-making:
In addition to this reasoning, however, my work is also driven by:
- A love of the land I stand on,
- Of wanting to connect with the beauty of the short-lived,
- Of feelings of radical hope and
- An unquestioning faith in ‘process’
This land blows through me more than I blow through it.