Inchnadamph
What time of year was it? I remember the water bubbling green in the low grass, the ranger pointing out how the herbage showed the geology below - was it chalk? No, Limestone. Of course limestone. But we looked at the small flowers and stumps of grass; it must have been spring. Scrambling up the scree to the place above the stream, Allt Nan Uamh. Uamh, like womb.
Awakening
My mother says she can hear the earth rising. “Soughing” she calls it. “Like trees in the wind?” “No, that is a different sound.” “What does it sound like?” “Difficult to describe”. We tell her it is the surge of her own blood, pumping in the thinning veins in her ears. She says no. There - can you hear that? A sort of swelling; the Earth.
A short piece written during a workshop with The Dark Mountain Project, May 2021.
We bury what we wish to remember.
At Onkalo, the Finns have built a place to bury their nuclear waste, four kilometres deep in the rock. It is not a shaft, exactly, though the entrance is mine-like. It is an excised lung - a branching series of bronchioles extending underground, each terminating in a copper-coated alveolus full of plutonium fragments.
After watching Into Eternity: A Film for the Future, Michael Madsen, 2010 with the Posthuman reading group at UAL, 14 January 2021
TOWARDS LIGHT - script
“Around this time I became unsettled by the wasps …”
‘Towards Light’ is a ten minute film, growing out of an extended conversation between multispecies researcher Katherine Pogson and videographer Claire Shovelton. An amateur lepidopterist records their perplexed efforts to make sense of their encounters with moths, navigating an imagined pheromonal world of light pollution and habitat destruction, in search of fertility and love.
The piece formed part of the art-research exhibition 'Places to Intervene in a System' at Lumen Crypt gallery, St. John on Bethnal Green in East London in August 2021.
In this case-study, I outline the creative journey I have passed through in the process of communing with and reflecting upon the lives of moths.
From this, I scope out a series of reflective practices – of noticing, of inversion, of community engagement – which redirect the creative urge itself, in order to ask the question “what truly nourishes you?”
Published in Design and Nature: A Partnership
Edited by Kate Fletcher, Louise St. Pierre and Mathilda Tham.
Earthscan from Routledge 2019
ISBN 9780815362746
I saw the eggs being laid. 3.30, 28th June.
A hot blur of colour, a concentrated stillness then gone. And I remembered I had seen this before, from this spot, on this very same tree years ago, without realising then what it was. This time I was prepared.
This piece began as a live performance spoken to accompanying visual projection, for a work-in-progress show in September 2018. It was also performed at the Global Fashion Conference at London College of Fashion in October of that year. Version 2, 12 December 2019.
“I fold myself up
But do not go away…”
A song lyric written in during Ben See's wonderful Where Words meet Music workshops, September 2019. In a session with Victoria Adukwei Bulley, we were asked to write ‘a conversation’ with a much-loved song. I chose Kate Bush’s “How to be invisible” from Aerial (2005), which had become a kind of anthem for me in my early moth research …
Exhibition Review: Fashioned from Nature, Victoria and Albert Museum. FAshion PRACTICE JOURNAL 11:1, 2019.
The ‘Fashioned from Nature’ exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, April 2018 – January 2019 charted human engagement with nature through a focus on materials, to highlight the environmental consequences of fashion practices worldwide.
Published in:
Fashion Practice, Vol.11, 1. pp 141-146. Routledge. 2019.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17569370.2018.1507171
Image © Victoria & Albert Museum
The reservoir is peaceful at night, though the birds are loud. The dark lens of water is demarcated only by their sound, the fringe of reeds invisible. A cluster of lights defines the perimeter of the reserve: construction lights, house lights, tall apartment blocks, garden lights.
But there is no light inside the ring.
A piece of nocturnal writing, this draws on my experience as a volunteer at Woodberry Wetlands, a London Wildlife Trust nature reserve in North London, 2017 - 18.
What will evolve in our plastic world? What will adapt, absorb, and grow out of the landfill? In a fundamentally altered geology - the extracted, discarded, ‘single-use’ landscape - through the process of breaking down, ingesting and reclaiming molecules, what qualities will be expressed? Perhaps we are already living this process and it is prosaic rather than apocalyptic? A kind of reverse or Post-Frankenstein’s monster?
A thought-piece about the Anthropocene and the urge to make things, 2017.