Through my art practice I aim to explore themes of belonging, nature and housing/habitat insecurity, where pursuit of growth impacts stable/safe homes for both human and wildlife. I want to highlight connections between human and wild, and raise awareness about local conservation.
Exhibitions 2018 - 2023
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8 Journey's Home. 'Matter' exhibition at Glynde Place, April 2018.
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Artwave Glynde Place September 2019.
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Two Households shown at the Out of the Woods exhibition, May 2021. Brighton.
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Artwave at Rosie Wooldridge Studio September 2021. Lewes.
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Six Under Sail at Rottingdean Heritage Windmill. Showing with five other women artists. July 2023
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From Sea to Soil. Artwave Lewes September 2023
the honest signal
My most recent exhibition took place at Rottingdean Heritage Windmill and explored the skylark, its place in British folklore/literature, and its red-level extinction threat.
I created a series of muslin flags, embroidered with red thread and printed with skylarks, their nests, habitat and song spectrograms which moved with the air inside the windmill—an ethereal installation. I also handmade nests from locally found grasses and inserted prints, these were exhibited alongside two handmade art books; a concertina book and a cartonera.
Outside this windmill, there is a large population of skylarks, and I encouraged reflection and interaction with a ‘make your own’ poem maker, using 200 words/phrases from skylark poetry across the 17th-20th century. Visitors to the exhibition created their own poems using the cyanotype board and cut out words.
I wrote two poems for this exhibition, How to Build a Nest, and The Honest Signal (both shown below). I made a fabric book, a cartonera book and a concertina book to display this text. I am interested in how hand made books democratise art and literature and also highlight crisis and the need for change and have been inspired by the Cartonera movement which originated in Argentina. I was keen to show the threats to the skylark, and so I sun printed my own photographs of a tractor, (to represent farming methods and pesticides) a dog (dogs often trample ground nesting birds) a falcon with hood, (Natural England continue to issue hunting licences to falconers to hunt red listed birds) and both an antique decoy ( a 300 year old lark mirror), and modern plastic lark decoys available for hunters to buy on Amazon (to highlight large scale hunting of endangered birds in Europe, slaughtered in hundreds of thousands using vast nets).
I am interested in how the natural world is woven into our memories and present experiences in ways we’re not always aware of, and the sense of ‘homeliness’ and reassurance that we derive from this but how that is often a distraction from the real and present threat to wildlife due to climate crisis and economies of greed. This is an area I wish to persue more deeply in my practice.
They carried death
in their flight,
dust that trembled between
wing feathers
between night and clouds,
between might
and slenderness. Risk collected
on journeys colliding with
humans of cruelty
and detachment
In thrilled ascent they were
yanked down in vast
fluttering nets. 10,000 or more ensnared,
an unnatural diminishing of
flight and endlessness.
Lured by ankle strung
hostages whose honesty
was subverted.
We look skywards now, hoping
elastic melodies multiply
unfurled in sound pockets, dropping, emptying
not for us though, or forever
not for heaven or beauty or anything bewitching.
Alauda Arvensis:
The Honest Signal
8 journey's home
8 Journeys Home was a process-based installation piece which explored the longing for home.
After years of renting and unwelcome house moves, securing a tenancy in Glynde offered me the chance of a long term, stable home. The process of making the journey sticks was a celebration, a spell and a wish.
Each journey stick tells a story. I created text using old Sussex words to describe events on each walk and collected found objects to document each walk.
Binding these talismans to the sticks was a way of making a spell to bind myself to place. Wooden sticks were used in ancient cultures in Britain and all over the world as symbols of power and enchantment and to map the landscape and weave narratives.
Tracing the landscape on foot was a way of deepening my care for and relationship with environment, the journey sticks increased my sense of connection and belonging.
two households
Developed during the pandemic and was titled to reflect the Government rules about how much contact we were allowed to have with other people. I made cyanotype prints of ordinance survey maps for the local area and photographs of all of the doors in my village to symbolise the new domestic boundaries of lockdown life.
Other cyanotype prints in a storyboard tell a tale of a slower, more insular everyday life during this period, where local nature and wildlife began have a more powerful mythological presence.
I am interested in the naturalist's traditions of collecting and archiving as a way of feigning control over our environments especially during times of crisis and change, contrasted with the ancient rituals and superstitions, which aim to do a similar thing but in a very different way.
