Finding Common Ground
Wales 2024
An exploration as part of a year long Future Wales Fellowship opportunity supported by Arts Council Wales and Natural Resources Wales, with Peak Cymru.
The Future Wales Fellowship is an opportunity to go deep with research into our connection with nature – whilst acknowledging of course that we ourselves are nature. Over the coming year I will be exploring material and ritual, letting the materials of the land and sea lead my inquiry, and seeking out rituals past and present that those materials offer us. I’m interested in native and sustainable grown materials that can teach us something about where we are and bring us into a closer relationship with place, as being within, rather than on, stewarding, conquering, or using…
The research process will involve making in response to materials and places; exploring possibilities for co-building of shelters and structures; and interrogating stories of global and local extractionism, as well as possibilities for healing through accessible land, sea and sky based rituals that reconnect us to the cycles of the moon, the sun and the seasons.
So far the journey has led me towards “edge” spaces of the physical and temporal; to pilgrimage and what it means to be in spiritual connection with place; slow travel and slow being in both day and night; growing and working with flax, willow, elm, ash, lime and seaweed; community celebrations of hay and summer solstice; investigating permaculture as an artistic practice; firesides and fields; and, the creation of a coracle as a ritual object and nest.
This is the beginning of the adventure and I’m excited to see where it leads…