Meeting the Wind
Ynys Enlli September 2025
I arrived on Enlli planning to create a series of walking scores for the island. Instead, a fierce storm blew in and I chose to treat this as an offer rather than an obstacle, and to work with the energy that the wind and waves brought.
Exploring the beach for storm debris, I first met a little strand of seaweed bobbing upwards out of a larger pile, dancing by itself in the wind – a performance of more than human bodies in relation with one another. Further along, the beach offered me a rare five-stranded bladderwrack holdfast that suggested the form of a cloak. Wearing it around my shoulders, the heavy wet strands flapped and cracked in the wind and offered the possibility of being brought back to life through movement, inspired by the little dancing strand I had seen earlier.
Spreading the cloak out to dry, it became a bird, an eagle from the sea waiting to be set free in the wind again. I plaited and wove thongweed from the piles washing up daily on the harbour beach, binding the strands into a wearable form, until I was ready to venture to the most Westerly edge of the island to greet the gale as it arrived on land. Together, the seaweed and I danced according to the whims of the wind, creating a performance that celebrated our combined energy and highlighted the precarity of both human and more than human amid the force of the elements.
Later that night, as darkness wrapped around the island and the wind continued to whip around the buildings in noisy gusts, bringing its wild energy into the studio, I drew an attempt at a map of this island without edges, a place in flux where the energy of the elements dictates the movement of everything else, where sea and air merge with land until it is not clear where one ends and one begins, or even where we ourselves begin and end as the wind blows through our own bodies.
I became interested in where the island offered shelter, and how this shifted according to the direction of the wind, and I began to map the rocks that sheltered me as I journeyed around the edges, and the edge dwellers themselves- the lichens, tiny plants, and even a bird cemetery. At the end of the week, the cloak was exhibited in Storws, coming to rest in a place of transitory shelter for island residents awaiting the boat to the mainland, before being offered back to the sea in a ceremony of thanks to the island.
Ynys Enlli is an island very close to the mainland but cut off completely during storms. During my week there, no boats came, and were isolated with only what we had brought with us. These lessons from the island of working with only what is available and abundant (in this case, seaweed and the wind), and finding the possibilities in what first appear to be challenges, are what I have chosen to bring home with me.
