The year is drawing to a close and I’ve been reflecting back on the projects, people and places I’ve been a part of. In my usual freelance rhythm, Spring to Autumn is busy with the matter of ‘doing’ and in Winter, the pace slows down, and naturally, it’s time to rest and restore for the next quarter
Last year, at around this time, I was finishing off the final module of my Wild Beach Leader qualification coursework and establishing Under Open Sky as an organisation. I wasn’t sure where formally marking the growing shift in my practice would take me. Over recent years, I’d found myself drawn to working outdoors and creatively celebrating the natural assets and seasonal rhythms, particularly here in the Great Yarmouth coastal area. It’s been both very hard and very satisfying to see Under Open Sky become an organisation and start its first year of activity. During this time, it has had support from local and national funders, two Directors: Kate Harper and Sasha Pinto, and lots of freelancers and organisations, meaning our activity has supported over 100+ people to nurture their connection to the coastal landscape, through creativity and citizen science engagement
Beach land art created at Winter Finding, a collaborative session between Under Open Sky and SoulShineWalking and noticing by the river in Gorleston-on-seaCollecting in the cemetery at Yarmouth Springs EternalEarth Light Paintings
I hope that Spring in 2023 can also include Yarmouth Springs Eternal, as it has done for the past 2 years. Through working repeatedly – in same location at same time of year – we’ve been growing a body of experience about how Spring unfolds in Great Yarmouth, during a time of climate and ecological emergency. Yarmouth Springs Eternal received a Highly Commended award for the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance: Climate Award recently, which was such as boost during the bid writing! I’m keeping fingers crossed that we can step out into Spring together again, whilst also recognising the heightened competition for funding during this cost-of-living crisis, especially for a freelance workforce supporting people experiencing these challenges most acutely
Something that re-emerged with another wave of importance this year was making time for my arts practice. Not just fleeting moments – 20 minutes here and there between Zoom meetings or laundry cycles – but to dedicate significate blocks of time, half and whole days, or even a month! This time last year I applied for, and was rejected for, an Arts Council England: Developing Your Creative Practice grant. I was hoping to access support to spend a full turn of the wheel of the year creatively exploring coastal ecologies, using plants, light and natural elements. Whilst I didn’t get the grant, I still made it happen, in a different rhythm!
I was offered space at The Yare Gallery, Great Yarmouth during their ‘Fauna and Flora’ Summer show this year. I used this time to pause participatory projects over the Summer and as a base to reconcile my Springtime explorations, and further deepen into my practice. The Summer was scorching hot and we experienced a very long drought here in East Anglia, and my table, wall and window space at the gallery was baked with heat. I used solar dyeing processes using locally foraged plants to make the best of this uncomfortable aspect, to add seasonal colour swatches to a hand-stitched textile banner I started around the Autumn Equinox in 2021. The exhibition closed almost a year after I started the banner. Since then, I’ve been creating Earth Light Paintings with beach-combed chalk, mud, compost, charcoal and light-sensitive leftover Cyanotype photographic chemical, amongst other materials. Whilst in the Summer I was exploring the overlooked abundance of plants; this Autumn and Winter I’ve been drawn to make time for thinking about tipping points and boundaries
Finding a flow between my community arts work, my arts practice and my values feels like lifework, an on-going balancing act. I feel grateful to (mostly) being able to make this happen. Recently, I was asked to talk to students at Norwich University of the Arts about this. Serendipitously, I’ve been invited to be Slow Ways Story Contributor in 2023. This commission will support me to create quarterly stories of walking journeys, which tap into personal reflective narratives, local voices and a space to be experimental. I’d like to keep my journeys on home ground, wandering the East Norfolk coast and surrounding areas. I’m still mulling over my first route, but I’m going to start from the upcoming 70th anniversary of Great North Sea Flood in 1953, and to see what emerges from walking and spending time with that story. Under Open Sky will be part of an event marking this anniversary with Gorleston Library and Restoration Trust. The Slow Ways stories will feature on their website, newsletter and social media, alongside other UK-wide folk collecting and curating stories about their own patch
My final freelance work of the year will be with Creative Arts East, facilitating workshops for older people, as part of their Silver Social programme that aims to address rural isolation. I’ve planned creative workshops on the evocative nature of festive scents and spices. Through Under Open Sky, I’m co-leading Cycle to the Sun, a duo of gentle cycling events to mark the turning of the wheel in Great Yarmouth. Once those seasonal activities are wrapped up, I’m looking forward to some well-needed lolling about and festive cheer!
I’m feeling so happy and proud, Yarmouth Springs Eternal has been recognised as a Highly Commended project in the Culture, Health & Wellbeing Alliance awards! We share the acknowledgment in the Climate category with the fantastic Eco-Capabilities project, a children’s wellbeing programme led by Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination and the UCL Centre for Climate Change & Sustainability Education
It’s brilliant to have our work recognised at this national level. In particular, as most of the other shortlisted projects were led by organisations. Yarmouth Springs Eternal is an independent project I dreamed up during COVID. Since its first Spring of activity in 2021, we have been supported by project assistant Moyses Gomes, venue partner originalprojects; and Becky AKA Supporting Your Art with her camera, documenting the process! Alongside many generous artists, facilitators, funders, people and other beings over the past two years
Yarmouth Springs Eternal is an evolving, responsive and iterative project that is informed by the context we’re living in, and as the judging panel noted, highly values lived experience throughout. This is what the judges said about Yarmouth Springs Eternal:
“We felt this work was strongly rooted in community, yet with space to allow for constant evolution, responding in a meaningful and timely way to need. It was underpinned by a very strong sense of the links between climate, culture, nature, wellbeing and inequalities, and embraced a broad understanding of lived experience that shaped the growth of the work.”
I was invited onto The Sophie Little Show, on BBC Radio Norfolk & Suffolk, last week to select the Community Playlist. I was on Sophie’s show a few years ago, so it was great to be back and share some updates. For my playlist, I took inspiration from some key moments in my life, such as getting married and starting out in my career. I also selected a song from Ingrid Plum’s latest album, Corporeality, which features my artwork on the cover. The song ‘Stutter’ inspired me in particular, which was created when Ingrid developed a stutter when she was recovering from COVID. It reminded me of the power of creativity, of channeling complex life/health experiences into creative practice, which I can relate to
If you’d like to listen again, you can listen again for up to 30 days from the broadcast date (30th September 2022) on BBC Radio Norfolk‘s play-back page
Thank you Ryoanji Records for selecting my Storm Darcy/Snow Ball artwork for Ingrid Plum‘s new album, Corporeality. The work was created during Storm Darcy in February 2021, using a melting snow ball, Cyanotype chemicals and several hours outside in the storm
It’s said that more people die in storms named with ‘female’ names because of misogynistic perceptions of femaleness. This research has been challenged, but the weather naming practice has a history of gender politics. Since 1953, the US National Weather Service feminised storms with only female names, following the naval tradition and the practice of men naming storms after their wives, girlfriends and saints. This was challenged by Roxcy Bolton, gender activist and meteorologist, during an 8 year campaign in the US in the 1960s-70s
Bolton’s campaign was part of her wider activism towards liberating women. In her words, the practice of only using female names for weather events “reflects and creates an extremely derogatory attitude toward women,” who “deeply resent being arbitrarily associated with disaster”
Nature has been feminised through Mother Nature and Gaia figures across cultures since early civilization. The modern/Western use – such as that challenged by Bolton – has been toxified in patriarchal society as it mirrors exploitation and extraction of natural resources: if women are close to nature, they can be controlled too
Some argue that moving away from feminising nature using traditional binary could help to deconstruct stereotypes in wider society, stemming from concepts like Charles Darwin’s hierarchy, from top to bottom: male, female, nature. Or perhaps by mutually healing our disrupted relationship with living ecosystems (with ways of being that prioritise care and regeneration) it could also help us to redress other human imbalances
These are some of the ideas that I chew over when I make my work… Do check out Ingrid’s new album! It’s available to listen, download and purchase on Bandcamp
This summer, from 16th July to 1st September, I will have space at The Yare Gallery, Great Yarmouth, in the Fauna and Flora exhibition. The show is a celebration of nature by East Anglian artists from across the region, curated by Sarah Young
I’ll be working in the gallery on Wednesday afternoons in August and at other sporadic times. If you’d like to chat or learn about my processes, do drop by! There is lots to see in the exhibition as well as a cafe and garden. I’ll be working in the gallery and their gardens, as well as at local locations, such as the river, streets, parks and my garden. I will gather plants to use for photographic and textile uses. As the project develops, I will be sharing updates on my social media
I’ve returned back from my train journey across Europe for the CreaTures Festival. I was delighted to bring a patch of Great Yarmouth to the programme, representing the Yarmouth Springs Eternal project in the conference and exhibition programme from 29th June to 1st July in Sevilla, Spain
It was surreal to see melted candle wax collected from Great Yarmouth cemetery in the exhibition venue Real Fábrica de Artillería, an industrial factory established in 1565. I wondered whether the pigeon feathers on the installation table were the ones I brought with me, or ones dropped from the pigeon families now inhabiting the building. It was strange to see ‘Great Yarmouth’ and ‘the season of Spring’ as a contained experience – video, artefacts, posters – arranged on a table so far from home. The object bundles, fresh from the hands of the group, were laid as offerings to the audience. I thought about the snail whose shell home was now on display many miles away from its origin. Each object I laid in the display reminded me of the people and places they derived from
Image: Julio Albarrán
A display, even with Spanish interpretation translation for local visitors, never quite encapsulates it for me like the embodied experience. Maybe that’s because I feel lost and under-skilled in the area of exhibitions and curation, but more at home in facilitation. I was grateful to Thibault Pradet for his curatorial support and to my husband Pete for his on-going technical and emotional care! The range of installations in the exhibition were so rich, with interactive elements and inspiring community stories. A modest display suited Yarmouth Springs Eternal, as this year, for me at least, it was the conversations that felt really special. Spending time together in nature-connection and reflection was a pleasure. I wanted to highlight the words and collected objects in the show, to offer a sense of gentle discovery, intimacy and of the ‘moments’ shared
Thanks to Red Herring Press for printing our risograph posters for Yarmouth Springs Eternal installation exhibition visitors. I’ve still got some left over, so I will find a home for them in time. Thanks to Supporting Your Art for producing the project video, which really helped to bring energy to the still-life display. I have returned with a collection of precious objects – leaves, twigs, a snail shell, flint – which, inspired by the Yarmouth Springs Eternal public event led by Catarina Pimenta and Jacques Nimki, I will offer back to the Earth. Except the litter, plastics and faux plants, which I will dispose of carefully
I particularly enjoyed participating in the exhibition programme of events: a walking experience led by Roberto Martinez and an interspecies meditation led by Ruth Catlow with Andrea Botero. In the latter, we were guided by Ruth to merge our current physical form with that of another living being. I chose to blend with ‘Mind your own business’ (Soleirolia soleirolii), a low-growing matting plant growing abundantly in my garden at home, native to the Mediterranean, which reminded me of the cool dampness I was missing in the 39c heat of Sevilla. I’ve since looked up the plant online and read that the RHS regard it as a “weed” which can be treated with Glyphosate, a pesticide that has been linked to problems with human development, hormonal systems and cancer. Isn’t it strange that when plants flourish in abundance it triggers fear and feelings of oppression? It reminds me of the conversations we had during the Yarmouth Springs Eternal project this year, how our controlling and restrictive relationship to nature mirrors the discrimination experienced by people – we’ll still making choices to toxify our interspecies interconnection at a time of climate and ecological crisis, when our existence relies so much on all beings
As well as being part of the CreaTures Festival exhibition programme at Real Fábrica de Artillería, I was invited to talk at the conference programme at Espacio Santa Clara. I was due to be part of the conversation panel ‘Anticipating Change: From climate collapse to eco-social futures’. Unfortunately – due to the heat or something I ate – I was bed-ridden with a stomach bug that day. I was incredibly grateful to Lara Houston for representing my words during the talk, as I watched on Zoom from my sick bed, crying. Thanks also to Andrea Botero for giving the 5 minute project introduction to Yarmouth Springs Eternal that evening too
Lara Houston presenting Yarmouth Springs Eternal at the Anticipating Change talkAndrea Botero presenting Yarmouth Springs Eternal at the exhibition
After spending 26+ hours on trains across three countries over 10 days, I’m very glad to be home and very grateful to have been part of the CreaTures experience this year. The EU-funded research programme is now drawing to a close, but I’m sure that the projects, relationships and inspiration sparked from the project will live on in and actively build towards eco-social futures across Europe and beyond. I have plans to build on the inspiration too, though a third year of Yarmouth Springs Eternal in 2023, for which I will start funding bid writing after some much needed downtime and rest in the Summer
As I was pulling into Great Yarmouth train station on my way home, I felt welcomed by the familiar plants lining the tracks, including some that I was carrying in their dried form back from their European exhibition trip. I noticed the elderflowers were still just holding on, having seen them in Paris the week before already as ripening berries. The best thing about returning home, for me, is seeing how my garden has changed. I was glad to see the evergreen ‘Mind your own business’ I meditated on at the CreaTures Festival a few days prior, it was looking plump and happy. In my garden, it plays a vital role as a soil protector and low overlooked habitat often occupied by snails. I’ll think about my CreaTures experience when I see this creeping plant and will celebrate its power to spread and flourish in the shady spots
I would like to take a moment to again extend my gratitude to everyone involved in making and supporting Yarmouth Springs Eternal, this year and last year. In 2022, the project was led by:
Project lead: Genevieve Rudd
Project assistant: Moyses Gomes
Images and footage: Genevieve Rudd, Moyses Gomes and Supporting Your Art
Video editing: Supporting Your Art
Print: Red Herring Press
Facilitators: Catarina Pimenta, Henrik Kedves, Holly Sandiford, Jacques Nimki, Kerri Taylor, Ligia Macedo, Russell Hughes, Sara Moreira and Tiffany Wallace
Venue: PRIMEYARC/originalprojects; and Great Yarmouth
Funders: CreaTures/EU Horizon 2020 and Norfolk County Council’s Arts Project Fund
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