Material Actants: Blackmere water, Atlantic Ocean, Ink, glass, sand, peat, salt, steel, tin, copper, photographic paper…

This ongoing body of work originates in the landscape of the Staffordshire Moorlands, at the height of the global pandemic. It combines an imaginative interaction with local myth, mermaid folklore and the writings of Astrida Neimanis; interweaving traces of situated and displaced histories within the active materiality of land and cosmos.

The works result from an exchange between myself and the mythical land-locked mermaid of Blackmere. Our collaboration presents a speculative fiction which casts their watery body as gestational entity and universal element present in all living beings - on a journey from land to sea.

My artistic apparatus captures the residue of evaporation upon the stable ground of the glass plate (itself a manufactured sand-body) poised upon the less stable sand of the shore. The images that unfold through these various states, reveal the interactions of the elemental materials articulating their fluid sensibility and ever-present becomingness.