Q&A With Louder than the Storm

Hello,

Happy October 1st to you.

I recently took part in a Q&A with Louder than the Storm.

To read the interview please click here

To see my short film ‘Betwixt’ in the online exhibition ‘Intertwine Our Branches’ please click here.

Intertwine our branches is an art exhibition highlighting the importance of climate intersectionality to diversify environmental movements, to challenge inequalities, and show the power of coming together to ensure justice. We have brought together 19 artists across the globe from all different backgrounds talking about how climate change has related to their own personal experience, and their journey to create change through art to inspire positivity and hope. 

From talking about mental health to breaking down gender binaries to challenging colonialism, it is clear that climate change is a human issue which affects all aspects of our lives. Each artist in attempting to navigate these highly complex issues, where it is clear that there is no single solution to climate change, advocates the importance of community, of inclusivity, of being activists as the way to move forward. 

We hope everyone by engaging with the art, attending our events and workshops, submitting their own thoughts and artworks, can become a little more closely connected to the beauty of this earth and support each other to reduce and navigate through the effects of climate change.” - Extract about the exhivition taken from Arts Council England

Castle Beach

Since coming here I have always loved the geology of castle beach, it inspired a lot of my thinking about morphology during and my presentation. Today I discovered a blog with more information on the geology of this place, I knew it was ancient but did not realise how ancient.

“Castle Beach at the end of the promenade is a favourite for locals, as children love to explore the many rock pools at low tide. And if you are interested in geology, take a look at the rocks on the beach. They are over 400 million years old, some of the oldest rocks in England. They were originally laid down as sandstone and silt sediments in the Devonian era and remained undisturbed as horizontal strata for over 100 million years until they were uplifted and deformed by the tremendous pressures of tectonic plates coming together in the final phase of the formation of the supercontinent Pangea. This uplifting produced the Variscan mountain range, the eroded remnants of which are America's Appalachians, the Urals, the Pyrenees, and, in SW England, the high moors of Dartmoor and Bodmin. This unimaginable tectonic pressure also partly melted the underlying mantle, which eventually solidified into a giant granite batholith, which underlies most of Cornwall, outcropping in several areas. The hot granite baked the deformed sediments into a hard metamorphic rock known locally as killas, which cracked as it cooled, allowing mineral-laden waters to rise from the mantle, and crystallise in the cracks. In many parts of Cornwall tin and copper minerals crystallised, while in Falmouth you will see white quartz crystallised into these cracks.” - Sourced from the blog http://min-eng.blogspot.com/2017/04/

Thought Zine, Notes & Umwelten

My body is your body.

My body came from your body.

Once my heart was inside my mother's body.

Now it sits approximately five feet six above your body ~

~ Biosemiotics - A recognition that communication, interpretation and meaning-making are not limited to human life, but to all life everywhere.

~ Learning to listen to the myriad of other voices beyond the human.

“Biosemiotics, which bridges the sciences and the humanities, is a new field of study and a new way of understanding the world. It takes its name from bios (Greek for life) and semeion (Greek for sign). Its central insight is that all living organisms experience their world through signs which they must make sense of, or interpret. In other words, all organisms are in a communicative relation with their semiotic worlds, and these worlds are full of other forms of communicative semiotic life. Biosemioticians refer to these semiotic worlds as umwelten (plural of umwelt, or semiotic environment). They consist of all the sign relations which species’ evolution has made relevant to the organism’s meaning-making.

For example, many birds and insects see at the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, where humans do not. Their umwelt, in other words, is slightly different. For humans, the cultures they have made are relevant to their existence as humans, and these exist – as living ideas, artefacts and technology – interwoven with the human umwelt of nature. There is an underlying reality, but every species has evolved to experience it in the way that is most useful for that species’ life and survival.” - Wendy Wheeler, extract from In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss

You can find the full script here >>>>>

https://modernforms.org/blog/colourful-speculation/

“Both nature and culture grow from the same evolutionary source. Whether we are super-aware of it or not, we are all influenced by the communicational feedback loops that flow between selves and natural and cultural environments. When meanings (or functions) go wrong at any point in these sense-making circuits, all our living systems fall into potential danger. So what are we doing to ourselves and the planet when we allow this ceaseless slippage of natural and cultural meanings that starts to dismantle the life of our worlds?” - Wendy Wheeler