sabrina dreaming severn estuary tidelands · sabrina dreaming sabrina many rivers have sacred...

SABRINA DREAMING

Severn Estuary Tidelands

Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15

Antony Lyons

SABRINA DREAMING

Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15

Antony Lyons

Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Hydro-

Geo -

Eco-

Socio-cultural

Historico-

Creative-

Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Catchments

&

Attachments

SABRINA DREAMING

Sabrina

Many rivers have sacred personifications - often in the form of feminine deities.

For the River Severn, this is 'Sabrina' or 'Hafren' in Welsh.

The artist-residency project seeks to expand and deepen the ways in which

this coastal landscape is encountered and understood.

New conversations and involvements via film/sound/sculpture-based artworks,

extracting some of the hidden and intangible essences of this coast

In the context of a pressing need for anticipatory adaptation to climate-

instability

The Severn Estuary coast has the second largest tidal-range in the world.

Involves CCRI research streams relating to ecosystem services, land-use,

water management, food security and rural/social issues.

The field areas for the residency will be chosen from within this estuarine coastal

zone

“An attempt to provide a platform for more diverse

involvements, and to explore new transdisciplinary

responses to this place”

Sabrina Dreaming

activating the gaps; building

bridges

A geopoetic approach:

an interweaving of the

rational and the imagination

rhizomic/mycelial

embracing complexity

GEOPOETICS

+ DEEP MAPPING

slow/temporal creative place-

investigations

relational, reflective and

reflexive

slow-art residency

"The term geopoetry was first coined by geologist Harry Hess in the

1960s to introduce his readership to the novel idea of plate tectonics.

He described his speculations as geopoetry in order to induce his

readers (mostly other geologists) to suspend their disbelief long enough

for his observations about seafloor spreading, driven by magma rising

continuously from the mantle, to catch on. He needed his audience, in

the absence of much hard data, to speculate imaginatively, as if reading

poetry…

…a mental space where conjecture and imaginative play are needful

and legitimate”

“The land unfolds for the geologist as he passes

over it, revealing an infinite number of perspectives

that are integrated and contrasted in his

mind....these results are built upon the intuitive use

of judgement in which the geologist selects and

constructs a system of signs, and blends multiple

perspectives from a nearly infinite amount of

potential data."

Robert Frodeman

our maps of reality

our ways of knowing

artist-in-transience?

conversations and unspoken tensions

“Deep mapping aims to challenge the official management of

memory that fixes the value and uses of places.” Dr Iain Biggs

Eleven Minutes (Tide and Time), 2006

Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

‘Aliveness

Machines’,

Devon, 2012

Installation - Art+Science

Donegal, 2011

Donegal, 2011

Donegal, 2011

rhizomic/mycelial

embracing complexity

GEOPOETICS

+ DEEP MAPPING

slow/temporal creative place-

investigations

relational, reflective and

reflexive

slow-art residency

It takes time…

It needs one or more ‘gateway’ contacts

Emergent, responsive, flexible, fluid

Dialogues with ‘officialdom’/agencies

Dialogues with local people

Is a provocation and well as a celebration

It is action-research

Relational, reflective, reflexive (2-way)

Benefits from collaboration

Before and After

Before

After

TRANSGRESSION

‘‘a relative rise in sea level resulting in

deposition of marine strata over terrestrial

strata. The sequence of sedimentary strata

formed by transgressions and regressions

provides information about the changes in

sea level during a particular geologic

time’’

Occupy the Intertide

Anticipatory Adaptation

‘Stilt Life’

TRANSGRESSION - A FILM

‘coastal

squeeze’

‘hold the line’

‘managed

retreat’

Transgression (Rising Waters)

Reminders of the Desert

Reminders of the Desert

TRANSGRESSION (Rising Waters)

"An exploratory geopoetic essay, derived from a series of

walks undertaken by artist-researcher Antony Lyons and Dr

Iain Biggs at the Severn Estuary coast.

We take as our starting point the definition of ‘Transgression’

as a geological term describing an advance of the sea over

land areas.

Our essay is based on fieldwork (walking, listening,

recording), archival research, exploratory conversations and

production of intermedia collages.

Project Blog

sabrinadreaming.blogspot.co.

uk

These 3 photos are all pilgrimages,

and all involve tidal situations

...and transformations...

Conceptual Influences on

Sabrina Dreaming

Ghandi’s ‘Salt March’ arriving at the coast at Dandi,

1930:

The main point of his 240 mile long march to the sea

was political and subversive - a challenge to Britain's

Salt Acts which prohibited Indians from collecting or

selling salt. The action formed a pillar of Ghandi’s

“satyagraha,” or mass civil disobedience. What the

image also reveals is the age-old and powerful human

relationship to the coast in the form of salt-harvesting.

Social Resistance - ritual disobedience -

transgression

The image holds and reveals (amongst other

associations) the Beuysian idea of ‘social sculpture’;

the importance of myth, soul, symbolism and ancient

shamanic thought; the Joycean epiphanies by the

sea (at/near this location); or even his ‘thinking like a

river’, as in Finnegans Wake.

photo of Joseph

Beuys,1974

SOCIAL SCULPTURE (BEUYS)

Embracing what is unfinished rather than

what is complete, what seems unacceptable

rather than what reassures..

Transformativity

Engaging with processes - ecological and social

ATTACHMENTS

CATCHMENTS

”We shall never cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time”

T. S. Eliot,

Little Gidding, from Four Quartets