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