Welcome to this new experiment in sharing my art practice. Thank you so much for your interest. I’d like to begin by looking back to some work from last year that grew from my project with Barrow Archives, because I feel that I can write to that with a small sense of certainty. You can learn more about the wider project here.
Once I’ve found my feet, perhaps I would rather write to you in the present flow of moments and ideas forming, when everything is in a muddle, still new, vulnerable, and becoming something. I’d like to resist the temptation to un-muddle, because the muddled-up-ness is where the best work and stories begin to emerge. I hope that I can find some mixed-up ways to tell them.
Dear Kathleen…..
How did I come to write a letter to Kathleen Bell? A person whom I had never met, could never meet. Whose study of the seashore of Walney Island, dated 1929, I read on a visit to Barrow Archives in June 2025. I fell in love with Kathleen’s seashore study – the wonderful photo of her on Walney shore holding a tangle of seaweed, her seaweed samples, writing, and drawings.
Handwritten correspondence was already on my mind when I discovered Kathleen in the archive. I had been looking at disaster postcards of the early 1900’s and considering their relationship to crisis communications in the digital age. Inspired by Kathleen’s seashore study, I visited Walney shore on 1st July 2025, with my friend Jenny. Shortly after, Jenny posted me a handwritten page with a drawing of seaweed and thoughts about our day. Such a joy to receive. I wrote back with a drawing of a pebble, with seaweed inside it. There have been more letters since. On July 25th I wrote in my notebook: “What would I say to Kathleen if we could meet? How would I explain the ecological crisis that we face? The seed of another letter. The letters felt progressive in our pressured world of instant messaging.
My art practice with Morecambe Bay is more-than-human and I wanted to carry that with me into the archive. To acknowledge thoughts and ideas as they emerged with the material and presences around me, and to allow them to guide my actions. It is a practice that evolves, learns, and develops techniques along the way. It can be playful and fun. It is part of who I am, but I am in the thick of it rather than at the centre of it.
To write a letter can mean to catch thoughts as they arrive. I have a sense of how the letter will begin, but not how it will develop. It is difficult at first, but feels empowering to allow words to spill across the page – A relief.
But Kathleen could never read my letter to her, so I read it to the Irish Sea on Walney Island. Standing where Kathleen might have stood. Waves splashing up my legs, soaking my clothing. The wind snatching at the words. It was a day full of uncertainty, excitement, and potential. Nobody was watching.
As documentation for my project, I made some audio recordings, and video. I didn’t want to share them when the work felt vulnerable and new. I don’t know what happened to my handwritten letter to Kathleen Bell that got sea splashed and crumpled on Walney shore. No future humans will discover my letter to Kathleen in an archive, wrapped in paper and tied with ribbons. Perhaps it was meant to be ephemeral?
Much later I returned to the recordings – Waves fold over the camera, as I struggle to be heard. Seaweed sways beneath the ebbing tide. Fragments of Kathleen’s sea shore study floating in the sea.
When I look at this audio/video experiment it is predominantly because I want to feel that day again. I’m still not too comfortable about sharing. But there is still something emerging from these events on Walney shore, and my wider practice. We forge ‘our own paths’ with many other participants and influencers along the way, both human and non-human. What does it mean to realise that one’s sense of self is bound up with so many more-than-human others? Where do I begin?