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Reseach Outline

My current research is centred around an investigation of the history, ecology and folklore of the Fens, an area of drained wetland in East Anglia, UK. Within the project, this site becomes the focus of explorations of embodied experience, kinship and intimate relatedness. Drawing on ecological, feminist and decolonial theory, I have generated a body of research and artworks that explore possibilities for imagining new forms of relation between human and more-than-human entities within the landscape[1].

The project aims to address the dual role wetlands (marsh, bog and fen, as well as reclaimed land) play in the experience of climate change; acting as both archives of climate history, and also as ‘sentinels’ for the devastating effects of sea level rise. As historical artefacts, preserving layers of sediment over thousands of years and sequestering vast amounts of carbon, wetlands act as physical archives of past climates and the contested process of land management. Heavily managed landscapes, they are also simultaneously acutely vulnerable to climate change. As prognostic devices or sentinels, they deliver warnings about a future in which water is at once scarce (harder to manage, to supply) and over-abundant (owing to sea-level rise).

The project is structured around investigations of a series of sites around the River Great Ouse, which runs through the Fens. The course of the river has been significantly altered over the last 400 years by human attempts to drain the landscape; exploring its movement through the landscape acts as a means of tracking geological, industrial and folkloric histories, as well as complex global networks of material exploitation. Notions of flow, disruption, dislocation, seeping and dissolving evoked by the movement of water through the landscape present possibilities for both structuring the research and tracing relationships to other networks of materiality.

Responding to the fens, where I have lived for significant periods of time, opens possibilities for using my own life and body as a means to read these currents in the landscape. Within the project, the watery landscape becomes a poetic, political and prophetic site, acting as an agent both of unstoppable flow, testament to the power of the natural world, and as a site of imaginative possibility.

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Thus far, I have used sculpture, installation and performance to undertake investigations of kinship that draw together references to the natural sciences, social sciences and philosophy. World-building, fiction and the development of speculative narrative strategies have been central to the development of this work. Attempting to trace stories that depict forms of relatedness that cut against dominant approaches to landscape, environment and kinship found in patriarchal Western societies, my research has led to the emergence of a series of figures, forms and zones associated with specific sites, species, narratives and histories. In this context, materials and forms - limestone, chalk, peat, sylvite (a mineral found deep in the Fen bedrock), casts from my own body, the body of an eel, parts of a dredger and a Tesla vehicle, among other things - incorporated into sculptural and installation works, become associative prompts, echoing and harbouring the memory of geological, industrial, and political actors and histories in the landscape. The work presented in the portfolio has sprung from this research and the narrative structures developed; the sculptures and installation, as well as the experiments with video and performance, are centred around the figures, landscapes and histories it encompasses.

Relating anthropological theories of an expanded notion of kinship that spans cultures, species and corporeal-technological boundaries to notions of flow between bodies, organic and inanimate matter, (as theorised by Donna Harraway, Jane Bennett and Elizabeth Grosz, among others), my engagement with material and sculptural research, alongside movement and performance, explores the specifically physical experience of relatedness. Building particularly on Stacy Alaimo’s theorising of transcorporeality, Saidiya Hartman’s writing on the risks and possibilities of telling stories in spaces shaped by histories of violence, M Jaqui Alexander’s exploration of landscapes as bearers of memory, and Ana Tsing’s charting of the interrelations between industrial activity, damaged landscapes and capitalist systems of exchange, I seek to explore the speculative and affective potential of engagement with a constellation of materials, figures and landscapes, both real and imagined. Analysis of videos by Jayne Parker, Katrina Palmer’s ‘End Matter’, texts within Gloria Anzaldua’s ‘Borderlands’ and Tai Shani’s ‘DC Semiramis’, among others, also support the development of conceptual frameworks and visual languages within the project that establish flows and exchanges of fluid and material, new material vocabularies, and unexpected formal encounters/ juxtapositions.

One of my key goals for the completion of the project is to integrate different strands within my practice, allowing me to bring figures and themes that emerge within my research and writing into new relation with the process of developing artworks. Within the context of the new project, I am currently developing a series of films that will be presented alongside sculptural installations as a means to bring time based and narrative elements into new relation with my sculptural practice. Over the past year I have undertaken a series of video shoots, and my goal in the coming period is to develop more resolved moving image sequences.




[1] The current focus of the project has developed out of research conducted over the course of the last three years, during which I have moved from an intention to investigate a series of sites in Aotearoa New Zealand, to a focus on wetland landscapes, with particular reference to the Fens in the UK. This shift was brought about by covid restrictions preventing me from being able to travel to NZ to undertake research. Between mid 2020- early 2022 I experienced a protracted period of uncertainty in which my fieldwork in NZ was repeatedly postponed. This caused significant delays to the development of my work, but has also lead to consideration of the role of memory and imagination, proximity, distance, desire and dislocation in exploring interplays between sensual, embodied relation with the environment alongside consideration of the imaginative and symbolic structures that mediate our relationship with the natural world.