SABRINA DREAMINGSevern Estuary Tidelands

Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15

Antony Lyons

SABRINA DREAMINGHydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15

Antony Lyons

Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Hydro-Geo -Eco-Socio-culturalHistorico-Creative-

Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations

Catchments&

Attachments

SABRINA DREAMING

SabrinaMany 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 realityour 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+ScienceDonegal, 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 Blogsabrinadreaming.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 explorationAnd the end of all our exploringWill be to arrive where we startedAnd know the place for the first time”

T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, from Four Quartets