To See Soil in My Palm
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Becoming With
As we enter the proposed era of the Anthropocene, or Age of the Human, it is clear that our way of being human is damaging a once vibrant kinship with the earth. We continue to sever [1] ourselves from our ecosystems, discarding a love for the environments we are very much a part of. In…
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And the Flowers were Boiled in Their Tanks
Forget about the terror and take a decade head start to feel the roots of a world that you my dear, could never tame. You could belong, yes, if you tried to belong; if you hadn’t spent enough history ripping the soil out of your hand and feeling nothing. No-one is asking you…
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Recollections of a Cyanobacterium
It only needed to happen once. That moment the Earth’s matter became living. But then maybe it didn’t. I think it was Anaxagoras — one of them — said we were scattered like seeds. Sentient space dust drifting aimlessly until the lucky ones landed on Earth. Makes you kind of sad, what happened to the…
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Soiling Bodies
A Shitty Turn Barren rocks surround the dawning sun at 18,000 feet as school kids huddle around the standalone solar water heater in the freezing desert. Squatting with all of my senses heightened, I embrace my surroundings. The texture of the creaky wooden floor, a heap of mud with a shovel on my right, a…
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Plastiglomerate
Mountains are now skyscrapers, earth is now concrete and rock is now plastic. There is no greater physical evidence of our relationship with the natural world than the plastiglomorate stone. Sediment and shell bound by plastic, this new form of rock is a true marker of the Anthropocene epoch, of our impact on the…
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Always Eating the Fruit Slices out of Their Drinks
Initially, when trying to imagine myself in the non-human world, I imagined myself dead. I mean this in the least morbid way possible, but it got me thinking of my funeral – and I imagined all of the non-human entities that come to be me; always eating the fruit slices out of their drinks. And…
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The Subtle Uncanniness of the Canine
In the Artworks of Mariia Annenkova Can there be anything unsettling about an ordinary scene of animals playing with each other? Looking at the endless stream of accounts on Instagram and TikTok dedicated exclusively to cat and dog content – primarily showing situations both familiar and humourous – one can easily be lulled into the…
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Santa Ines Cat Song
These screenshots are from a video that is part of an ongoing body of work in which I am exploring the deteriorating state of my family’s native village in Spain. In recent years, much of its population has moved to live in larger cities, leaving it an empty and desolate place. In this video, I explore ways…
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Come Home Again
For ten days from the 21st of September 2022, a half dome sculpture titled ‘Come Home Again’, sat in front of the Tate Modern. The sculpture imitated the structure of St Paul’s cathedral, cut in half to let visitors explore what was inside. With a monochrome styling, Artist Es Devlin filled the sculpture with hand…
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My visual storytelling sequences ensure the authenticity of each image while making all the neighbouring images in the sequence challenge each other, based on the facts themselves that they represent. For example, when the viewer views the fourth photo (Frame 4), they would assume that the fact is that a photographer is taking a picture…
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Seaglass
Away from the human world, I sit here on the sand alone and look out at the quiet water. This beach is far from home. No one built this beach. Trees stretched out horizontally, shaped by the wind and their black arms reach out, creating outlines against the pale blue sky. They cling…
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Politics of Gardening
In the Royal Botanical Gardens of Kew “Certain gardens are described as retreats when really they are attacks.”1 In her short story Kew Gardens (1921), Virginia Woolf describes precious moments where humans and other living species intermingle in the poetic atmosphere of a walk around the glasshouses.2 Botanic gardens are usually seen as enjoyable sites…
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Dumnonia, The Thin Places
‘Our existence is ultimately dependent upon intimate relationships of reciprocity, humility, honesty and respect with all elements of creation… one has to align oneself within the forces of the implicate order through ceremony, ritual, and the embodiment of teaching one carries.’ Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Dumnonia is the title of an ancient kingdom that once encircled…
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The Stork That Drops a Cardboard Box
A short story about systems that keep us alive, needing them and yet hating them. Fiction allows us to explore alternate material cultures, which relate to but also differ from our own. A nomadic tribe, who support themselves with that which surrounds them, wander through plains. Their travel towards fresh resources is overtaken by increasing…
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Drone Video of Gardens
‘Drone Video of Gardens’ explores conventions of the gaze, imagining how non-humans look and interpret the world. By creating fake landscapes through the merging of found images, google map locations and my own footage, I created hybrid landscapes that were simultaneously real and fake, landscapes that appear real at first glance but cannot and do…
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October Come Home
I’m writing to the October that slips from my grip. Not the collection of days that sulk in the belly of the year, where we harvest our hopes for the winter to come. Not those orange weeks filled with idle worship. But to the cradle that Anne of Green Gables told me to hold so…
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Engaging in the Negative Space
Everything is embarrassing. We scramble to fill the gaps of ourselves. We stuff our pockets, or minds, our bodies, our lives with words and phrases, definitions, and interests, all to fit. Or rather to stand apart. That’s between you and your God. Tim Kreider, the American cartoonist, said “We have to submit to the mortifying…
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For Mother has Fallen
Grew your seeds, even when you gave me nothing- You chip away at me, breaking me and remoulding me to call your own. ‘I am the inventor, these materials are mine’ But I am the inventor. For I am in pain- drowning in the sadness of seeing myself ripped up in a million pieces. Humans…
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Reflecting on Horizons and Landscapes as Companions
I used to think the coal power plants we passed on the motorway were cloud factories and was so comfortable with this idea of a man-made sky. Looking back into that landscape is different without the whimsical beliefs of a child, but I still find it comforting despite knowing the true use and environmental cost…