2025
I was gifted the apple tree. Planted above the pram, its boughs flicker the sky. I stroked it, held it. Dappled shade and the breeze of promises, offering rest.
It was chopped down.
Here. A pile of packing boxes and picture windows frame my view.
There. With the flutter of anxiety she parked up. Glancing through the window, Deidre heard chatter, the sound of pots and pans, the patter of small feet. A clap of thunder broke her dream.
Nowhere and everywhere. The view turns with weather clouds passing over distant furze streaked moorland. I unpack my boxes. And plant another tree.
(Full text)
2020
Place has meant home for me, perhaps even a yearning for home — frequent house and
school moves as a child had left me feeling un-homed, out of place. During times of life change, my work as an artist and geographer always seems to come back to this feeling of displacement as a starting point from which to work. Now is one such transitional moment, a moment marked by an upcoming move from Cornwall where, for the first time, I have lived in the same house for more than three years. This house in which I have brought up my family has been our home since 2001; a settling in one place that has been life-affirming. Those who know me well are therefore surprised to hear that I am leaving West Cornwall and moving to a city. Bristol is very different from these remote cliff tops near Lands’ End, four hours further west. A house became a home,
only to now, once again, become a house.
(Abstract)
2019
This chapter brings a geologically focussed inflection to landscape studies. Using a non-representational approach to practice, informed by geo-aesthetics and feminist materialisms, I reflect on a performance in a stream, the site of flash-flood in Cornwall (UK). This reflection neither precludes thinking landscape in terms of the political consequences of visual representation, nor as performed, subjective process. Using the disruption of performance by the accidental demise of my mobile phone, I speculate that landscape is additionally marked by ephemeral material process and agential geologic process, human and of the Earth. As a result, I suggest there is a need for artists to attend to the political landscape via the intimacies of mundane, everyday narratives to engage with material and geologic landscape encounters.
(Abstract)
2015
In this article I reflect on an art practice-based project that I have been working on in response to a particular landscape in the far west of Cornwall that was subject to a violent storm and flash flood in 2009. Landscape studies in geographical discourse have a long history of engaging with critiques of representation that focus on the power of the frame to conflate the culturally and politically constructed image of landscape with a substantive material and embodied form of knowing.
Parallel developments within art discourse have shifted from a consideration of the form and essence of the art object to thinking about the troubled, uncomfortable operations of images and the affective work that art does. As such, both landscape and image could be described as provisional and generative, involving troubled subjectivities; both could be said to operate through processes of dissemblance, instability, and ambiguity that perform across and between frames. In light of such critiques, how might a visually orientated arts practice (understood in a materialist, embodied, and emergent sense) function amidst the aporetic hauntings and dissonant conditions found in this landscape?
