Ebb and Flow, 2025

The South West Coast Path and the South Dorset Ridgeway are ancient trails that stretch from Dorset to Cornwall. For millennia these natural elevated byways have been critically important to local people. With expansive views across the Jurassic landscape to the sea beyond, these elevated routes still evoke the ancient communities who used them as vantage points and safe trails through hostile lands and as sacred destinations for religious rites and burials. Long barrows, burial mounds, stone circles and the hillforts of Chalbury and Maiden Castle date from the Neolithic to the Bronze Ages, rivalling Stonehenge and Avebury in historical importance. Standing in these ancient locations the past feels tangibly close, but even in these protected landscapes human impact can be seen everywhere; farm runoff and sewage outflows, plastic on the beaches and nets on the shore, these pollutants move from land into rivers and from rivers to the sea. Man-made environmental pollutants move through different landscapes, a sometimes visible and often invisible cross-contamination from one ecosystem to another. With swirling and unnatural looking cloudscapes these images contain intentionally artificial forms which are out of place against the backdrop of ancient natural landscapes. Made by throwing, pouring and scattering organic liquids into bodies of water - rivers, streams, ponds, the sea and even shallow homemade vessels in my garden - the motion of the waters they entered drew out tendrils and creates swirling shapes. These false clouds are suspended and stretched across the sky, appearing caught on the wind or carried by the tide; thunderclouds, mists and storms that don’t belong. A stark reminder of the climate emergency, they foreshadow the ecological concerns of climate change against an ancient natural world teetering on the edge.