I have been creating paper land art for over 10 years, working predominantly in water environments: rivers, lakes, sea and ice. I began with two paper bodies, which I cut and sewed, taking them to the seashore and built a body of work within a cave. This became the seed for my film Llif/Flow seven years later. The quality, movement and sound of water in the process of hand paper making is important and informative. I return paper to the water and co-create with nature: I will make a form and watch how it interacts with the elements, how the movement within the water affects the body. Please see the Gallery for photographs.

 

During a residency in 2023 with Cadw and TactileBosch at Bryn Celli Ddu, a neolithic burial chamber on Ynys Môn (Anglesey), I made my first wearable art, in the form of a dress. This dress was created in response to the chamber, in particular the geology and ancient rock art. I used abaca paper, chalk, ground rock and oil pastel. The sleeves of the dress represent pillow lava (rock formed from submarine lava, like piles of pillows, some of which metamorphoses into blueschist) and the core of the dress is blueschist, which is formed from ancient seafloor sediments and oceanic crust travelling far down into the subduction zone (c.35km), at high pressure and low temperature, and then returning to the Earth’s surface. A freestanding pillar of blueschist stands in the chamber. The patterns on the front and back of the dress replicate those on the patterned standing stone outside the burial chamber. 

 

In 2024, I returned to Bryn Celli Ddu, collaborating with Cadw and Think Creatively. I was given the remit of creating a ritual theatre performance to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Cadw’s public engagement work with the chamber. After spending time researching the site, and conversing with the archaeologists on site, I created Sun Goddess, a costume reflecting the rock, moss & lichens, found objects from archaeological digs, including limpet shells and the Mold Golden Cape found relatively close by, and of course, the sun, whose path of light falls directly through the chamber as it rises on the summer Solstice. I created a performance to honour our ancestors, the land, and all sentient beings standing right there in that moment. It was an honour and a pleasure to be a part of this, together with the Druids and fellow artists. The name Sun Goddess arose from the fact that two children came up to me afterwards, with an offering of flowers, asking if I was the Goddess that lived in the chamber, because they often left flowers but never saw me …. See Gallery photos

 

I have created wearable art in response to working in Siberia for many years, on Lake Baikal, where I collaborated with LabirintLab, carving ice labyrinths for the Spring Equinox and living on, or close to the ice. My observations have been transformed into a paper ice kimono.

 

A costume made to represent birch bark for my performance Alarch/Swan was created in 2023, reminiscent of the use of birch bark as an early form of writing material and for many uses, including to wrap the dead.