This is a written account of an intimate artistic exploration of the Taw Estuary in North Devon over seven years. My grandmother lived much of her life in a 1950s bungalow overlooking the Taw; it was a place of many of my childhood holidays. A place once so familiar to me but made strange upon my return by the human debris lining the banks of the Taw, by daily news of extinctions and impending climatic tipping points, by my own walking body taking on the shifting identities of new parenthood. A place that held layers of memories unsettled through the fog and confused scales of time of my grandmother’s dementia.

The images included here are of the estuary, and of the artwork that emerged through the many walks along the Taw, which I came to think of as collaborative work made with the estuary.

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(Field notes made during or after walks along the Taw, January 2020)

Her memory like her hearing now fails her, in the tropical heat of her home our confused conversations circle possible versions of this place, multiple identities of who we are, who we were, who we might be, we stumble around dates and epochs, stories alternate between the ever fantastical and the mundane – their veracity equally questionable. Chapels buried under the sand, tunnels beneath the silt, downed German airforce planes, tea-dances, first loves, small flirtations. I never visit often enough, I never stay long enough, the possibility of not being known, or worse of a hostile reception hovers off stage… ‘and who are you dear?’ Then the fog clears and she looks into the insides of me, flattening layers and blowing away smokescreens, with her blue eyes shining she says, ‘ah yes, you’ve always loved that place haven’t you?’

The estuary held a magnetic pull that brought me back. When the first walks began in 2015, it was in a state of not knowing why or for what reason, or what might or might not emerge. I came back to walk in the year before my grandmother turned 100 and in the year after having had my second daughter. There was a strong sense of beginnings and ends, a sense of the passage of time and a sense of the trace of a life in the place of the estuary. The notion of trace emerged slowly through the work to become a theme I would return to again and again. My own trace, as I walked through this landscape, and the exploration of how I might record this; the trace of my grandmother’s life through her contested stories of this place, and the trace of other lives and other species evident in the human debris discarded along the banks of the Taw and in the marks and shapes of other things and other beings, more-than-human, that inhabited this place.

Over the many walks, I began to understand the destructive trace of my own and other human bodies in this and every place, as news of the unfolding climate emergency held a space on our airwaves most days. Tim Ingold says: ‘everything leaves a shadow-trace of some sort. But the body of the thing can no more be detached from its shadow than it can be removed from the world in which it exists’ (2020: 37). Our every action leaves a trace of its impact. I extend this understanding to what it is to walk and exist with a place; there is a porosity between the human body and the more-than-human and non-human worlds within which we are an entangled part (Barad 2007).

The idea of trace became central in how the artwork developed with the Taw. Residues and traces of matter are found within the work, in a very literal sense. The earth and river water emboss a trace of the collected plastic debris into paper in Ghost Plastics (Figures 8 and 9). Textures of the ground and post-industrial structures left to decay into the estuary water are registered through Ground Texture Recordings (Figures 4 and 5) and Scratching the Surface (Figure 6). The weathering causing the abandoned ships to entropy is explored through Rust Recordings and Trace (Figures 2 and 7). All of the work is left to continue to bend, curl and crumble to echo the processes of decay, flooding and erosion active along the banks of the Taw. This approach understands that ‘place’ is not fixed but complex, ambiguous and constantly becoming (Massey 2005). I see this ongoing body of work as matter maps that hold material/textural traces of the embodied and sensorial encounters with matter along the estuary. The matter maps are made collaboratively with the Taw and all of its vibrant materiality at a time of unfolding climate and ecological crisis. [1]

The limitations of language mean that the possessive pronoun of ‘my walking body’, ‘my hands’, ‘my feet’ has a louder voice within this written account than is intended. These are limitations that I want to recognise and are also one of the reasons why this research is held within an artistic register – the entangled materiality of the matter maps holds an ambiguity and complexity that is non-linear, non-verbal, not situated within one dominant language, but situated within matter.

This writing does not aim to translate the work into the written word but offers some insights and context into how the body of work developed. The matter maps were made through ‘my’ sensing body, so this account is written in the first person; it is highly personal. I align this to Karen Barad’s (2007) writing relating to objectivity and entanglement that states that as humans, we can only experience the world through our own bodies, situated not just as part of the world but as part of nature itself. Any experiments we undertake place our bodies and all other measuring apparatus as part of the entangled intra-action that directly impacts the outcome. I extend this understanding to the creative experiments that form the artistic processes made with the Taw. A personal approach does not, therefore, make for a less objective approach; instead it acknowledges the personal nature of my research, and aims to lay bare all of the elements that are entangled amidst the matter of the Taw (my human body amidst others). The matter maps hold within the collaborative approach of their making, a sense of a ‘flat ontology’ (Harman 2018) that situates my walking body as one equal factor amidst other more-than-human and non-human worlds entangled together. The writing that follows explores the artwork through my walking, sensing and pausing body, a body that is white, European, female, currently able-bodied, so that again this understanding impacts the artworks that have emerged through my own personal embodied experience of the place of the Taw. ‘My’ body is one entangled matter amidst the matter of the estuary that holds a residue of these encounters as a trace in the many series of matter maps that have emerged through these walks.

Thinking about this embodied approach as experimental, I position this creative practice as a form of fieldwork that holds a relationship to slow residencies in place, a fieldwork that is situated within and recognises that we humans are part of the matter we explore, that holds methods of attentive care and co-existing within the environment as learned from indigenous communities that live in ways that ‘sustain a balance among humans and non-humans alike’ (Modeen and Biggs 2020: 219).

The more I walked, the more I noticed, the more I noticed, the more I slowed, the more I slowed, the more I noticed, the more I noticed, the more I cared. This slow walking, I align to a form of walking as a methodology for research (Springgay and Truman 2018) that examines walking as a mode of critical thinking; ‘to create openings where different kinds of awareness and practices can unfold. Slowness is a process of unlearning and unsettling what has come before’ (2018: 15). My own slow walks opened up my senses to the small material differences within the Taw, the tiny shifts in textures underhand or underfoot, the fragments of plastics washed up and ground down daily as tides wash in and out. The knowledge of the estuary that I had known as a child was unsettled through the many walks. I was faced not with the clean, open sandy beaches of my memories, but instead with vast quantities of human debris washing in on every tide – single-use plastics, discarded fishing tackle; new signs emerging warning us not to bathe because of toxic levels of pollution; daily dark news unfolding of our climate emergency and species extinction weighing my walking body down into the sinking silt underfoot. This sense of loss for a place that wasn’t what it was and might never be so again I align to a sense of ‘solastalgia’, [2] with an understanding that the walks took on an emotional quality to them – a sense of making sense of the nonsensical through embodied making; how can we (humans) treat our places in this way? How do we live with(in) this knowledge?

The embodied nature of walking allowed a repetitive time and space for questions to unfold; I began to wonder when this place would be underwater as sea levels rise; if the plastics lining the banks of the Taw lined the beaches of every coastal place in the world; if the waters were too polluted to let my children paddle, how could other life be sustained? I wondered how we could learn from indigenous peoples living with places to move those of us living within capitalist economies away from the runaway train of cycles of endless consumption. If every piece of plastic ever made is located somewhere on this planet, what does that look like, what will it look like in the long 500 years of its gradual future decay?

Holding the OS Explorer map 139 of the estuary in my hands, I began to wonder who this map was made for, what was included, what was left off and why? The legacy of mapping as an agent of power and control (Wood 1992) holds a close relationship to the extraction of rare minerals, displacement of indigenous peoples, privatisation of places for profit and environmental degradation in the now. I wondered if I could make alternative maps with the Taw that would offer another record of the traces of human and more-than-human lives along the estuary entangled with the matter of the Taw. Maps that would be made through the senses, with the stuff of this place, through the repetition of placing one foot (slowly) in front of the other and feeling my way in the dark amidst the unfolding climate crisis. Donna Haraway’s words became increasingly important amidst the earth, plastics, rust and other debris in shaping an understanding of what alternative records of our places can be and can attend to:

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories (2016: 12).

Barad situates our knowledge and our modes of communication as dominated by the written word (2007); I began to think about an artistic/creative register as another matter through which to think with. A thinking with and through the sensing body as other ways to think thoughts, a series of textural/material matter maps of the Taw, made with the Taw as other ‘descriptions [to] describe descriptions’ (Haraway 2016: 12). Descriptions that mapped the fleeting and overlooked stuff in the time/scale of the everyday as a mode of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016). So that coming together, the artworks formed a body of work that were alternative maps, not maps made for power, or control, not made for land grab or to maintain the status quo of extraction from nature, but instead placed making with as an entangled part of nature as central to how they emerged. This creative, material, textural register aimed to bring together different stories of the Taw; stories mapping the matter of the Taw made with the matter of the estuary, stories formed through the senses and through making, stories shared through different records of stuff encountered over seven years. Stories to place our treatment of this place within the trace of matter held within the matter maps.

This mode of re-mapping aligns with a ‘counter cartographical’ approach (Springgay and Truman 2018). An approach that attends to the overlooked and to the ‘movement and rhythm of place, sensory materializations of place, and memories that are not simply in the past, but encountered in the present’ (Springgay and Truman 2018: 107). The artistic processes were developed to explore the ‘sensory materializations of place’ through the movement and rhythm of slow walking that tunes into the ‘movement and rhythm of place’ (2018: 107). This rhythm of place and of life is increasingly disrupted as a direct result of human impact. I extend the ‘materializations of place’ to Tim Ingold’s invitation to ‘follow the materials’ (2010: 8) that I took up as a mode of tuning into the matter of the Taw. Here Ingold’s thinking holds a close relationship to Jane Bennett’s when she asks, ‘what method could possibly be appropriate for the task of speaking a word for vibrant matter?’ and further, ‘how to describe without thereby erasing the independence of things?’ (2010: xiii). Gradually the artistic processes were shaped with these questions in mind. The material encounters in all their vibrancy were central considerations in how to develop ways to record these entangled encounters, to hold a trace within the work as a form of alternative maps of the Taw.    

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(Field notes, May 2019)

Today there are people at the low tide line where the sea meets the sand. It’s sinking sand there, so I wonder how they stand. They are looking for something. Cockles? Spades in hand and bags on arm. The sunshine frames their distant figures, the wind blows salty strands of hair into my face. It’s become like an old friend this ship. We sit in companionable silence. I remember a conversation a few days back with my eldest daughter, it went something like this; What are the ice caps Mummy? And why are they melting? What happens when they melt? Can’t they just make more? No, I say. She thinks a while then: so the very last ice cap will be like a teeny ice cube just melting away and then they’ll be gone. Me: yes, maybe so. Then they’ll be gone.

When your 6-year-old asks you how the grown-ups have let climate change happen, how do you answer?

I walked in the understanding that the paths I took, the earth pigments I walked over would be underwater in my children’s lifetime, likely within mine. I found this a heavy understanding to walk within. I thought then of the mattermaps as holding a record of the traces of eroding earth, discarded plastics, shingle rock formations, textures of the abandoned ships that may be the only record of this materiality within the Taw by the time my children are my age. Soon I came with strange contraptions, aluminium metal plates attached to each shoe using gardening wire (Figure 4). It was an idea that stemmed from an encounter with the lid of a sardine can washed up on the banks of the Taw on one of my early walks – the scratches and indents telling stories of its long journey to its resting place, the shadow of a trace held within its surface. So much of my experience of walking and my memory of the walks when I was not walking was about how the ground felt underfoot – the textures and the sounds. I wanted to find a way to record these textures, to force my walking body to slow down and to really notice the sounds and feelings underfoot. The marks made scratched and indented into the plates over the course of each walk, forming what I think of as a palimpsest of marks made collaboratively with the estuary. This multiplicity of mark-making within the palimpsest Massey states holds the possibility of a sense of disruption (2005). It resonated with the heightened awareness of the small-scale destruction of each footstep disrupting the ecosystems underfoot. Each footstep was amplified, the sounds and textures formed a new understanding learned through the soles of my feet.

These aluminium plates became experimental drypoint etchings that were printed using ink made from earth collected along each walk. In this way, the traces of indents and textures were laid bare through the earth-matter of the Taw (Figure 5). Often these traces were printed with the local earth pigment Bideford Black, around 350 million years old and once mined for industry, remnants of which are still evident through crumbling jetties, a part-demolished coal-fired power station, tarmacked over goods train lines, huge abandoned container ships. Each time I printed with one of the aluminium plates, it became flattened again, the textures were smoothed out; in this way, it was reminiscent of the tides washing up the beaches daily, smoothing sands, depositing the heavy burden of unwanted plastics in their wake.

The walks took me along the plastic-strewn high tide line towards the redundant concrete jetties that punctuated the estuary and the large, abandoned container ships left now that they no longer had any human use (Figure 1). Slowly the boats were taken over by other worlds, wildflowers self-seeded on deck, birds nested in pipework, other humans left traces of activities through broken glass bottles and layers of graffiti. The barnacles that once marked the water line on each boat started to die and crumble off with the rust. I wanted to feel these changes through my hands and repeat this action during every walk along the Taw. I started to attach metal plates to each hand and walk down the length of each hull and around it to circumnavigate its shape, all the while pushing the plates along the scratchy textures of barnacles and rust (Figure 6). Rust would flake off, leaving a line on the sand beneath, the plates holding a register of this abrasive action as they began to heat the palms of my hands through kinetic energy. A tactile reminder that our earth is warming. The plates I again worked with as experimental drypoint etchings. This time they were printed with rust pigment to hold a register of the gradual shifts in textures of each rusting hull through wind, sea, saltwater and time.

I also began to leave behind something to act as a non-human ‘witness’ to the storms and decay on each ship. I attached off-cuts of metal onto the abandoned ships to act as another register to record the effect of weather, sea-spray and decay over time; these approaches aimed to ‘speak a word for vibrant matter’ (Bennett 2010: xiii) by working with the matter of the Taw in all its vibrancy and sometimes strangeness. Over time the smaller cargo ship began to fill with water so that the plates I attached on deck became submerged in mostly rainwater. A new knowledge formed through the plates that enabled me to ‘read’ the weather conditions through the residues of rust on the surface. Orange lines meant periods submerged in rainwater; dark red/brown lines meant time spent in dry conditions as the rainwater evaporated and the plates were sprayed with the saltwater of the incoming tide. Fragments of cobwebs and seeds held another record of material intra-actions that I did not witness but the plates became entangled within.

These plates were pressed into damp paper to form another echo of a trace of the residues of the estuary (Figure 7). Their fragile nature crumbling off onto the floor of the gallery once hung, to continue to replicate the processes ongoing along the estuary all the while.

As I followed the high tide line, I stopped to unpick each strand of fishing twine from the bundles of seaweed along the estuary banks (Figure 3). This beachcombing ritual generated another series of artistic processes that formed another series of matter maps of the Taw. These maps recorded the vast quantities of plastic debris – from bottle tops and shotgun cartridges from MOD firing ranges across the water to discarded fishing tackle in the form of ‘Ghost Nets’, [3] the term I borrowed to title much of this series of work (Figures 8 and 9). The discovery of the plastics held a complexity to them. It was unsettling, frustrating, and yet oddly, many of them held a tangled, weathered quality that I began to think of in Jane Bennett’s terms as unlikely pockets of ‘enchantment’ (2001). Bennett explores the meeting points of organic and inorganic materials as having an unpredictable quality that can hold a strange sense of vibrancy and wonder (2010). The plastic strands of fishing twine would bend and flip no matter how much I pushed them flat; they seemed to hold their own material memory within them. I see this as a form of Bennett’s thing-power (2010), the sense of agency and unpredictable outcomes that form through the combinations of materials at a certain time/place.

Tuning into this developed another way of working that led to each bundle of plastic twine being coated in river water and earth and then crushed within paper to form an embossed residue within the surface, the outcome of which I did not control, but that again seemed to have an uncanny quality, a strange sense of symmetry that seemed almost anatomical in nature (Figures 8 and 9). The future 500-year decay of the plastics is traced with the 350-million-year deep time of the earth pigment. There was an unsettling quality to the traces that emerged on and within the paper, in the knowledge of the destruction of these plastic materials choking marine life and becoming embedded within ecosystems. Recent research finds micro-particles of plastics on the embryo side of the placenta [4] – we are these materials, and they are us; in Barad’s terms, there is no separation, just the uneasy knowledge emerging through touch and through making with of the many complex entangled ‘intra-actions’ (2007).

The different artistic processes developed with the Taw hold entangled connections with each other – conversations are formed through matter, through earth pigments held within the work. These material conversations hold a new understanding and a new record of the watery place of the Taw. A series of textural maps have emerged, matter mapsthat chart every piece of plastic debris to wash up on the shores collected during the walks; maps that hold a record of the decay of each abandoned ship along the estuary; maps that hold a trace of the array of ancient earth pigments from the eroding cliffs slowly crumbling into each high tide.

The matter maps offer a record of the materiality of this place at a point in time when rising sea levels threaten its existence. They also offer a mode of understanding that is embedded within a human-non-human collaborative tactile/material knowing through a close and slow embodied attunement with the Taw. This understanding opens up a range of artistic processes that are experimental and collaborative with the matter of the estuary. They can be taken to other places, watery and non, to form the starting point for another close exploration of the material entanglements through an artistic register. They open up other ‘descriptions to describe descriptions’ (Haraway 2016: 12) at a time when our places are facing rapid change through human-induced global heating, at a time too of increased reliance on the digital realm to hold records of the now. This approach attends to matter and the small shifts in matter over a seven-year period. This close attention is aligned to ways of noticing that are tied to modes of care and ethical behaviour. In this way, I see this approach as an artistic mode of Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology (2007) that seeks not to separate out ethics, the how we know and the what we know, but instead to recognise their intrinsic inseparability. The artistic processes, the trace of entangled intra-actions with matter held within the artworks and the matter itself, along the Taw, are deeply entangled with the other, and entangled with modes of being that are slow, careful and sensorial.

These artistic approaches to alternative mapping hold earthy, material residues that place my human body as a part of the estuary in all its worlding – an experience of a place that is woven with memories of childhood, stories from my grandmother, daily news of climate breakdown, and what it is to bring children into the place of this knowing. This understanding is tangled amidst the debris from other human lives (my own included) and non-human worlds; riverbanks collapsing daily, topsoil washing into a river too polluted to dip my toes into safely, post-industrial structures marking the time of the Anthropocene crumbling daily. These are complicated, layered, often abrasive relationships that are rhizomatic and non-linear in nature. Like the place they explore, the artistic registers hold records that are ambiguous and shifting. This artistic approach is experimental and collaborative with the matter of a place; it tells other stories that are matter/texture stories held within matter maps of this place: ‘stories told in otherwise muted registers’ (Hustak and Myers cited in Haraway 2016: 69). They are approaches to knowing a place through mapping and feeling, held with approaches to thinking critically about what it is to exist as a human in the now of climate breakdown and what traces our actions leave behind us in the everyday.

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(Field notes, February 2021)

I remember once a bird had crashed into her living room window. Every detail of every feather was printed onto glass, beak and eyes, holding the negative space of the space of a life that had passed. The imprint was there, distorting views back over the Taw held within the middle distance. The bird had gone, mattering amidst matter entangled within the long grass under the shade of the old oak tree.

Endnotes

[1] IPCC report 2018, www.ipcc.ch/sr15

[2] Albrecht et al.’s (2007) term that positions the emotions of loss felt upon an individual finding a familiar place changed beyond recognition as a result of war, development, climate change as three examples.

[3] www.worldwildlife.org/stories/our-oceans-are-haunted-by-ghost-nets-why-that-s-scary-and-what-we-can-do–23

[4] www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/22/microplastics-revealed-in-placentas-unborn-babies

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