Cartographic Interventions
Group exhibition at White Elephant Gallery (Morecambe, UK) and The Gregson Centre (Lancaster, UK)
Research commissioned by Future Places Centre ( Lancaster Univesity Data Science Institute) with funding from Digital Economy.
Summer 2021
In March 2021, for every low tide, I went for 30 walks on the same section of Morecambe Bay’s intertidal mudflats. I was observing lugworms.
Lugworms are world builders. Their constant work digesting the sands through their bodies creates thousands of castings on the surface of the mudflats, temporary cartographies that are erased and rebuilt with every rising tide. These castings are tracks of the lugorms’s bodies, ephemeral traces, temporary sculptures, left on the landscape that blur the line between body and place.
When I walked on the mudflats, the trajectory of my own body intersected with the many trajectories inscribed by lugworm bodies. An encounter, a point of contact between two languages. After few walks, it became a conversation, and data collection, my translator.
On every walk, I followed a strict framework of data collection across GPS tracking, tally counting and an audio journal log. I wasn’t concerned by accuracy, instead, I was harnessing technological tools as instruments to mediate attentiveness in my experience of the landscape.
The information recorded during the walks was assembled into a multimedia installation at White Elephant Contemportary, a Morecambe gallery only a few meters away from the research location. Juxtaposing sculpture, audio, GPS animations and moving image, the intallation suggests an alternative map of a human encounter with the landscape through layered time and moving bodies.
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