Future Foresting // Residency Update 01
The body is embodied landscape.
I’m pleased to begin sharing my two-month residency at Wigwell Lodge, Derbyshire, supported by Void Art Centre and The Ampersand Foundation.
This residency continues as part of an intensive 100-day period of fieldwork across Derry–Londonderry, where walking, carrying, clay foraging, and making became both artistic practice and research. Now here in Derbyshire, the pace shifts. The residency offers space to pause, reflect, and turn my attention inwards; towards a landscape of renewed relationships with bone, the pelvis, the spine, as coordinates to deep time. It is a moment to filter a rich matrix of multidisciplinary research into new forms of writing, sculpture, photography, film, and installation over the coming year.
My practice asks a simple question: What if we replanted the forest back into our bones?
Working across ceramics, ecosomatic practice, movement ecology, and speculative bioarchaeology, I explore how clay, bone, and landscape each record the forces that shape them. Increasingly, my research centres on movement ecology; how everyday actions such as walking, carrying, and squatting reveal forgotten relationships between human embodiment, place, and the more-than-human world.
This residency continues conversations first developed with the last director, Viviana Checchia, at VOID around social permaculture, collective care, and ecological ways of thinking. These ideas have profoundly shaped my practice, where sculpture becomes less about producing objects and more about creating situations that invite participation, embodied attention, and new ways of sensing our relationships with each other and the living world. It is now perfect timing for several reasons, to lessen the grip on my research gathered so far now as I move into integrating, metabolising and processing all the information so far. Actually finding that I have evolved aspects of the principles in permaculture, repositioning my values from within the practice itself. Principles that are in focus right now: ‘use the edges and value the marginal’ and apply self-regulation and accept feedback’.
Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing the physical experiments, field observations, and evolving ideas that are shaping ‘Future Foresting // BioAr(t)chae(c)ologies’. Through the Mesolithic landscape of Mountsandel, to ecosomatic practice, and material experimentation, I’m developing sculptural guides that are intentionally minimal, playful, and quietly unsettled, inviting us to experience movement as a form of ecological knowledge.
How might changing the way we move change the way we care; for ourselves, for one another, and for the environments we inhabit?
#FutureForesting #EcoSensing #MovementEcology #Residency #VOIDArtCentre #AmpersandFoundation #Ceramics #SocialPermaculture #Bioart #ContemporaryCeramics
