reading

I've done quite a bit of reading both as part of my planning for this project and since I started.  I have a little pile of relevant titles and have really enjoyed either re-visiting books I've read before or finding new ones.

I can't get enough of the recent and current writing on the natural world.  There is a particular genre here that includes Richard Mabey, Robert MacFarlane, Roger Deakin, Mark Cocker, Kathleen Jamie... they all have in common an intense level of observation of the world around them and are able to convey the wonder they have for it in a gripping and beautiful way.  I find their writing very inspiring.

As I'm reading I mark passages that are particularly relevant...

The cleavages between the sand dunes, where the wind and waves had driven it, were choked with plastic... They had their own fascination, the shampoo and milk cartons, the toilet cleaner bottles we could turn over with our feet.  Though the colours were faded and the labels long gone, we knew their shapes, had seen them ranked in supermarkets and hardware stores.  Brushes, masking tape, training shoes, orange polypropylene net...

(p59, Findings by Kathleen Jamie)

My habit of gathering stones and other talismans was a family one.  My parents were collectors.  Shelves and window-sills in my house were covered in shells, pebbles, twists of driftwood from rives and sea.  For as long as I could remember, we had picked things up as we walked.  Humdrum, everyday rites, practised by millions of people…. Now, though, collecting offered a way both to remember and to join up my wild places…. The objects seemed to hold my landscapes together, without binding them too tightly.

(p87-88, The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane)

Our coast is being altered by the sea at every tide, and every storm, and nowhere more than here on the east coast.

(p76, Waterlog by Roger Deakin)  

I was recommended Polly Binns' Vision and Process in Textile Art.  A Personal Response to a Particular Landscape Expressed Through Textile Art.  This is her Phd thesis.  It has been a very valuable read for me and very relevant to my engagement with coastal landscape.  Although her engagement with the North Norfolk coast was all around her every day so she could enjoy the total immersion that I am dipping in and out of with Spurn.

The People Along the Sand by Jan Crowther is a history of Spurn and the people that have lived there since 1800 and I'm finding it really quite gripping!  It is so incredible that people have lived and worked on this inhospitable strip of land, often at the mercy of the sea and for a long time before there were roads and cars.  This really brings home the loss of land to the sea and describes the communities here having to shift and re-adjust when erosion gets the better of their buildings. 

introduction

Hello! I'm Alice and I am Artist in Residence at Spurn Point during this year. My residency is due to start very soon so I thought I'd introduce myself. I'm thrilled to be following on from the previous artists that have worked at Spurn - what a wonderful place to take inspiration from.  We've been unable to continue the previous blog used by Spurn Artists (link on the right) into this year's project, hence this new beginning.


I work mainly in textiles and printmaking. I completed a degree in Contemporary Surface Design & Textiles last year and am now working freelance as an artist. You can find out more about my work here and here. I use different print techniques in layers with hand stitch, sometimes using the stitches themselves to make texture for print. I am using paper a lot at the moment (many textile artists use paper): it is effectively a non-woven cloth, just like felt. I like the stiffness of it to stitch into.

I am committed to using colour from natural sources and like to experiment with mark making using colour directly from plant material and from rusty objects. Much of my recent work explores the kinds of marks that are found at the edge of water: the lines and ripples left on the beach; objects that have been discarded and sorted by the sea. I didn't set out to work to coastal themes but it is something that has developed over the past couple of years and now I have the opportunity to really bring these ideas together and explore Spurn, its detail and texture and its constant shifting of material.

My work is fairly abstract. There may be suggestions of recognizable things but really I'm interested in conveying a sense of something rather than depicting things as they are. I sketch a lot as a starting point to any project so some of the first things you will see from my time at Spurn will be drawings. I use drawing as a way of recording my experience of a place.

My background prior to being an artist was in nature conservation. I used to work for Yorkshire Wildlife Trust as one of the Otters and Rivers Project Officers. My first degree was in physical geography so my artistic practice has a firm backdrop in landscape and environmental issues.

I hope to keep this blog updated regularly during the next 6 months or so and I'd love to hear from readers who have followed the various artists in residence at Spurn or who have their own experiences of Spurn that they'd like to share.  What does Spurn Point mean to you?