Sabrina Dreaming - Hydro-geo-poetic investigations on the Severn Estuary. Presentation by Antony Lyons at University of Gloucestershire 14 April 2015.

1. SABRINA DREAMING
Severn Estuary Tidelands
Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15
Antony Lyons

2. SABRINA DREAMING
Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations
Artist-In-Residence at CCRI, 2014-15
Antony Lyons

3. Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations
Hydro-
Geo -
Eco-
Socio-cultural
Historico-
Creative-

4. Hydro-Geo-Poetic Investigations
Catchments
&
Attachments

5. SABRINA DREAMING
Sabrina
Many rivers have sacred personifications - often in the form of feminine deities. For the River
Severn, this is 'Sabrina' or 'Hafren' in Welsh.
The artist-residency project seeks to expand and deepen the ways in which this
coastal landscape is encountered and understood.
New conversations and involvements via film/sound/sculpture-based artworks, extracting
some of the hidden and intangible essences of this coast
In the context of a pressing need for anticipatory adaptation to climate-instability
The Severn Estuary coast has the second largest tidal-range in the world.
Involves CCRI research streams relating to ecosystem services, land-use, water
management, food security and rural/social issues.

6. The field areas for the residency
will be chosen from within this
estuarine coastal zone

7. “An attempt to provide a platform for more diverse involvements,
and to explore new transdisciplinary responses to this place”

15. Sabrina Dreaming
activating the gaps; building bridges
A geopoetic approach:
an interweaving of the rational and
the imagination

16. rhizomic/mycelial
embracing complexity
GEOPOETICS
+
DEEP MAPPING
slow/temporal creative
place-investigations
relational, reflective
and reflexive
slow-art residency

17. "The term geopoetry was first coined by geologist Harry Hess in the 1960s to
introduce his readership to the novel idea of plate tectonics. He described his
speculations as geopoetry in order to induce his readers (mostly other
geologists) to suspend their disbelief long enough for his observations about
seafloor spreading, driven by magma rising continuously from the mantle, to
catch on. He needed his audience, in the absence of much hard data, to
speculate imaginatively, as if reading poetry…
…a mental space where conjecture and imaginative play are needful and legitimate”

18. “The land unfolds for the geologist as he passes over it,
revealing an infinite number of perspectives that are
integrated and contrasted in his mind....these results are built
upon the intuitive use of judgement in which the geologist
selects and constructs a system of signs, and blends multiple
perspectives from a nearly infinite amount of potential data."
Robert Frodeman

19. our maps of reality
our ways of knowing
artist-in-transience?
conversations and unspoken tensions
“Deep mapping aims to challenge the official management of
memory that fixes the value and uses of places.” Dr Iain Biggs

23. Eleven Minutes (Tide and Time), 2006

25. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

26. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

27. Torridge River and Estuary, Devon, 2012

28. ‘Aliveness
Machines’,
Devon, 2012

30. Installation - Art+Science
Donegal, 2011

31. Donegal, 2011

32. Donegal, 2011

34. rhizomic/mycelial
embracing complexity
GEOPOETICS
+
DEEP MAPPING
slow/temporal creative
place-investigations
relational, reflective
and reflexive
slow-art residency

35. It takes time…
It needs one or more ‘gateway’ contacts
Emergent, responsive, flexible, fluid
Dialogues with ‘officialdom’/agencies
Dialogues with local people
Is a provocation and well as a celebration
It is action-research
Relational, reflective, reflexive (2-way)
Benefits from collaboration

37. Before and After

38. Before

39. After

40. TRANSGRESSION
‘‘a relative rise in sea level resulting in
deposition of marine strata over terrestrial
strata. The sequence of sedimentary strata
formed by transgressions and regressions
provides information about the changes in
sea level during a particular geologic time’’

41. Occupy the Intertide
Anticipatory Adaptation
‘Stilt Life’
TRANSGRESSION - A FILM

42. ‘coastal squeeze’
‘hold the line’
‘managed retreat’

43. Transgression (Rising Waters)

45. Reminders of the Desert

46. Reminders of the Desert

47. TRANSGRESSION (Rising Waters)
"An exploratory geopoetic essay, derived from a series of walks
undertaken by artist-researcher Antony Lyons and Dr Iain Biggs at
the Severn Estuary coast.
We take as our starting point the definition of ‘Transgression’ as a
geological term describing an advance of the sea over land areas.
Our essay is based on fieldwork (walking, listening, recording),
archival research, exploratory conversations and production of
intermedia collages.

48. Project Blog
sabrinadreaming.blogspot.co.uk

49. These 3 photos are all pilgrimages,
and all involve tidal situations
...and transformations...
Conceptual Influences on
Sabrina Dreaming

53. Ghandi’s ‘Salt March’ arriving at the coast at Dandi, 1930:
The main point of his 240 mile long march to the sea was
political and subversive - a challenge to Britain's Salt Acts
which prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt. The
action formed a pillar of Ghandi’s “satyagraha,” or mass civil
disobedience. What the image also reveals is the age-old
and powerful human relationship to the coast in the form
of salt-harvesting.
Social Resistance - ritual disobedience - transgression

55. The image holds and reveals (amongst other associations)
the Beuysian idea of ‘social sculpture’; the importance of
myth, soul, symbolism and ancient shamanic thought; the
Joycean epiphanies by the sea (at/near this location); or
even his ‘thinking like a river’, as in Finnegans Wake.
photo of Joseph Beuys,1974

56. SOCIAL SCULPTURE (BEUYS)
Embracing what is unfinished rather than what is
complete, what seems unacceptable rather than
what reassures..
Transformativity
Engaging with processes - ecological and social

57. ATTACHMENTS

58. CATCHMENTS

60. ”We shall never cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time”
T. S. Eliot,
Little Gidding, from Four Quartets