“ The opposite point seems more a tongue of land
you’d touch with a good bowshot, at the narrow.
A great wild fig, a shaggy mass of leaves,
grows on it, and Charybdis lurks below
to swallow down the dark sea tide. Three times
from dawn to dusk she spews it up
and sucks it down again three times, a whirling
maelstrom; if you come upon her then
the god who makes the earth tremble could not save you.”
(Odyssey, 212; 119-127)
A recent invitation to present some installation works at the 2015 Lydney Harbour Festival provided an opportune point at which to draw to a close the first phase of the Sabrina Dreaming creative residency project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Freshly returned from a repeat visit to the waters and islands of the Waddensee (Netherlands); there for a presentation of work-in-progress for my Sabrina Dreaming artist residency and the wider context of the Submerged (Drowned Lands) project. In the manner of previous blog-postings, I'm kicking off this report with trio of ship's names...
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| Tanja |
My early fossicking (and noodling) activities related to this Gloucester-based residency have lured me further upstream, away from my more familiar haunts near Avonmouth and to the south along the Severn Estuary. The coastal landscape here has a very different quality. There is a strangeness, compounded no doubt by the presence of the looming bulks of the two nuclear power stations, within view of each other (Oldbury and Berkeley). But here too is an extensive remnant coastal salt-marsh zone, and the gradual transition from estuary to river waterscape. The opposite bank is now close enough to easily make out individual buildings, vehicles, even people. There are remains of jetties scattered on both sides, marking the once busy river-crossing points...
Some of the following is re-published from antonylyons.blogspot.co.uk
Some context for Sabrina Dreaming:
Undeniably - in the case of England - the predominant theme, to date, in 2014 has been water/flooding/storms. There are strong indications that climate instability is ushering in periods of global extreme weather, with potentially very significant social and landscape implications...
