Criaturas das profundezas

Abstract

In July 2024, I was awarded a two-week-long residency at Cove Park, an international artists’ residency centre an hour from Glasgow, on Scotland’s west coast. The peninsula has a rich and diverse ecosystem and is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Cove Park is also just 1km from RNAD Coulport, a naval weapons base which contains the United Kingdom’s nuclear threat delivered by Trident submarine. Responding directly to this highly charged context, I began a process of ink making, using highly symbolic materials from the area. Taking rust from the security fence at Coulport Naval base, battered and beaten by the sea, along with oak galls from Peaton Glen wood (a temporary peace camp), I created an ink which was then used to produce a series of nearly one hundred klecksographic drawings. The complex images that emerged suggest a myriad of natural life forms ranging from bat, insect, skeleton, flower and seed head – perhaps even the odd tardigrade, capable of surviving nuclear disaster. These works on paper, along with various artefacts used during the making process, were installed in an exhibition1 at Cove Park overlooking Loch Long. Creatures of the deep provided an opportunity for visitors to explore seemingly binary ideas of nature and culture in the exact location where Trident submarines loom large. Our human-centred obsession with order, control and identification encourages notions of separation and division. The reality is that nature and culture co-exist. Like the galvanised steel security fence post from which these images emerged, the metal surface is pock-marked by barnacles which have made the galvanized steel frame their home. The ink holds these seemingly contrary elements in fluid balance, ready to be released through careful acts of abstraction. We have reached the current point of climate crisis and environmental collapse by viewing the world as a human-centred domain with other sentient beings existing solely for our provision. To relinquish this omnipotent outlook, we need to be able to imagine a future world that is not ours and that we may not be part of. Relinquishing control over materials, and instead allowing them to form their mysterious lexicon, Creatures of the deep challenged the binary notion of nature and culture, suggesting a more nuanced, complex and fluid possibility for environmental co-existence.