Sediment Work in progress since Jan 2023
Over the past year I have been walking the sixty mile stretch of the North East coast which has been affected by a mass
die-off of marine creatures, which started in 2021.
The die off has been widely reported in the national press and has been linked to dredging in the Tees Estuary, which was thought to have realised historic pollution held in river sediments. (Works conducted as part of the creation of the Teesside Freeport and coinciding with demolition of the Redcar blast furnace.) DEFRA initially rejected this theory attributing the die-off to a rare an algal bloom or virus, this view was challenged by scientific research which is ongoing however at present there is no conclusive answer as to what has caused it.
My work sets out to be an act of witnessing to these events, through walking, historical research and interviews with local people and scientists; asking how we can understand the health of marine ecosystems, who is responsible for sustaining these natural habitats, and how the health of our natural world intersects with the communities who share that space?
This page contains a small selection of images from that work in progress which includes photography, video, text and archival research. The project has been developing slowly and a series of interconnected works are now emerging including a video work which focuses on the coast immediately around the Tees estuary, collected materials from walking the coast organised as a biological timeline, photographic work documenting the walking process and a series of images which capture instances of marine mortality, each taken on a specific day and location. In each case creatures are photographed individually but were all discovered within centimetres of each other, the mass of life in each image only being a fraction of what was seen.
As part of the work I am also recording living creatures and noting wildlife seen on walks, it's important to me that the work is not only about death or pointing to something awful but also to reflects on why this matters, thinking about biodiversity more generally in order to ask how we actively care for the natural world as a society.