A geologist and an artist walk onto a beach...
… in North Somerset.
So inevitably, the beach is fairly muddy. Why are we here? To run an experimental event, using muds from the area to make art and start conversations about our landscape and ecosystems, and the traces we leave behind. What did this time together teach me?
Sara Dudman and I collaborated on a project called “Mud Painting by the Beach” which we ran at Brean Beach in Somerset. Sara is an established artist and when lockdown put a stop to many of her projects last year, she started exploring materials and pigments closer to home. She started with organic material from flower petals and found the colours to be ephemeral, echoing the uncertainty of the pandemic. Then she turned to the ground itself. Living in Somerset, the coast with its colourful cliffs and vast muddy estuary beckoned.
As she explored with different rocks and muds, Sara found that they all behaved differently and created hugely varied textures and colours. She had some ideas about why this was from her knowledge of paints, pigments and their behaviours, but she wasn’t sure how that related to the original materials themselves, the rocks. Enter the geologist.
With my understanding of the geology of the area, I could tell the story of the rocks: when and where they had formed, why some had hard textures and others were softer. But looking at rocks as art materials and to deciphering why certain muds make good paint and others do not was completely new to me. Looking at my scientific discipline through the eyes of an artist enabled me to explore it afresh and gain new insights. The rigidity of understanding “nature” in a scientifically rigorous way dropped away, and I felt more curious and playful. I forgot about the discipline of field sketches, and played with the colours and textures instead. Merging science with art also brought the coast to life in a new way: the land around me became both a source of inspiration for my artistic imaginings and the art itself, providing me with raw materials and canvas.
With the participants at Brean, we painted directly onto the beach with different coloured muds. We used a deep ochre red and a kaolin-white from the Cornish coast for contrast, and a thick, silky, pale grey from the beach itself. The paints were made purely from mud mixed with water, so when the tide would rise to wash them away, they would cause no harm.
At the heart of my collaboration with Sara lies the question of how we interact with the land we inhabit. We believe that using the actual stuff of the coast to create artworks about the coast helps bring us in closer proximity with it. And through this intimate understanding of the land, a relationship can develop which nurtures a deeper sense of care.
So as we drew, we invited participants to think about their interactions with the landscape and the traces left on the beach. With Brean Down as a backdrop, a limestone cliff rich in fossils, participants were invited to consider what fossils are likely to be left behind on the beaches we frequent today. What traces will remain? Organic shapes such as shells and seaweed were drawn in mud paints. And soon enough human traces appeared too, in the form of footprints and litter. Holiday-makers visiting Brean for their holidays and local residents alike told us of the variety of items they had seen on their walks along the beach: bottles, broken spades, tyres. Standing on the beach, we started conversations about what impact these traces we leave behind have, what layers we will remain in the fossil record, and how we can think about our impact on the land we tread upon.
These series of conversations were just the beginning, and hopefully will lead to many others for our participants as they remember their time on Brean Beach with us. I knew our day had been a success however when I overheard one of the local attendees saying to her friend: “I never thought I would learn to appreciate Brean Mud in this way!”. Sara and I smiled at each other. We had achieved what we had come here to do: create connection between people and their place in new ways.