Ecological Spirals and Mineral Journeys

Ecological Spirals and Mineral Journeys - featuring parts of my contribution to a new book by António Monteiro.

'Not Circles, but Spirals: 4-D landscape flows and nature-culture entanglements in the Côa Valley, Portugal'

There is a slow, quiet unraveling at work across some interior landscapes of southern Europe...

Film_Poem Images On Rocks

Film-Poem: Imagens Em Rochas / Images On Rocks

 

Between 2021 and 2024 I undertook an ecological artist residency in the Côa Valley, in eastern Portugal - a collaboration with archaeologist/ethnographer Bárbara Carvalho and also the musician Jesse D. Vernon. Much of our creative fieldwork and community involvement was carried out in the zone of the valley close to the Faia Brava nature reserve, which is the location of the Lapas Cabreiras site, known for its impressive collection of prehistoric ‘Schematic’ painted rock-art motifs.

Coa Valley Ecological Art part2

Greater Côa Valley residency - Wild Côa Symphony

Creative Team: ecological artist Antony Lyons, archaeologist Bárbara Carvalho and musician Jesse D. Vernon.

Music and sonic walk in Vale Carapito

 

Situated in an an ecological regeneration area, the aim of our collaborative working is to establish a space – real and metaphorical – for the co-creation of a video-sonic ‘portrait’ with which people can genuinely feel an emotional relationship, and which can continue to evolve over time.

Ravel, Unravel and Poetic Hauntings in the Terrains Vagues

Some further ponderings from the Here Commons Everybody creative programme - soon to enter a second phase - What Commons Next? 

Participants from new ecological projects throughout Europe created 'site maps with objects' at a workshop in Cambridge in June, 2022, led by Antony Lyons and hosted by the Endangered Landscapes Programme. Images here from the co-created collective exhibition.

In relation to two connected artist residencies in Côa Valley, Portugal and Elan Valley, Wales) my strands of creative exploration seem to be circling around a vortex;

Coa Valley Ecological Art

Wild Côa Symphony. A 1-year artist residency project with the Endangered Landscapes Programme & Rewilding Portugal. Summer 2022 update. 

[Extracted from a news article on the ELP website, and including personal reflections from primary creative collaborator on Wild Côa Symphony, Bárbara Carvalho, creative ethnographer, Portugal]

Imaginative weavings of landscape, ecologies and communities:
Working closely with local communities in the Côa Valley, the ecological artist, Antony Lyons, and public archaeologist, Bárbara Carvalho, have been exploring this impressive riverine landscape

How Wild Is My Valley

wanderings, wonderings and ponderings in two valleys

“All that is gold does not glitter
Not all those who wander are lost”
Bilbo Baggins, describing Strider, in Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkein

Last summer, I was back in the sanctuary - or retreat - of the ‘artist cottage’

Landscapes in Limbo part2

Geopoetic reflections, exhibition notes and images from the Limbo Landscape Lab

An exhibition at Wheal Martyn Museum, Cornwall, UK (July-Nov. 2018) 

by Antony Lyons, Heritage Futures senior creative fellow.

Assembling human and non-human stories in a transforming landscape

#Transformation theme of Heritage Futures

“It is the children born now who will see if
we humans can turn it around…can re-balance?
It’s not us. We’ve messed it up.
They will fix it…or they won’t.
I would like to be around in 75 years’ time to see 
which way it will go; what they do; what is done to them
…but I won’t be there”
(a worker at Wheal Martyn, Aug 2018)


a) DEEP-MAPPING in the mists of DEEP-TIME

"This film is time-compressed. I recorded it - hand-held - for over 30 minutes, from the shelter of my trusty mobile studio/campervan. The circumstance was happenstance, serendipitous. The occasion presented itself after many visits, over the course of a year, in the environs of the Sky Tip mound of mining waste outside St Austell in Cornwall - the centre of the long-established industry of kaolin mining. The Sky Tip has slowly, yet inexorably, inserted itself on my radar, and also now it is the focus for a project by a group of photography students - from the local Poltair School - with whom I’m working.

Landscapes In Limbo - part1

Section of Google-Earth track of first joint field trip by Antony Lyons and Caitlin DeSilvey in Cornwall in 2014

Landscapes in Limbo

JULY 2017
part 1 - juxtapositions and speculations


Two years into a four-year creative research involvement with the boundary-pushing academic project, Heritage Futures, I’m taking stock of what’s slowly emerging within my field of view; attending to the germinating seeds of some site-inspired video-sonic creative responses - or activations - in three 'landscapes in limbo'.