Sensitive Chaos

Sensitive Chaos - poster
Exhibition at Orford Ness, 2019

Poster production with the assistance of the Letterpress Collective, Bristol.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk/orford-ness-national-nature-reserve/features/sensitive-chaos-on-orford-ness

Salt of the Sea - Salt of the Earth

I've received two messages...about salt...

One message is from Vancouver; a weather report from a friend:
Weather wise, we got another huge snowfall on Saturday and another expected today or tomorrow. Vancouver has used 7000 tonnes of salt to melt ice so far, whereas most winters they only use 1000 tonnes. Salt shortage everywhere prompted Vancouver to hand out free salt on Wednesday but it was gone in minutes and people who had been lining up for it left disappointed.

Water Citizenship, Creative Conversations, and Water Consciousness in action

Some thoughts on an emerging co-created project for Bristol EU Green Capital 2015

NOVA (the eco-creative fantasy-lab) and WaterCityBristol have joined-up with the education charity My Future-My Choice and performance artists Desperate Men in creating a new collaborative project called Bristol Loves Tides - celebrating tidal culture, processes and ecologies in Bristol, in the context of participatory research and fostering broader water-consciousness.
Bristol 2015 have chosen to fund our project as one of its flag-ship initiatives, and the roll-out of the year-long programme has now begun. The core elements are:

A Myriorama of Oblique Strategies

View from the freshly shored up rail-line at Dawlish, en-route to Falmouth

The photo here was taken on a trip to a seminar/ 'melting pot' at the Environment and Sustainability Institute in Cornwall, where I recently presented some glimpses (or a myriorama) of a drifting creative journey through the realms of science and eco-art, towards some substantial research-based collaborations.

Occupy the Intertide? part2

Tide + Time, NOVA (Lyons), 2006

My presentation (of a project proposal) at the recent interdisciplinary Emotional Geographies conference in the Netherlands was titled:

Dreaming of Sabrina
Geopoetic Possibilities In The Estuary  - A deep-mapping almanac

The 'estuary' in this case is the Severn (aka Sabrina, or Hafren). The inclusion of 'almanac' - a word derived from Arabic/Greek sources meaning 'of the moon, or month' helps express the dominant lunar-tidal process in this water-body, with the second-largest tidal-range in the world. The map below shows the main settlements adjoining the estuary...

Occupy The Intertide?

[An Almanac of the Submerged]
June 18: I am reminded by the always insightful Open Democracy that today is Magna Carta Day, recognising the event that - to some extent - brought the monarchy to account in England. (Interestingly, the document was signed on a 'water meadow' - a liminal space between land and water, and a landscape very pertinent to some of my current research). At the signing, a companion document was The Charter of the Forest (Carta de Foresta). In contrast to the Magna Carta, which dealt with the rights of barons, this apparently provided some real protections for the common people against the abuses of the aristocracy. 

Submerged - Transgression (The Rising Waters)

Submerged - Transgression (Rising Waters)

[The Almanac of the Submerged]
Following one strand of the Submerged (Drowned Lands) project, I have embarked on a film-making adventure, kicking off with some shoreline conversational walks with Iain Biggs. The title and theme for this experimental filmic journey is Transgression (Rising Waters). A first iteration will be screened at a conference in Bristol in November this year - the international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA).
"How can the term transgression stimulate invention and generate new insight into modes of design practice and concepts of power, politics and space?... How can the notion of transgression offer new readings of buildings and space?"

Water, Water-Bodies, Water-Ways

...and the poetics of vital matter

photo: a lyons

"You can't keep water down"

This comment bubbled up in discussion with Dr. Owain Jones at his PLaCE seminar talk last month (the final instalment of the long-running PLaCE Research speaker sessions).  Over the coming weeks and months, I'm aiming to write a detailed blog-post on what could be termed the 'geopoetics' of each of the materials woven in to my intermedia installation for the recent Tramontana Festival 2013. Water is the topic of the first of these.

In Print

A short post - and a re-blog.
My recent foray into the world of artist-book publishing has been highlighted online by one of the contributors; critic, curator Annick Bureaud.
Here is the link to her original posting.

"Lyons’s work deals with art and science but also with craftmanship, landscape and climate change, deep mapping and field recordings, poetry and environmental and land art, slowness and time, and much more."

Submerged (Drowned Lands)

Chew Valley Lake, July 2013

Submerged (Drowned and Dammed Lands)

[aka The Almanac of the Submerged]

Environmental artist Antony Lyons is working with others, including Professor Steve Poole (UWE-Bristol/Regional History Centre, Bristol) on an Arts Council England funded initiative, involving creative fieldwork, community conversations/voices and research at a number of locations. The first phase of the project runs from Spring 2013 to late 2014.

The approach involves a creative and poetic response to a variety of landscape and cultural settings that are affected by changing water-levels. The unifying theme is that the waters come, the waters inexorably rise. Then everything is changed (and the waters recede...)

Intimacy vs. greed/ speed/ disconnection

Intimacy vs. greed/speed/disconnection

(here, one could possibly add 'ecology' on the side of intimacy - to help balance an unequal struggle)

The fusion of projects continues. The theme of relationships to the land - and what the land holds - emerges for me in widely different geographical spaces. So too ideas around 'eco-symbolic landscapes' (as first encountered in the hills of Donegal), 'exploring the shadows'; and many more inter-woven threads (intimacy, speed, greed, disconnection, harmony, resonance, flow, presence…)

At the trans-disciplinary 'Catchment' workshop last year I was lucky enough to meet Mona Smith (a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), who - through offering a strong statement on 'relationship', helped crystallise - for me - a great deal of discussion around water, environment and society. In conversation, Mona also introduced me to the Dakota term 'bdote', meaning 'where two waters meet', 'confluence' or even 'where a stream meets a lake'. (A project called The Bdote Memory Map' is the hub of a constellation of resources providing stories about some of the traditional Dakota sites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area).

Water is very much to the fore in my involvement now with a different Confluence Project, in Devon. A recent kayak journey on the River Torridge served as a cogent reminder of the essence of 'slow residency' encounters. But more on this trip in a future journal entry...

Slowly Encountering Place

For the inaugural journal posting on this new platform, I am pasting in a draft version of an essay to be included in a forthcoming publication.

Slowly Encountering Place

The process of assembling this volume has brought into focus an awareness of an evolving ‘meta-project’ - emerging over the space of five years, via a sequence of extended landscape-based residency projects. For me, the journey began in earnest in 2008 in England's ‘West Country’ with Quantock Dreaming, followed by the Lovely Weather project in Donegal in 2010, a residency at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and returning to the West Country for the art+environment residency, ‘Confluence’ Project in the North Devon Biosphere Reserve. Early indications of a composite approach - encompassing sculpture, ecology, memory - can be seen within the strands of the 2006 urban trail installations in Bristol, called ‘Eleven Minutes’.

Whilst sifting through the vast amount of moving-image and sound recordings assembled during the Grand Canyon project, I found myself re-considering the themes and ideas underpinning this journey, especially in dialogue with the wider fields of Deep Mapping and Land-Art. The ongoing support of the PLaCE Research Centre has been important in this respect. Iain Biggs (Director of PLaCE) has long pursued the aim of trans-disciplinary creative land-based work. Possessing a hybrid environmental science and art background - I have sought to carve out a personal approach, grounded in fieldwork, ecological knowledge, dialogues with archival material, geopoetic imagination and the co-creation of future-visions - all within landscapes that contain tensions and polarised perspectives.

“Pasts and futures, even if they are no longer; even if they are not yet, still haunt the present, and are, in a supplemental relationship to it, always coming back.” John Wylie, 2007

With the Colorado River now featuring strongly in my delvings, I have found myself attracted to the idea (and the ideal?) of ‘unmapping’.