Natur am Byth: Artist in Residence
July 2024 - March 25
Natur am Byth is Wales’ flagship Green Recovery project re-thinking the way we see endangered species and habitats around Wales.
Throughout my residency, I developed a site-specific project that engages LGBTQIA+ communities with secretive species often overlooked and unloved, living between urban and rural environments in the Swansea Bay area of South Wales.
My research focused on the Fen Raft Spider and one of its key habitats, Crymlyn Bog. The project explores the intersections of art, ecology, and queer resilience, reflecting on the bog’s troubled history, including being bombed during WWII, nearby industrialisation, surrounding residential developments, and a neighbouring landfill. Currently, Crymlyn Bog is oversaturated, and restoration efforts are focused on removing water from the site. The Fen Raft Spider, is covered in hydrophobic hairs, allowing it to float on water and exist in this water-logged environment.
In recent years, concentrated efforts to boost the Fen Raft Spider population have led to sensationalised media coverage, with headlines exaggerating its size—calling it “as big as rats” and painting it as an invasive threat. This work draws parallel between this rhetoric and the queer-phobic narratives we often see in today’s media. Using the misunderstandings and mistreatment of both this species and its habitat as metaphors for resilience, I explore themes of oversaturation, belonging, and interspecies care.
Through a series of gatherings for the queer community, we explored interspecies care, and notions of belonging in times of ecological, societal, and emotional oversaturation.
Sun 12 Jan 2025, 11am - 1pm, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery
A session to meet, get us thinking, and learn about the project, species and habitats. Together, we will play with themes of queer resilience, belonging and habitat oversaturation. We will learn about queer nature and ecology and imagine gentle futures.
Sun 19 Jan 2025, 11am - 3pm, Crymlyn bog
Did you know there's a 300 hectare quaking bog in Swansea? This site is a mystery to so many Swansea residents, tucked away behind Amazon, next to an old oil refinery, bombed in the war, this is the ultimate secretive site of resilience. As we explore the area, I will lead a workshop for us to find ways of embodying place and making offerings to this habitat.
Sun 26 Jan 2025, 11am - 1pm, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery
This session gives us a chance to reflect on our site visit and pull together what we have learnt into art work. I am writing a series of performance-led offerings throughout this project, your ideas and reflections will become part of the final work, if you choose.
All photos by Daf Williams during workshop at Crymlyn Bog, January 2025.
