Unearth / Commissioned by Lancaster Arts / 2024

A part of LANDING, a three day event at The Battery in Morecambe exploring our relationship with the natural world, in collaboration with We Live Here.

On Friday 28th June 2024 participants worked with Elizabeth to explore the unassuming material world of Morecambe Bay. They sculpted Lugworm casts, made drawings inspired by sensory experience and experimented with plaster casting in Wet sand. Their creations were shared in a pop up museum of Nature and us.

A participatory workshop designed to open up conversation around what people feel is or isn’t their place within nature. Using the bay as a starting point and hoping to challenge the idea of ‘Nature’ as something that exists somewhere else, when in fact it is everything we experience. In examining the unassuming, uncelebrated, unknown and unseen we encourage hands on experience, building of a relationship with materials/place, engagement, interest and an active rather than passive experience.

Part 1 / Drawing - sensory experience.

Participants will be invited to put their hands into different boxes and draw what they feel inside. A sensory experience of the natural world can help us to learn more instinctively about it. It also adds a dimension of risk and the unknown. Which again is something we need to be prepared to engage in, to form deeper connections with nature. The boxes contain varied items, some obvious and connected with the bay, e.g. wet seaweed or a weathered stone. Whilst some with items such as an iPhone whose microchip began its journey as sand.  

Part 2 / Sculpting - worm casts.

The unassuming Lugworm is all over Morecambe bay. We can sometimes see many 100s of worm casts out on the sand. Lugworms are important because they re-oxygenate and clean the sand as they digest it and they are a food source for marine creatures and birds. In creating our own worm casts from clay we can celebrate this unseen inhabitant of the bay.

Part 3 / Sand casting - inspired by fossils.

Using sand as a vessel for making simple plaster casts allows participants to explore its properties as a material and reflect on its ancient and cyclical story.

‘Every one of us is endowed with the singular gift of paying attention - that remarkable convergence of our senses, our intellect and our feeling. It’s so appropriate that we call it paying attention, for it is perhaps a near universal form of currency - it is exchangeable, it is valuable and it incurs an expense on the part of the payer, for attention, we all know too well is a limited resource.

Paying attention to the more than human world doesn’t lead only to amazement, it leads also to the acknowledgment of pain. Open and attentive we see and feel equally the beauty and the wounds.’  Robin Wall Kimmerer